Flyer

If you even fancy yourself a fan of flight sims, you need this one. There's no real way around it, you need this flight sim, it is simply one of the finest combat flight sims you can find.

Very steep difficulty curve, but makes you come back for more. A unique premise that is done fairly well. The game tends to lean towards being unfair towards the player at times, but they are pretty few and far between. A unique game in a genre dominated by Ace Combat and similar titles. Worth a purchase.

Frustration is there, but it is still a boat load of fun in the end. Extremely low end visuals will demand the player go in looking for more than just a pretty face, but they will find their dedication to be well worth it.

For something that touts it self as "Authentic" you'd expect more fidelity to the subject matter. The flight model feels "on-the-rails" and the action dull. Multi-million dollar aircraft feel and handle more like an $70 Ready-to-fly RC airplane. Not much else to say about it other than "Bad, bad, very bad."

The game is truly held back by it's frustration factor. The game itself tries to be a more realistic sim, in which it does succeed. The scramble missions are a lot of fun and the flight model itself is fairly responsive. However, the arbitrary speed limit is a huge downer. Even in electrical system failures which knocks out your airspeed indicator and altimeter (Something that wouldn't happen in a real aircraft as the pitot-static system is mechanical) you still have that asinine speed limit. To make matters worse, there's an aircraft that needs you to hit Mach 2 to acquire it. Have fun constantly going into free flight over and over and over again trying to break mach two, but not go over the speed limit. This strikes me as the developers attempt to add challenge and it just comes off as inane. The murky scenario descriptions do nothing to aid you at all and the finicky system in which the completion of objectives comes off absolutely arbitrary as well. This is especially an issue in the Recon missions. The rotary winged vehicles are beyond awful. Why did they even bother adding them to the game? To try and squish down the complex workings of a helicopter's throttle collective into two buttons is, in itself, unrealistic and stupid. They should have either just kept the controls simple (as they did with a jets and not include a spool up time) or not include the choppers at all. The visuals are lack luster but given it's age that is to be expected. The aircraft are modeled very accurate and it doesn't look so bad as to repulse, so the visuals have aged in a satisfactory fashion. What good can be said about the game is often over shadowed by the bad. Enemy aircraft all seem to handle the same and enemy ground targets see you through mountains and hills (yet another reason why the rotary winged section is not worth your time. The developers should have spent more time with making missions for the utility craft (US-1A and C-1) and perhaps a campaign as opposed to even including helicopters. In the end, AECA tries to appeal to both Ace Combat and Sim fans, and fails at both. AC fans will cling to their great trilogy on the PS2 and sim fans are incredibly better off with Lock On: Modern Air combat.