Ace Combat Infinity (PS3, 2014)
I'm not sure how to qualify "beating" my first Ace Combat game. The first free to play entry in the series has a single player mode, but it's eight missions long. And not all of it was available when the game was first released. And you need in-game money to unlock the later missions. I'm pretty certain you need 2-3 million credits to unlock all the missions. For reference I've played this for over 200 hours and got 48 million. I'd quite like to get the millions I spent on the non trophy-dependent missions back.
I've never played an Ace Combat game. I'd never even heard of the series until this was released in 2014 and I downloaded it because it was free, before routinely bottling it at the suggestions it would take 300-odd hours to get all the trophies. For some reason in December last year it reappeared in my head and I've played it daily since the beginning of 2017. Now, here we are. They're tricky with the whole F2P thing, it's not unlimited. You get, effectively, one go every four hours. One new unit of fuel. You can store some of these supplied fuels or unlock stocked fuel by getting it in drops after missions. Of course you can buy stocked fuels at truly awful prices. I think it's something like £28.99 for 60. This is bad. Extremely bad. And going by the ranking leaderboards for the monthly challenges there have to be people being given it. I have a score in one now of ~120k, the eventual winners end up with scores in the multiple millions. Coming to the game three years after it came out and with no more real updates I've benefitted from having lots of opportunities to get fuel. I'm glad I've never had to pay for it though.
So, what do you do? The bulk of the regular game is in online co-op missions, where you have a playing field and a number of targets to destroy. You have a total of six minutes to finish each mission and when you start you have no idea how this can be enough. Trying to turn your flying toaster to fire about eight missiles to kill one helicopter, it's a nightmare. I will say that what I can remember of the learning curve in this regard is brutal. The layout of the menus and the upgrades don't help much with this.
Once you decide to stick with one plane and upgrade it a bit you get to see a marked difference though. You soon find yourself actually contributing, or feeling like you are, with adorable scores of 20/30k. It really is hard to try and judge the game when I was crap and had crap planes with now when I'm still crap and have marginally passable planes. There's a good variety of missions (most of which have been added since its release) so even though I've been dedicated to playing it daily since the start of the year I've rarely been bored. Each mission offers unique challenges even beyond the mix of air/ground enemies, although you're only allowed four slots for building planes (unless you pay, obviously) so I was hampered slightly in having to decide quite early what planes I should have and to stick with them. Of the different classes available I've gone with a Fighter (best at airborne targets) and an Attacker (best at ground targets), it's pretty pointless to try and add a Multirole somewhere as well. The amount of time it would take to get the money and XP for them to make them worthwhile would be... well, unavailable, probably. The servers would be closed by the time I got anywhere.
Back to the actual missions though and the other part of the word, co-op. You play with random punters online and herein lies something of a problem. It's not what you expect of online games that have been out a long time. It's not full of extremely good people who just destroy everything right away. There are people even now more useless than me. Seeing people with matching rates below the starting point of 1500 surprises me, but then I too only started playing it recently. That doesn't mean I can't hate them for being utterly useless though. Especially when they ruin everyone else's attempts to fully beat the mission. Still, the competitive nature that's brought in when you know what you're doing is what really makes the game so engaging. I think after three years and several updates they've really managed to get a good balance between all the planes and weapons - I've seen complaints from way back about certain planes being overpowered and I've not really found that to be the case myself. When I first started playing I would look at the planes people getting huge scores were using, of course when I tried I got nowhere. Come to think of it I'm sure I played a game last week where someone in a terrible plane was regularly outscoring everyone else in the room. Player ability is much more important than the planes for the most part, which is a good thing. Whatever happens in AC7 with the online they've got a good base here.
There isn't much else to say of the co-op missions besides them being centred around blowing up as much stuff as you can. Occasionally there are team deathmatch events, of which there are three types:
Regular TDM, straight plane vs. plane
Naval TDM, where you're at sea and there's an enemy fleet to destroy/one of yours to protect
Ring battle TDM, where there's rings in the air you can capture
They offer a nice change from time to time but by this point they're
really for the dedicated. For what I said about there being a good balance in the co-op, in the deathmatches, not so much. I've not played nearly as many and although I manage to luck into a spectacular result once in a while you just get flattened too much for it to be fun. The difference between manoeuvrability and damage of players compared to CPU enemies is unbelievable. Missiles going at about ten times the speed, planes moving in every direction at will, it's beyond me. Regardless of what plane I'm in.
If I'd stuck with this game from 2014 I might have a different opinion of it now. I might have given up, I might have completely adored it. In my experience from the start of the year it's something that my paranoia about an impending inability to finish the trophies has been rewarded for. The dedication of players over those three years suggests I might have loved it. Just tonight I was playing with someone who I've seen before who had a "2013 Beta Tester" emblem on his flight. If that's not a testament to the game I don't know what is. Regardless of when you started the game I would probably say that the first month of regular playing is a nightmare - when you know what you're doing the competitive spirit will overwhelm you.
