Ace Combat: Advance
Score: 60% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Namco Developer: Human Soft Inc. Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Third Person Shooter/ Flight
Graphics & Sound: While Ace Combat: Advance sports some flashy graphics, its mediocre gameplay and lack of an interesting story (the true hallmark of the series) prevents it from being anything other than a bad birthday gift. I continue to be impressed with the presentation the little Game Boy Advance can dish out. Ace Combat: Advance certainly gives an attractive performance, though this doesn’t save it from its major faults. Unsurprisingly, the game features a top-down view, rather than the first person perspective from the main series. Your plane zooms up and down in the landscape as you fly around destroying enemy targets and avoid being shot out of the sky. It’s the typical pseudo-3D graphics that every GBA aficionado is, by now, intimately familiar with. The sound aspect of the game is generally uninspired, lacking the vibrant sounds, pumping soundtracks, and well-performed voice acting that have made the latest games in the series a true joy to play. The limited storage of the cartridge is no excuse either, except for maybe the lack of real voices – I’ve been inspired by MIDI many times in my life.
Gameplay: Slow and plodding. That sums up the game experience of Ace Combat: Advance perfectly. Never is there a real sense of speed or interesting dog-fighting going on. The only time the game even approaches fast-paced is when you turn on your afterburners, and even then, it’s rather unimpressive. The gameplay itself is pretty basic; you fly around using your main guns and secondary missiles to destroy targets. The game lacks any real interesting variety in mission types, and is generally just a rehash of things seen before. The same could possibly be said of the main series, but Ace Combat: Advance lacks the key ingredient that makes the Ace Combat series so fun to play. Story, that is the true missing ingredient from Ace Combat: Advance. The cinematic presentation of epic stories is what separates the Ace Combat series from the other humdrum dog-fighting games out there, and Ace Combat: Advance lacks in that area completely. Sure, it would be impossible to replicate such grandiose visuals on the GBA, but there’s not even a semi-interesting narrative going on here. It’s like they didn’t even try.
Difficulty: Without story, a challenging game is really the only thing left that could engage a player. However, a single gameplay mechanic nearly trivializes the entire game. You are able to call on a ship called Mother to refuel and re-supply any time you want during a mission and as often as you want. While you refuel and re-supply as often as you wanted in, say, Ace Combat 4, you were required to fly all the way to base to do so, and that frequently cost precious time from your time-limit. In Ace Combat: Advance, however, the supply comes to you, making the game, in general, a breeze as long as you can avoid dying.
Game Mechanics: The mechanics of the game are pretty simple. You’re always moving forward, but you can turn a full 360 degrees and you can fire your afterburners for a quick burst of speed. One button fires your machine gun, while another fires your secondary weapons. The one interesting gameplay factor that is included is the ability to fly closer to the ground by pressing the up button. This too can become frustrating though, as often you crash into objects that didn’t look like obstacles when you do this. Disappointing to say the least. It takes real effort to successfully port a series like Ace Combat onto a portable system, and Ace Combat: Advance is just a pale shadow of the Ace Combat experience.
-Alucard, GameVortex Communications AKA Stephen Triche
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