A huge improvement over the original, which was more of an arcade "ride" than a real flight simulator. You can now choose between three different planes, three different views, there's a thrust lever (sounds obvious, but hey), and three different game modes. The first two modes are "casual" and "expert": a bunch of stages with various scenery (above a jungle, a desert, the clouds, the sea,...) and objectives (shoot a number of planes, sink an aircraft carrier, a tense 1-on-1 dogfight, and even a refueling minigame). The last mode is "dogfight" where you simply need to shoot down waves of enemies. There's no continues in this mode so you're really chasing the highscore.
For a 1995 game, it still looks surprisingly good with big 3D models and a smooth framerate. Kinda crazy they decided to port it to Playstation since you can really feel the technological gap. There's also a banging soundtrack, a lot of voices and sound effects, the whole Namco arcade package.
Air Combat 22 is a really fun game, but it does have some issues. There's a strict time limit, and more annoyingly, very few missiles to work with. It's almost impossible to shoot down fighters with your regular guns, so if you're out of missiles, you're out of luck. That's not a problem in the regular modes where you can credit feed, but it's a death sentence in dogfight mode. It's not really fun to get a guaranteed game over because the enemy barrel-rolled right before you pushed the shot button and you wasted precious ammunition. I guess that's the limits of a pure arcade experience, and I'm glad the series jumped over to home consoles.
For a 1995 game, it still looks surprisingly good with big 3D models and a smooth framerate. Kinda crazy they decided to port it to Playstation since you can really feel the technological gap. There's also a banging soundtrack, a lot of voices and sound effects, the whole Namco arcade package.
Air Combat 22 is a really fun game, but it does have some issues. There's a strict time limit, and more annoyingly, very few missiles to work with. It's almost impossible to shoot down fighters with your regular guns, so if you're out of missiles, you're out of luck. That's not a problem in the regular modes where you can credit feed, but it's a death sentence in dogfight mode. It's not really fun to get a guaranteed game over because the enemy barrel-rolled right before you pushed the shot button and you wasted precious ammunition. I guess that's the limits of a pure arcade experience, and I'm glad the series jumped over to home consoles.