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"The trend setting game of the Ace Combat series...even though it's listed as Air Combat!"

The game in a long standing series that started the genre for the Play Station all started here in this little gem of a simulation game that features you as a fighter pilot up against a myriad of enemies across several different stages of missions. While not the most visually attractive or even audio effective game that has ever come across the Play Station platform, it was the first in a series that was very successful and still is to this day! Most PSX gamers will find this title to be one of the first in their collection {assuming you collect like I do} and will probably play this several times before actually putting it away and never playing it again. If anything, Ace Combat is a game that has more historical value than it does game play, and ultimately needs to be looked at and respected in the same sense of looking at a fine piece of art behind glass in a museum!

The basic premise is to make it through several different missions that have the same goal: Make it out alive. You'll be pitted against computer controlled pilots that can be relatively difficult to fight against, and most of the dogfights with multiple enemies can seem overwhelming. Regardless of whether you change the difficulty setting or not, you'll be in for a hair-raising ride! Replay value here is effectively low, in which once you finish the game, there really isn't much else to do. Giving you the missions to fly, and the planes to go up against, you'll probably play for a couple of weeks before getting bored and moving onto a different air combat Sim. No worries though, you'll spend alot of time the first time through just learning how to get your accuracy up and moving before you'll put this one down.

Considering that this is a one-player game, there were probably options to really make this a hell of a two-player game if the ability were there to do so. When you think back on what the Play Station had to offer in the very beginning, there really wasn’t much there and titles like these are what really started the PSX library off on a good run! Games like these were found mainly in the bookshelf cases like what we have with the Play Station 2, so that automatically dates the game to at least 7 years old. The game play isn’t anything that we haven’t seen since, but in the beginning, there was nothing better, and quite honestly, nothing close to what Ace Combat had to offer. What I found to be interesting enough was that the game play was nothing shy of challenging regardless of whatever difficulty you set it at, and in all honesty, that ranks high in my book!

As with most combat simulators, Ace Combat delivers a slightly difficult control to learn, but easy to use once it's been mastered. You have a variety of buttons that control different functions of the plane, and you also have pretty good interface with directing the plane where you want to go. You may find that getting in the middle of a dogfight at first is difficult, but after a few minutes of learning where everything is, you'll be piloting as well as the rest of them! At the time, the controls here were quite complex, in which you needed to know just how to work the PSX controller to the way that you wanted it to work. Without the use of the analog sticks, you had a game that required more knowledge and timing of the directional pad than it did anything else and that simply adds to the challenge. This alone dates the game even further back, in which you had no other option in how the game was controlled!

Ace Combat for the PSX set the standard in terms of visuals from the fighter-jet point of view. Placing you in the pilot, you have several different enemy planes that are well drawn and well designed and move across the screen with a decent speed. Where the explosions and plane fires stop, come the choppy frame rates and sometimes pixilated visuals that you come to expect from an aero-fighters game that starts a series. While not bad, it's not perfect and the lack of details in the game show the age extremely fast! You’ll find that playing games these days and then trying to play this is going to be extremely hard on the eyes, especially with the release of Ace Combat 4 for the Play Station 2.

The music here is pretty low-key, and nothing that you'll truly remember once the PSX is turned off. While the music does give you something to listen to, and a partial rush, you'll find that it does little but fade into the background after a few minutes. The sound effects are standard for a game of this type, but they do utilize a good stereo system if you have one hooked up with surround sound. First rate, but still not perfect. You’ll also find that with today’s standards, this game is behind the times in a large way, solely because it doesn’t make very good use of the stereo feature nor has the ability to create a realistic sound. While not a bad thing, it does tend to make you step back and look at the game, as a starting point for all of the other Ace Combat’s to come through!

Ace Combat is a trendsetter in which it offered PSX gamers something to play to get into the feel of air-combat simulators. While the replay is low and the actual game aspects are a little rough, you can't go wrong with this version of Ace Combat, and you won't find a better starter game for those just getting into the mix. Worth a look, you'll do well to rent first before you buy, just to see if this Sim is your cup of tea.


Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 01/09/01, Updated 12/06/01