News: Kawamori DLC for Ace Combat Assault Horizon Previewed
Posted on : 20-10-2011 | By : Cacophanus | In : News
Hardware: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360
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As we mentioned a while back, Shoji Kawamori had been hired to design a new plane for Ace Combat Assault Horizon. Well, 4Gamer now has a piece on the plane and has a fair few nice shots of it in game. Now called the ASF-X, the DLC will be available on the 26th October for either 960 yen (PSN) or 640 MSP (XBLA). As we said previously, this plane doesn’t transform into anything (unfortunately). For those that have played the game, then this DLC will be somewhat of a futile gesture. Whilst it has sold initially well, the reaction by gamers has been pretty scathing. Much of this ire is aimed at the DFM mode that effectively removes any form of skill from the game and instead tries to appeal to supposed “humans” that have the cognitive capacity of a brain damaged newt. At least Kawamori’s plane looks pretty cool, which is at least something I suppose.
Considering how uneventful the actual combat was in just about all of the AC games the DFM mode adds some much needed variety.
The DFM mode is on rails through, so there’s less variety. There’s no actual dogfighting at all now.
There was no dogfighting to begin with.The AI for both friendlies and non ace enemies was so poor even at higher difficulties that the only challenge came from a single,rarely launched missile taking your health down to 40% with no way of repairing it.While this could have been avoided by simply doing an overhaul of the AI and taking an Over G Fighters approach to loadout customization and mid mission landings things would be great but they decided that the DFM would be the better choice for injecting new life into the series and admittedly it’s better than nothing.
On rails is never a step forward for dogfighting.
Now its more like Star Fox.Thats a win in my book.
Star Fox isn’t about about dog-fighting though.
My problem with the new system (at least in story mode) is that certain enemies WON’T GO DOWN until they’ve played their role in the story. Seriously, one bogey tanked FOUR MISSILES and enough bullets to choke a B-2 Bomber and it didn’t go down until it crashed in the ocean so I could shoot four cronies down.
DFM would’ve been better if it wasn’t so essential. It’s to the point where the game says “you’ll shoot this guy down in DFM and take it like a man, or you’ll never shoot anything down”.
“Modern Warfare 2 in the skies” makes me shudder. If I want Modern Warfare, I’ll buy Modern Warfare. I don’t like russian stars on my planes, I found the story predictable and uninspired, and I want my X-02/FALKEN.
Assault Horizon – Decent at best, but not as good as the numbered titles.
DFM and multiplayer: How does that work?
The same way it does in single player.You can activate it and your opponent can break out of it or even do a flip and get behind you.
Its fun, but. yeah, its quite the departure.
DFM in MP is very hit and miss: some people can absolutely abuse it for easy kills. and really, its not much different from the Singleplayer DFM, sans the scripted fly-throughs of the cities.
you can still dogfight outside of it, but guns are practically useless outside of DFM and ASM.
[…] isn’t the first time he has acted as a guest designer either, as he created a new fighter plane for Ace Combat: Assault Horizon not that long ago as […]