Imagine, if you will, a scale. On one end is dedicated flight simulation, and on the other is arcade design philosophies. In my humble opinion, Ace Combat is at its strongest when these two sides sit in equilibrium with each other, a perfect balance. Ace Combat: Assault Horizon feels like it slammed down so hard on the "arcade" side of the scale that it sent the "flight sim" side into orbit (say hi to Captain Nagase up there, will ya?), and then broke the scale in the process.

This title's big feature is Dogfight mode (DFM), a mode you manually activate that sends you into a hot pursuit behind an enemy. By keeping your sights trained on your enemy, you can fire off missiles with enhanced homing and damage output. It's mostly on autopilot, but enemies can still shake you off or counter your DFM, chasing you with their own version of DFM (which you can also counter). The problem with DFM is that the game is downright reliant on it. You cannot play this game like a regular Ace Combat game, and to that extent, it doesn't feel like my skill at flying a virtual aircraft is being tested. Air-to-air special weapons are effectively useless due to how fucking fast enemy planes are, and their health is inflated to the point where the extra damage you deal in DFM is essentially mandatory.

This game also tries to spice things up with types of gameplay that are new to Ace Combat, to wildly varying degrees of success. There's on-rails missions where you fire a machine gun from the comfort of a chopper (reasonable enough), missions where you manually aim bombing runs via the perspective of a surveillance camera (this one was extremely irritating), and missions where you gun down entire cities as a chopper (braindead). Weirdly enough, one of my bigger beefs with the game is the camera. There's a point where you need to stop pretending you're filming a war documentary and let me see what the fuck I'm actually doing. Your plane feels like it takes up much more screen space than usual, and the camera has a tendency to drift around aimlessly. It was so distracting that using first-person cockpit view felt like a requirement. Same goes for the chopper, it takes up like half the screen, obscuring the targets you're supposed to be aiming at.

To a degree, this Ace Combat game feels a lot closer to an action game in spirit. The music in this game honestly sounds like it wouldn't be out of place in a game like Metal Gear Rising in many cases. There's a big focus on scripted sequences, and often leads to a plethora of do-or-die moments. There's no time to breathe between missions. DFM sometimes takes you on a ride, grazing past crumbling buildings and explosions. But when you activate DFM on a plane scripted to do that, sometimes they take a nosedive straight downward, only to sharply level out so they can follow the designated setpiece trail. This caused me to break off from DFM on more than one occasion, sending me careening into the ground, and it never felt fair (one of these times was during the tutorial). Also, what the FUCK do you mean "your health regenerates automatically"? Does the plane repair itself in real time, independent of the pilot? Fuck off. I hate this aspect so much, especially since the game boasts the spectacle of the aircraft getting torn to shreds by bullet fire and the like. These concepts directly clash with one another, it distracts me to no end. "Oops, I'm taking too much damage, better flee the current conflict for a little bit." Eat my rudder, Bandai Namco.

The story is a god damn blur. Your name: John Combat. (That is a joke.) Your mission: Kill the Russians. (That is not a joke.) Yeah, this game ditches Ace Combat's "Strangereal" universe for the real universe. No Strangereal means no fantastical elements; no drones, space elevators, super-duper future planes, any of that fun stuff. You play as a military man with a military plan, fighting a very black-and-white conflict from the perspective of "we're America, of course we're the heroes!" There's no nuance to any of it. Also, normally I wouldn't touch upon this kinda shit, but misogyny! Listen, I get it. You make a fictional story about the U.S. Army, and you probably want to represent the male power fantasy that comes with it. I don't think you needed to bring sexism in the workplace into the picture though. The one playable female pilot in this game is more than capable, but she's surrounded by a bunch of dickheaded jocks. The game's box mentions that the story is written by "NY Times best-selling military author Jim DeFelice", and without looking into the reception of his literary works, I'm sorry, but this guy just sounds like a hack.

The one saving grace about this game is that it seems to be a spinoff. The game that released after this one was explicitly titled "Ace Combat 7", after all. That doesn't excuse this game's general lack of polish though, it doesn't live up to the pedigree that the series had established up to this point. Truthfully, I didn't quite finish this game. I got stuck at an absurdly strict segment right before the final boss. Reading people's complaints about the underwhelming final boss didn't inspire me with the confidence to see it through, but I feel like I came close enough. Maybe the online co-op/versus is supposed to be the main draw of this game? Half the game's achievements are dedicated to it. Who knows? I really don't care enough to find out. Lowkey wish that Ace Combat Infinity wasn't a long-defunct live service title, otherwise this wouldn't be the sole Ace Combat offering available on the PS3.