RaidersSphere4th

Poorly designed mission, sluggish response across all planes, stats seem not even matter most of the time.
If you have played AC, PW or similar game, this game will give you an aneurysm finishing it.

Mission design is frustrating and I highly doubt this was ever properly tasted. There are number of missions that are incredibly disorientating solely do the graphics choices where ground, sky and sometimes even walls are really close in color. Never had this problem in all of AC. Planes feel sluggish (regardless what the in game stats say), distance to get lock on missiles is incredibly low. So to get a lock one needs to get close and at low speed - hard to do with 4 missiles coming at you. Not to mention looking at radar window I doubts that enemy missile aren't way more maneuverable.

Story is weird and at points just straight up horrible. I don't understand how this got past a team of peoples. Presentation in VN style is fine, clearly a cost saving measure. Setting the story on Venus could be interesting but it goes essentially nowhere.

Performance is great on windows. On Linux it doesn't work work at all. But not like there is much to enjoy even when the game works.

If you want AC game set in a future play AC 3, despite being a PS1 title it's miles better in every single compartment. If you played all AC games, PW and other give busted unfinished Vector Thrust a chance.

For ace combat knock off, it's not that bad. If someone had said this was a spin off without prior knowledge, you'd think this was part of the franchise. What makes it difficult though is it definitely shows it's age. Game runs fine, but the QoL features are rough around the edges. I'd say yea for enthusiasts who love ace combat style games. It almost feels like a Vita game. Might feel better to play on the Deck.

During combat, you are mostly better off just using the machine gun the entire time. i'll commend it for being an indie game that does the genre well.

you get used to it looking like that I promise

I enjoyed this wacky mix of arcade flight simulator and visual novel. Graphics aren't amazing, though that's fine because the game is old and they aren't eye-destroying. Controlling the plane was somewhat difficult at first because you have to use the arrow keys for pitch and roll, and you should probably assign q and e to yaw. The rest of the controls are kind of nonsensical so it would be best to just totally rebind them before you start playing. I also found the missions to be difficult and dogfights too tough on normal because of the bad controls, so I just played on easy.

The story is alright. It's not Ace Combat/Project Wingman, but it has its moments. Nobuyuki is an OG.

Overall, if you can look past the dated graphics, bad controls, and don't mind playing on easy, I think this can be a nice game to buy on sale.