Ace Combat: Assault Horizon arrived in October 2011 with a mandate to drag the series out of the clouds and into the player’s face. Project Aces built the game around a single idea: end the feeling of shooting at faraway dots. The result is the 14th Ace Combat title, a spin-off set on a real Earth, and the most divisive entry the franchise had produced to that point. It scores 6.6 of 10.
Trailer, via BANDAI NAMCO Europe.
Dogfight Mode and the end of the faraway dot
The major new gameplay feature is Close-Range Assault, split into Dogfight Mode for air-to-air battles and Air Strike Mode for ground targets. The pitch is intensity. The camera locks to your target, the two aircraft spiral together, and the fight becomes a chase rather than a joust.
It works, up to a point. The system is not optional. Certain planes and ground targets cannot be destroyed without it. To trigger DFM, the player taps LB and RB on the Xbox 360 or L2 and R2 on the PlayStation 3 once they are close enough to the target. Air Strike Mode fires from the same buttons at specific points around the map.
That is the whole problem in one sentence. A mechanic sold as a way to bring the action closer is also a gate. You cannot play the game the old way, and the old way was the reason people bought Ace Combat.
Two control schemes try to soften this. “Optimum” prevents the player from doing full rolls. “Original” gives full control of the aircraft. Neither changes the fact that the game’s marquee feature is compulsory.
Bombers, helicopters and a gunship
Assault Horizon does something no prior Ace Combat did: it puts you in aircraft that are not fixed-wing jets. The B-1 Lancer and B-2 Spirit strategic bombers are playable. So are the AH-64 Apache and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, along with the AC-130 Spectre gunship. The 108th’s Shooter, Nomad and Spooky Squadrons carry those sections, handled through helicopter turret, attack helicopter and gunship missions.
It is the most interesting thing the game attempts. The series had spent a decade in cockpits that all handled roughly alike. Putting a gunship in the player’s hands is a genuine break.
The multiplayer side keeps what worked and adds two modes. Co-operative missions and free-for-all Deathmatch return. Capital Conquest and Domination are new. That is a reasonable package for 2011, and it is the part of Assault Horizon that has aged least badly.
A real Earth, and a story that needed one
Unlike most Ace Combat games, which take place on the fictional world of “Strangereal”, Assault Horizon is set in real locations. It follows Ace Combat: Joint Assault down that path. The plot runs from 2015 to 2016 across East Africa, the Middle East, Russia and the United States.
The protagonists are mostly members of the United Nations’ 108th Task Force, a joint NATO-Russia military unit assigned to quell a rebellion spreading over East Africa. The player mostly controls Lieutenant Colonel William Bishop, leader of the United States Air Force’s Warwolf Squadron. His wingman is José “Guts” Gutierrez. French NATO General Pierre La Pointe assists.
The antagonists are Russian General Ivan Stagleishov and Russian Air Force pilots Andrei Markov and Maj. Sergei Illich, members of a criminal syndicate called the Blatnoi that wants to seize Russia and form the New Russian Federation.
The game opens on a nightmare. Bishop dreams of being shot down by a Su-35 with “shark mouth” nose art during an attack on Miami. He then flies missions with Warwolf Squadron and the 108th against the SRN rebel group in East Africa. Warwolf finds a powerful explosive weapon in SRN hands. Then Blatnoi-affiliated traitors inside the 108th’s Russian contingent attack, Markov among them, flying the same plane from the dream. He nearly kills Bishop.
The SRN then hits a nearby city with the weapon. The 108th identifies it as “Trinity”, a Russian thermobaric cruise missile warhead with the power of a tactical nuclear weapon. It inflicts WMD-like destruction without nuclear warfare.
From there the game moves through Dubai, the Suez Canal and a coup in Russia. The 108th rescues the Russian Prime Minister from NRF captivity and stops NRF-held missile silos from launching ICBMs. It advances on Moscow. The NRF fires a Trinity missile at the assault force, with a second inbound. Bishop shoots down the bomber carrying the second missile and beats Markov in a dogfight, seemingly killing him. Stagleishov offers political immunity for total surrender and the last Trinity missile. Markov, alive, kills him and takes the NRF.
Jim DeFelice and the writing problem
This is the first Ace Combat title with a plot mostly written by non-Japanese writers. Noted author Jim DeFelice led the work.
That fact matters more than the game’s marketing admitted. Ace Combat’s Strangereal setting was never realistic, but it was internally consistent, and its strangeness was the point. Moving to real nations and real military structures means the story now has to survive contact with actual geopolitics. A joint NATO-Russia task force fighting a criminal syndicate that stages a coup in Moscow reads differently in 2011 than it would have a decade earlier, and the game does not do much with that tension.
Set in 2015–2016, the game’s story mainly focuses on members of the United Nations’ 108th Task Force, a joint NATO-Russia military organization primarily assigned to quell a rebellion spreading over East Africa.
The plot is competent. It is also forgettable in a way that “Strangereal” never was. Bishop’s nightmare and Markov’s shark-mouth Su-35 are the two images that stick, and both are borrowed from a tradition of military fiction rather than invented.
Platforms, Steam and a delisted game
Assault Horizon shipped for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in October 2011. It came to Microsoft Windows in January 2013 through Steam and Games for Windows – Live. The latter was notably the final retail release for that platform shortly before its discontinuation.
The title has also been removed from Steam listings. Anyone wanting to play the PC version today has to find it elsewhere. That is a real cost for a game whose multiplayer modes — Capital Conquest, Domination, co-op, Deathmatch — depend on a player base.
- Dogfight Mode (DFM) for air-to-air combat
- Air Strike Mode (ASM) for ground targets
- Optimum and Original control schemes
- Capital Conquest and Domination multiplayer modes
- Co-operative missions and free-for-all Deathmatch
Where the 6.6 comes from
The critical aggregate sits at 6.6 out of 10 across six outlets, and that number is honest. Assault Horizon is not a bad game. It is a game that solved a problem nobody had.
Flight games did feel like shooting at faraway dots. Project Aces was right about that. But the fix — a compulsory lock-on system that removes the player’s control at the exact moment the series was built on giving it — trades one dissatisfaction for another. The bombers, helicopters and the AC-130 are the strongest argument the game makes for itself, and they are a minority of the campaign.
The real Earth setting and the DeFelice-led script were the bigger swing. They cost the series its strangeness and bought it a conventional military thriller. That is a bad trade. Strangereal was never a limitation; it was the reason a game about fighter jets could get away with the scale of its plots. Assault Horizon’s East Africa, Dubai and Moscow are recognizable, and smaller for it.
The multiplayer additions are the part worth keeping. Capital Conquest and Domination gave the series modes with actual structure, and co-op remained solid. But the Steam delisting means the PC audience cannot easily reach any of it, and a multiplayer suite without players is a menu.
What Assault Horizon proves is that Ace Combat’s identity was never the planes. It was the place they flew over. Strip out Strangereal and you get a competent arcade flight game with a lock-on button that will not let go. The 108th Task Force, Bishop, Markov and the Trinity missile are all serviceable. None of them are worth the world the series gave up.
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