I played the first mission or so of Ace Combat 6 and the first few missions of HAWX and enjoyed the missions more.
I have really enjoyed AC7, played through the campaign fully once and about a third through a second time so far.
The other factor that would have upped the enjoyment, or at least engagement in the fights, would have been far less drones and more aces to fight. While drones have the ‘faceless emotionless implacability’ factor to them, it just doesn’t have the same feel as fighting enemies with character.
In seriousness, I do not recommend doing both of those in one run if you value your blood pressure or your sanity. Get scratched by an AA gun while strafing ground targets and you have to load a checkpoint. Get clipped by a stray round in a dogfight and you have to load a checkpoint. It does an excellent job of teaching you to be patient, though.
Yeah, playing on easy is about the only way to actually pull that run off. The score quotas on Long Day, Pipeline Destruction and the like are all low enough that you can pick off easier targets and then ignore whatever is a truly serious threat since you don’t need the points anymore. The basic mission timers were never really an issue, either, with the closest problem being the Arsenal Bird in Mission 19 thanks to the gigantic drone swarm that you have to clear out before going after the Bird, or else they take potshots at you the entire time.
It made playing on easy considerably more interesting than if I just blitzed through it with the F-22, though. It also helped that there were no rank requirements, as I was getting pretty dismal ranks the whole way through.
The graphics on this game are pure airplane pr0ns, I tell you what. Full-on boom extension, if you know what I mean.
The gameplay is the same frenetic action nonsense as it always was. Still, observing that I, like, downed 17 Soviet air wings in one sortie does bring a smile to my face.
yes it is. a quiet 25 minutes flying admiring the clouds and your very pretty aircraft is not part of what these game designers thought of when they brainstormed modern jet air combat.
Mmm hmm. Now, granted I’ve only replayed that mission like three times, but on my last run I was using a DEATH TO GROUND THINGS A-10 and was just cleaning things up, along with the occasional flying thing.
I manfully chuckle when I see the “you get a better rank when you exceed the score.”
Motherfucker, the only way anyone gonna A rate this mission is if they have nukes.
It took me a while to get this one. It’s sort of the first difficulty spike. I did it on hard.
Don’t use an A-10. Use a faster plane with air to ground missiles with a lot of spread. you have to move around a lot, so the a-10 is a liability. Also, if you can catch some planes and copters fast, they give you a lot of points. Go to the first base, destroy everything fast, and rearm. Then go to the far away base and use all the missiles against clusters to rank in points. Once there are no meaty targets and you are out of air-to-land, go back, rearm and do the remaining base.
I was stuck with an F-15C the first time I ran into this mission and I was barely able to scrape together the 20K to win, partially because a fighter does poorly in the ground attack role and partially because I thought you were expressly forbidden from resupplying.
There are a handful of things out there worth well over 150 points that you want to kill to boost your score. The planes on the ground at the southern base are a good start, the four Gripens that take off from the northwest base when you’re halfway done destroying it are also worth a decent chunk, and the drones that swarm the map partway through are 350 apiece if you’re able to land hits.
Good special weapons for that mission are unguided bombs and the SFFS. I’m generally not a fan of air-to-ground missiles except on one mission where they are excellent. The A-10 is able to clear the map if enough bombs can find their way into clusters of warehouses and other junk, since that’s what I did to vent frustration after my first run barely succeeded.
I did it with a Su-34 Hellduck. No re-arms. Just rage. A whole lot of rage. Took me at least six tries, of which four ended about 300 points short of the mark. Very fucking frustrating indeed. Fuck timers, we’re old men now! ammirite?
So far in each of the ground-attack score missions I’ve found some opportunity to clean up on points that made the overall mission much easier. Like strafing one of those seabases with lasers: when I lined it up properly, I could bust a whole line of weapon mounts in a single pass. Or if you bust through one of those interminable dogfights between your useless squadron-mates and a bunch of enemy fighters with the multiple-warheard AAMs ready, that can be worth thousands of points in a single launch.
But yeah, it sure is frustrating when you feel like you were doing well and you look up to see 3 minutes left and 10,000 points still left to go and nothing nearby looks like a high-value target…
I managed to push this through to a Request Wednesday win, so it’ll be coming up on March 20’s stream. Time to show everyone what a deathly serious flight sim looks like.
