A Short Foray Into 3D Flight Shooters

I've long wanted to try out some of these console-centric franchises and games, but ended up not being a big fan of them overall. Each had its individual charms, but some problems too. I'll make some general points about Ace Combat Zero to return and compare to the first two Star Wars: Rogue Squadron games, and then Star Fox 64. I'd like to play some more similar games (Panzer Dragoon), but don't think it changes much about the core points here.

Ace Combat Zero: The Balkan War (PS2)

The controls for flight are nice, particularly leaning to turn just feels cool. Similar to set-up turns in racing games (turning left a bit before a sharp right turn to make it less sharp), it's a small bit of extra complexity without much of a tradeoff, but worthwhile for its nuance and how intuitive it is. Beyond that though, I really don't like the gameplay and a great soundtrack can't carry it. The structure, objectives and combat are a mess, and disparate elements don't gel well. Some is inherent to its approach, some maybe to the genre even, but it is what it is:

• Mission objectives / fail states are unclear and have some kind of time limit which then isn’t communicated. It’s like an escort mission except I can’t see the thing I need to protect or its status. There’s also the instant fail upon leaving the area, which enemies can get close to and which doesn’t always show on the radar.
• A 2D map (like the radar) can never properly communicate the space you navigate, let alone the moving enemies within it. When you combine that with slow turning and quite limited vision, trying to accomplish more than basic movement is clunky as hell.
  
• Then there's the enemy AI, shooting at them is basically random, and their erratic movement makes it very awkward to track them given how the vision works (especially when they're close enough to move faster than you turn). Avoiding their fire is a complete mystery, there's not much you could do and while being quite lost I barely ever got hit. Missiles take away stress on aiming, but still requires keeping on top of enemies and their homing and tracking aren't exactly perfect either. You can also run out of missiles which is ludicrous, lost a 20 minute mission to that (no clear markers for resupply areas).
• Compare all this to an fps, where enemies have clear movement abilities, behaviour and locations; the player has clear abilities and movement to both dodge (or get behind a wall) and to go on the offense, especially both at the same time; and the objective is a simple “kill; don’t die”. Or same with 2D shooters (choose one of shooting galleries, run-n'-guns or shmups). I know genres have their own things going on, I don't want to discourage going away from the tried and true (Monkey Ball excels while being completely unlike any racing or 3D platformer game), but I really don't think this take on the genre works out, it's on the arcade side of the arcade-simulation spectrum but still feels very bogged down with emulating the fiction.
  

 

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (N64)

The structure and combat work better than ace combat, with shorter missions and simpler enemies, but the controls/controller are clunky and feedback is awful. I didn't play much of this, as the second was an overall improvement.

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2 (Wii) 

Smoother controls, but still not very good. It’s essentially all escort missions with vague fail states at small and large scale, some are very long so failing near the end is tedious, finding enemies visually is hard since they blend in to the complex backdrops and your fov is so low for orienting yourself in open combat arenas (with fast enemies that you can’t easily predict), space combat means the radar doesn’t even help the tiny bit it usually does so I can spend like a minute just searching for enemies while ”we” are being attacked, enemy and allied ai doesn’t follow clear paths/rules/behaviours, and close up combat is awkward. It’s cool as some gameplay to contextualise a star wars experience, like blowing up the death star, but pushing the difficulty and trying to challenge you on those mechanics does not work well.

Playing it co-op via the third game works better, I’m not sure that it’s easier but I’m playing with someone who has completed it before, and even if it was the same experience on the game side, the bad parts are more tolerable with a friend while the good parts shine through.

 

Star Fox 64 (N64)

This actually works quite well just as a videogame, essentially being a 3D shoot-'em-up for most of the runtime. I'm not super positive on the game, but I think it's a much better approach to 3D flying and shooting gameplay than the previous titles. It features predictable, simple enemies following set patterns and shooting clear projectiles towards your area so you want to keep moving and dodge strays reactively (also of course the elegant barrel roll when you're in a pinch); a charged shot that homes in to make it even less precision-focused; a set movement direction so you don't need a radar to orient yourself; and levels with some degree of visual clarity, rather than being cluttered nightmares in pursuit of realism or adherence to canon.

Structurally, it has a branching set of levels with varied objectives and victory conditions, and a dynamic lives and scoring system that pushes you to optimise your gameplay without requiring you to do so or die instantly and redo 20 minutes (the level-locked powerups also reward you for playing well). It does have the all range bits as well, where it runs into similar issues as the last ones, but until hard mode's Wolf I didn't have much of an issue with those.

The rest of hard mode is pretty gimmicky too, and it's not like it's brilliant even at its best; the ship gets in the way of seeing enemies, movement confines are unclear, AoEs and hitboxes are impossible to intuit, ally AI is unpredictable and unreliable, and depth perception makes a lot of things tricky, like dodging the flailing arms of a boss. Framedrops can also be quite bad. Still, it functions much better than the games above, with much genuine charm and compelling gameplay.