Beat using 1st person cockpit view. The game played a lot like the Ace Combat games with the starfighter being able to easily go between orbit and atmosphere, having incredible speed and maneuverability, and infinite lasers and regenerating shields. Since I did not read the manual it took a few stages to figure out the mechanics. In particular I was not collecting paradrops or farming crystal power ups until things started to become a little difficult when I completely ran out of missiles and counter measures. Ammo and upgrades carried over between stages and once I discovered how to get them I farmed them every chance I got. Paradrops got me a lot of upgrades and plenty of counter measures, but they often had nothing late game. Taking hits sometimes downgraded the ship or reduced ammo so occasionally I had to reacquire some power ups. While I liked the concept of exploring stages to find power ups, each mission should have given enough ammo to barely complete it instead of expecting the player to farm ammo. The crystal system was especially dumb. Destroyed things (including trees) dropped colored very out of place looking crystals that disappeared after a few seconds. Collecting them in certain combinations gave specific powerups but you were expected to figure out and remember them. The end mission screen listed every combo picked up during that mission, and paradrops occasionally gave a lot of free crystals. I learned a few and focused on obtaining those: red + red for laser upgrade, yellow + yellow for shields upgrade, blue + blue for anti ground missiles, purple + purple for air to air. Alternating blue and purple in 4s gave multi missiles and I accidentally got those fairly often. During the final level I finally learned the combo for counter measures (blue + green) but still had about 50 left so did not need to worry about that. Air to air was the most important because I was consistently low on them and my most frequent cause of death was crashing into enemy fighters, which was very likely when trying to dog fight them with lasers! Instead I would fly slow and let them overshoot me then turn 180 to shoot missiles at them, making sure to fly lower so I would not crash into them. Enemy fighters seemed to kill themselves very easily when there were more than 1 so I usually just flew around letting them die to only shoot the sole survivor. I don't know if they were shooting each other friendly fire, or crashing into stuff. Either or both, the enemy AI was retarded. Friendly AI was better, able to shoot enemy fighters better than me, but other times dying in seconds or worse crashing into me, which caused 1 or 2 deaths.
The 2nd thing I went for was anti ground missiles because the laser was difficult to use when taking hits because every hit jostled the ship and threw off my aim. And going slow and steady enough to aim for ground targets made me easier to hit, thus screwing up aiming even more. Using the laser when multiple lasers were firing at me was more trouble than it was worth so I used anti ground missiles to take out grount turrets and that 1 level with tanks. It was not so bad against large enemy ships due to their size, but my shields could very rapidly deplete from laser fire. The 2nd biggest threat after crashing though were guided missiles. Not only did they inflict big damage, they also temporarily made the ship obnoxiously difficult to control to the point where sometimes when I was flying low the ship just suddenly pointed into the ground without enough time for me to pull out of the crash. By far the best way to deal with missiles was to immediately use a counter measure, which instantly destroyed all missiles (even my own) and such explosions could even destroy the SAM turrets and possibly fighters. I could also evade missiles by zooming away, using cover, or zig zagging. I usually ignored other enemies to focus down the SAMs with lasers because the targeting on the anti ground missiles was wonky and not good for a fast fly by because they would target nonsense like unarmed buildings, trees and rubble. The best weapon was the beam laser, which used targeting like the anti ground while being instant and also working against air. Multi missiles were good too but only worked against air with hard auto targeting that went after what it wanted, not necessarily what I was shooting at. The other weapons sucked. I tried mines against fighters that were behind me but no idea how effective it was. Megabombs were the biggest pieces of shit, being WW2 era unguided drops with enough damage radius to hit 1 maybe 2 targets. The radiation symbol led me to believe it was an actual nuke that would devastate everything in a fair sized area, which would have been awesome. It was cool that lasers could melt mountains, even instantly destroying things built on higher elevation, but no such power worked on sea level ground, where most targets were.
The game was fun as a combat flight simulator but had numerous problems. The fixed forward facing lasers and dumb targeting system did not feel worthy of such an advanced craft. How about onmi directional laser cannons that use AI to auto fire at threats and AI that is smart enough to focus on actual threats? Navigation and display were also not nearly advanced enough for this far into the future. At long range there were different colored circles put on targets but closer in these vanished. I found myself flying purely by visual orientation more often than not, which absolutely sucked in the space levels. I got so lost there, really had to stick close to the asteroids to use them as frame of reference. I very frequently used the map (which paused the game) to check on my direction, location, and where other stuff was. The map was 2D in a 3D space though, so not very useful in space missions. The biggest problem with the game was the mission design, some of which were so difficult that I wondered if the game was even play tested. I almost gave up on these missions but kept trying different things dozens of times until I finally won. The 1st tough mission was about saving 2 rookie pilots with failure if either died. There will be a pattern for these absurdly difficult missions around failing when a stupid npcs dies. The mission was very short and was really about killing the enemy fighters quickly without accidentally shooting the friendlies. Another similar mission late game said to save allied fighters from tractor beams to then destroy a bunch of satellites. I failed over and over until I ignored the orders and allies to destroy all the satellites by myself. Seemed like freeing them just got them killed. I did not fool around with the squadron commands because the allies were so incompetent. The 2 most difficult missions made me look up cheats and videos online, but none of that helped. In 1 they took away my super upgraded ship to replace it with a low shield, weak laser, too fast to control bomber with only megabombs. And no ECMs against plenty of SAMs. And a fucking time limit. I must have tried this mission a few dozen times before finally beating it. There were not enough bombs to take out anything other than the mission targets, and even the time I won I had to destroy the last 2 with laser. I made sure to save those in an area with no SAMs because the only way to not get shot down was to zoom off faster than the missiles. The time limit prevented any kind of slow methodical play around waiting for shield regen, which was the key in the normal levels. So winning was about zooming around fast, memorizing the targets so I could find and hit them without slowing too much, and ignoring the defenses. Then the most difficult mission of all; darkworld shootout where the mothership started off under fire from 2 heavy ships plus fighters with failure when the mother dies. Not if, when. Lasers and air missiles were completely useless because I could not kill the ships fast enough. A video online showed using the beam laser to quickly burn everything down, but I didn't have any. I did manage to finally beat it by spamming multi missiles non stop, but this mission (and some of the others with failure beyond personal death) showed that the game could become soft locked and unbeatable if the player lacked ammo and upgrades, since there was no way to go back and farm completed missions. On top of this, there were only a handful of different maps that repeated over and over. They really should have had much fewer but better designed missions with an actual coherent story, greater variety of enemies, and more longer term tactics. For example, I liked how airbases and carriers could spawn fighters, so destroying them first meant fewer enemies, and the couple times destroying radar shut down missile locking (not nearly long enough).
While the game was fun, the many poorly designed aspects and overstayed number of missions really drag the game down. I considered giving the game a 5 for those excessively difficult missions if I had to give up, but the rest of the game was more fun than that.
6.0/10
