Air Combat (1995)

Beat on Hard on PSP. I own the PS1 disk and vaguely recall beating it at least once back in the day. I found this game more difficult than the sequel, even frustratingly so at times. The enemy aircraft were easier to deal with due to fewer fancy maneuvers and my missiles being overall easier to hit; I could hit enemies head on and sometimes while perpendicular or while they were turning. The crosshair for the gun made it much easier to use. I seen no point to do fancy maneuvers, instead focusing on tight turns until I got behind the enemy. The only slightly tricky thing was when the enemies did a loop to get behind me. Because of my focus on lateral turning I put high value on the stability stat, which governs turn speed. Mobility was a less important because it governed up and down movement, but most turns used a combination of both. I started off with the F4 and used it for the early missions. I accidentally bought the F117 due to the clunky interface and decided not to reload because it is a cool plane. Too bad it had god awful performance, handling like a brick. I did manage to get a few good ambush kills using stealth, but it was not good at all for dogfighting or bombing. Next I bought the F18 because it had well balanced stats in everything except defense. I struggled on mission 5 with the oil pipeline due to SAMs; it only took 1 missile to be shot down and fail the mission and it took me many tries to figure out how to properly bomb. I seemed to be getting shot down randomly. My approach was to fly as fast as I could below 500 feet, but only the speed was important, and in my attempts to get to low altitude I often slowed down too much. I tried a bunch of different planes; the F117 did not help at all, the F15 could take 1 missile and a bullet which was not much of a boost, and the Mig31 was a tank that could take slightly more but had poor handling. I stuck with the F18 and finally beat the level. I wasted a few too many missiles and only had 1 left for the final plane, so I shot him down with gun. I used the last missile on a SAM and had to finish the last 2 mission targets off with gun while avoiding the other 2 ground defenses. It was close as it took a few passes to successfully hit the mostly hollow steel frame tower and my fuel was in the red. I later bought the A10 and SU27; both were excellent. I used the A10 more though because nearly every mission had ground targets. It had wonderful handling and was very good at getting behind aircraft. I also used it for the ravine levels; I only crashed into the walls a few times. I am not a fan of those levels. It would make way more sense to take a chopper. Only 2 more levels gave me significant trouble. Escorting the cargo plane took several tries and was a pain in the ass; the trick was to break off dogfighting and keep up with it to draw enemy aggro. The final boss was poorly designed and not fun at all, mainly because the guns and missile launchers kept respawning. I tried using the F22 and an ace wingman but that was no good. All the tactics that the game had taught up till now did not apply to the boss; it was too slow and dangerous to dogfight, while treating it like a ground target did not work because of the stupid respawning. I eventually got sick of reloading to try again and just used the first basic wingman and A10. I kept low to avoid the missiles on the top and made passes at the targets before breaking off and creating a bit of distance for the next pass. It was annoying to have to cycle targets until a mission one was selected. I would have preferred if the weapons could be permanently destroyed and it instead spawned waves of aircraft and/or new gun ports.

This was overall a fun game, once I got used to bombing ground targets, though I doubt I would want to replay the final boss, ravines or escort missions. Not being able to see missiles on radar made it more difficult to know how to evade, and did the lady need to repeat the warning for taking damage so many times? I liked how most of the planes had different distributions of stats rather than being straight upgrades, thus making them all good in their own way. The permanent loss of planes for getting shot down would make for interesting iron man runs. I played around with the F22 a bit in mission select and it was an excellent plane. Stealth helped prevent attacks, the handling was great, and the low offense made some high defense planes take an extra missile, which was not that big of a deal.

8.2/10