Namco's Highway to the Danger Zone
A Review of Air Combat on the PlayStation
When it comes to flight combat games, fans of the genre can generally be divided into two categories: simulation and arcade. Fans of simulation flight games often prefer to operate under the rigors of real-world conditions, such as weight capacity, engine flameouts, and flipping switches and doohickeys on an instrument panel. On the other hand, fans of the arcade style of flight games just want to find the targets, blow them to smithereens, and have fun doing it.
Suffice it to say, Air Combat was developed with the latter group in mind. The flight sim aspects were stripped down to their most fundamental elements. You didn’t need to have attended flight school to enjoy the game. As long as you could manage your airspeed and spatial awareness while keeping track of your targets, you were good to go.
Originally an arcade title in 1992 running on Namco’s System 21 “Polygonizer” system board, Air Combat found its way to the PlayStation on September 13, 1995—just four days after the console’s launch in North America. Before this game, flight combat sims on home consoles struggled to provide an uncompromised 3D experience. Usually, you had to either settle for fast pseudo-3D on-rails gameplay or full 360-degree movement, but with choppy animation that couldn’t convey an unfettered sense of motion.
Air Combat changed all that, having a respectable balance between simulation and arcade gameplay mechanics. The game provided a fairly realistic 3D environment for its time without bogging down the player with the sometimes off-putting simulation rules of PC flight sims of its day (g-force concerns, engine flameouts, etc).
What the PlayStation version gets right immediately is its incorporation of the arcade game’s core gameplay mechanics without trying to be a 1:1 port. Instead, it was built from the ground up to work within the PlayStation’s hardware limitations. Compared to other arcade-to-console ports like Ridge Racer, Air Combat stands out as a more original experience despite its arcade roots. It was a trend that Namco would continue with the PlayStation conversion of their arcade games.
Although the PlayStation port couldn’t match the visual fidelity of the arcade original, it made up for its shortcomings by including 17 unique sorties, easily dwarfing the original’s paltry few stages. In addition to straightforward dogfights against enemy squadrons, the game featured a surprisingly diverse set of missions.
Objectives range from stopping bombing runs to flying low-altitude reconnaissance to destroying oil rigs to undermining the air and ground forces of a heavily fortified city. The Ace Combat series has always done well with dreaming up mission objectives that at least piqued your curiosity to see what would come next, and it’s great to see that it started here in the first entry.
As novice-friendly as the game may be, Air Combat still requires a fair degree of strategy when taking down certain targets. Especially in later missions, enemy planes won’t just sit there and let you destroy them head-on. You’ll have to learn how to turn and burn—shooting down planes while in a tight turn or looping your plane behind them for a quick kill. And of course, the enemy squadrons and their anti-aircraft ground forces will be seeking to knock you out of the sky as well.
Each successful mission rewards you with generous sums of money—minus the cost of repairing damage sustained, plus your wingman’s cut of the action—which you can then use to purchase additional planes. The game features a respectable selection of 16 aircraft, including F-15s, MiGs, SU-27 Flankers (my personal favorite), and F-22s. While the planes look accurate to their real-life counterparts, any aircraft you purchase is repainted in a bright red, white, and purple color scheme.
The paint job doesn’t look that bad on some planes, but on others it looks almost cartoonish. Such a mixture of bright colors isn’t befitting, say, of an F-117 stealth fighter. It looks like you’re flying in an airshow spectacle rather than going into the heat of battle. While you do have the ability to fly in the planes’ original colors, it’s only accessible via a secret code on the loading screen.
In my opinion, this option should have been included as standard. The fact that none of the many sequels repeated this odd color scheme makes it stand out even more here. Though I doubt this was a major concern for anyone playing Air Combat when it was originally released.
Once you make it through the first few missions, you’ll be given the option to select a supporting wingman of varying degrees of skill (or not). The higher his skill level, the more expensive the fee. Unfortunately, the usefulness of said wingman is often difficult to determine.
When, for instance, I instructed my wingman to “secure the construct”, they would head in the general direction, but they wouldn’t actually destroy any ground or aerial targets in the vicinity of the construct they were supposed to secure. The wingman just meandered in a circle, doing nothing but making himself a target in your place.
Where the game feels especially dated is with the controls. It feels imprecise when executing pitch and roll maneuvers (which will be quite often). This is mostly due to the limitations of using the standard d-pad on the original PlayStation controller. The DualShock didn’t exist at the time, so you can’t really experience the benefit of nuanced maneuverability in a 360-degree space unless you happen to have the costly PlayStation Analog Joystick.
As a result, piloting the planes often feels just a touch unwieldy when trying to stabilize and reorient yourself to the horizon after a turn or loop. While it won’t ruin the game, it does take some getting used to, since most of us are far more accustomed to using a thumbstick to fly things in video games these days.
If there’s one serious gripe I have, it’s that crucial visual information—the altimeter, speedometer, and radar—is only displayed in the first-person viewpoint. Such information can’t be seen in the third-person mode, which makes it difficult to determine where you are in relation to the ground or enemies out of your immediate view, much to my annoyance. It was a real bummer, since I prefer to see my jet on screen, but it just didn’t feel practical in most situations when the fighting got fierce.
I often found myself scrambling to switch between viewpoints while tracking the enemies’ positions and trying to avoid being shot down. That, coupled with the controls’ awkward feel mentioned earlier, made constantly switching between viewpoints in the heat of battle prohibitively impractical. By the time I reached the fourth mission or so, I just let the first-person viewpoint hold sway over the rest of my time with the game.
Graphically, Air Combat hasn’t aged quite as well as Ridge Racer, Namco’s other early PS1 conversion. Environments in the early stages are nearly featureless, save for the obvious separation between sky, water, and ground, with the occasional variation in color hues to depict “terrain”.
The topography, in many stages, is sparse and doesn’t really have much to wow the player. Though, to be fair, it’s easy for me to say that, having started with Ace Combat 3 and seeing the graphics improve as the series progressed through the next three console generations. So by all means, take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Each mainline game in this series features a guidance arrow of some sort that helps you track nearby enemies out of your line of sight. But an interesting wrinkle here in Air Combat is that the guidance arrow only tracks aerial targets. This makes the pursuit of multiple ground targets cumbersome in many cases because you’re forced to rely on your radar to spot them if they are anywhere other than directly in front of you.
Without a doubt, Air Combat is the most simplistic entry in the Ace Combat series. Sure, the forced reliance on a first-person viewpoint to see the radar, along with other less-flattering aspects of the visual presentation, hasn’t aged as gracefully as other elements. And yet, despite having been released over 30 years ago, much of the game’s DNA has formed the basis of each subsequent sequel, including the upcoming Ace Combat 8 later this year.
That said, Air Combat has the interesting duality of being good for its time, yet unnecessary to play at this point (assuming you’re a newcomer). Everything it does—both good and not-so-good—was significantly refined in the sequels. Objectively, I don’t recommend going out of your way to purchase this game unless you just want it for historical context. Even so, Air Combat stands as a testament to Namco’s ability to capture the fun of flying a fighter jet without overcomplicating the experience. It laid the foundation for how a modern flight game should work in a fully 3D environment.
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* All screenshots courtesy of Moby Games.