RaidersSphere4th
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Game Description
In the distant future, humanity has turned Venus into a livable environment. However, not all is well on Venusian soil as political intrigue pushes the way to help a young girl, the ace pilot known as Sonic Venus, to find the whereabouts of her missing father. Take to the skies of the second planet of the sun in this thrilling Ace Combat-like indie game, where you will find much more than just the story of one family’s heritage, but also something that will change the planet entirely.Announcements
No. of Reviews: 20
Review 1
Purchased!
Next to action, racing, RTS, city management, classic arcade, and shmups, one genre of games I've always liked is that of the flight genre. Growing up with Ace Combat and Microsoft Flight Simulator, it was another genre that I've added to my gaming repertoire. Enter Raiders Sphere 4th, a doujin game in the vein of the classic Ace Combat titles but with a science fiction vibe. The only (thus far) game in the series to have been localized, I've played and beaten the campaign of this game twice. So, how does it stack with that much experience? THE GOOD: + The setting is original; the game takes place on the planet Venus, where humanity has terraformed and colonized the planet. Earth, or a planet similar to such, has always been the setting of this kind of game. It's a nice change of pace to see a different location for a change. + Some of the story twists are interesting. An example would be the 'ancient alien' technology in the game, and how Venus was originally inhabited by an ancient race of aliens. Though, it turns out that a part of the alien tech may have belonged to humans from long ago. You also learn of your father who disappeared transporting three super-prototype raiders created from said alien technology. And the MegaCorp of this game? It's merely a disc one final boss compared to the terrorists you face in this game. It's definitely a change from the Ace Combat series, and other games of its kind. + The characters are, for the most part, interesting. Sai Chen and Juria, or as I like to call them 'discount Neon Genesis Evangelion cosplayers', are designed well. + The game has support for many controllers, HOTASes included. Do you have an Xbox 360 controller? It works great. A PlayStation controller with dual analog sticks? If you know Ace Combat's button scheme, you can have a one-to-one control scheme. Or if you're like me and use a stick or HOTAS, there's button mapping for that. Logitech's Extreme 3D Pro stick is a good choice. Thrustmaster's T.Flight HOTAS X / 4 / One work wonders for this game. + The in-game missions have a lot of variety, both in objective and in locales. Some missions require that you destroy a set of targets in a city. Others require that you fly in a canyon or a series of tunnels to reach a checkpoint. One mission has you dogfighting in a sort of ancient coliseum, so to speak. + The soundtrack is very nice and memorable, especially some of the 'briefing' themes. + There's a lot of variety with the weapons and the raiders, the in-game aircraft, so to speak. No combination of raider or weapons are the same. + The game is very low-end friendly, with specs designed for anyone with a computer. Whether it's a basic, pre-built machine or a gaming monster, anyone can play this game on any setting. THE BAD: - For all the originality of the setting of the game, the plot is somewhat by-the-numbers. You are a pilot who lives with her uncle and cousin, working as freelancer contractors. In one mission, though, you get caught in the crossfire between government and megacorporation forces. A war breaks out, and you are forced to join up with the Terra Government. Ellea and co. start out as nobodies, but quickly become a nightmare to the enemy and earn the envy of rivals. It's up to you to end the war between the two factions. However, there's a deeper plot as you investigate the disappearance of genius raider designer George Southline, plus something about alien technology and how it's not what it really is. You also fight the Planet Children, a terrorist group consisting of those who believe that Venus belongs to them and them alone. Their scheme also consists of 'we're taking over the world in our image'. In short, some of the plot has been seen in other works before; others reeks of having been in other Ace Combat titles, the legacy works on the PS2 especially. The motives of the villains aren't original, either; it borders on your typical Saturday Morning Cartoon or James Bond villain. - Lots of raiders to choose from, but a few of which are actually any good. I found that the best raiders in the game were the R-27C, which is what you start with, the Doberman, the Asura, the Power Rex, and the Lightning in that order. Everything else is garbage; the Ground Ping is made of iron and has lots of payload, but steers like a brick and goes at the speed of molasses. The Daisy Wheel, on the other hand, has lots of payload but has an awful gun. Even the Lucifer, one of two 'super-raiders' (hint: super-planes) pales in comparison; it's the same as the Lightning but with the best defense and slighty worst speed, but the best defense is a good offence. Speaking of the Lightning, once you obtain it after the mission where you find the flying transport that the PC's father was in, it's pretty much the only raider you'll ever fly in the game. Uncle Nobuyuki even lampshades it in one of the cutscenes of the game. - There's almost no reason to play through the game on harder difficulty levels. Playing the game on harder difficulites determines enemy count, aggression, durability, and how much damage you can take, but it does not determine unlocks in the game at all. You'll unlock aircraft and weapons regardless of beating the game on Easy, Normal or Hard. - Some weapons are a waste of money, and the good ones are only unlocked very late in the game or after beating the game. An example would be the long range air-to-air missile. Good luck buying a kill that's not a helicopter or the Watchdog B's that you encounter with this weapon. Enemies dodge it with impunity. Another would be the 'Head-Crusher' air-to-ground missile, which requires that you fly slowly and fire from maximum range only. Even then, on harder difficulties it may take more than one missile to kill ground targets, and it should not have to take this much effort to use this weapon. The only good air-to-air weapon in this game would be the trajectory tracking missile, unlocked after beating the game when it should have been available earlier than that, and even then it has very limited ammo and may not kill raiders in one shot, or even hit them, for that matter. - Air-to-air, like in Ace Combat, is a waste of time and effort. Instead of using missiles other than the trajectory trackers, I just take out aircraft with an aircraft with strong on-board guns. In one mission, you need to use on-board guns anyways because your uncle forgot to load up with missiles. Not that they'll be of use, anyways. - Despite the game being nice to all PC users, the game runs slow if you have a great processor and lots of memory, but a weak graphics card. For reference, I played on a computer with 8 GB of RAM and an AMD FX-6300 six core, 3.5 GHz processor, but I got 15 FPS tops on medium shader settings with an AMD Radeon HD 6450 2 GB GDDR3 graphics card. It wasn't until I upgraded the graphics card to an NVidia GeForce GTX 1050, 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM, could I dial up the settings to maximum and get 54 FPS at the minimum. Don't bother playing the game on high settings unless your system is powerful enough. - Unless you tinker with the controller settings in Steam's Big Picture Mode, the game will mistake HOTASes for XBOX 360 controllers. This is a problem because there are some functions that will not work when using a HOTAS that's being treated like an X360 controller. It wasn't fun when I had to go through this until I solved the problem, thanks to the power of search engines. Overall, I recommend this title for anyone looking for an Ace Combat type of fix. While the plot is similar to other works, the roster of aircraft and weapons being unbalanced, and other minor negative factors, the game is great for being kind to PC users of any kind; having a setting unlike other games of its kind; missions that are not the same time and again; and parts of the story that stand out from other titles, too. A keeper in any ace's collection.
Review 2
Purchased!
Let's get the obvious cons out of the way first. The ground textures look like muddled shit and in some missions you won't be able to tell the difference between the ground and the clouds(thankfully your instruments are still visible in 3rd person so you'll know if you're losing altitude). The rest of the game looks like an emulated PS2 game as it does run in whatever resolution your monitor supports without upscaling. The only things that look good are water and smoke. Destroyed enemies will catch fire which lingers for the rest of the missions so by the time it's over you'll see fire and black smoke everywhere as you look around. Another potential problem is that the game doesn't have English audio making it somewhat hard to read the subtitles with 30 missiles locked onto you while dodging AAA fire from the ground and trying to hit an enemy in front of you. Thankfully you can watch a replay after completing a mission so you can read the story after completing a mission and not miss much. The sound is decent. Explosions make a big boom, guns go daka-daka, the missile lockon sound is quiet enough not to be annoying but still noticable, and Raiders will emit a pleasing turbo-whine like noise as they zip around. It makes them sound more futuristic and elegant. The music is surprisingly good too, you might want to search for the OST online. At first the gameplay seems inspired by Ace Combat but air to air is a very different beast. The AI is very good at dodging missiles which will lead to most A2A engagmenets becoming big furballs. The dogfighting feels very WW2esque with a focus on turn-n-burn. You'll be zig-zagging while decellerating to make the enemy overshoot, stalling mid-loop to drop behind them, or using wide barrel rolls to cover less distance while maintaining your airspeed. You'll be equipped with an Ace Combat number of missiles, even smaller craft will pack 50 per slot but you'll mostly use them to force the AI to dodge so you can close the gap and shred them with your cannons. If you just want to mow down AI fighters simply by getting behind them and launching a pair of missiles then this probably isn't for you. A2G combat is much more like AC, lock on with missiles and fire away. You'll almost never run out of missiles so you don't have to worry about that. There are plenty of fantasy planes(or Raiders) and you can customise the loadout to your liking. The raiders feel different as you move through the generations. The earlier ones feel like more stable planes while the later ones get a more spaceship-y feel with quick yawing and very low stall speeds. While they're rated in A2A and A2G those stats are as useless as they are in Ace Combat. A plane with the worst A2G rating will do the same damage as the plane with the best A2G rating if you equip them with the same missiles or bombs, the higher rated plane will simply get more ammo. It's best to try them out in Free mission and see how you like them instead of relying on the stat bars. The custom loadouts also mean that if you particularly like how one of the Raiders flies(or looks) you can use it for any kind of mission. The tougher planes will have an easier time strafing ground targets but you can simply avoid it in a more fragile speedster. The missions are nicely varied though most of them will require blowing a lot of stuff up. The standouts are probably the night-raid where you have to drop below the clouds and quickly blow stuff up timed with a friendly jammer then get back up before the jamming expires and the very vertical mission where you climb halfway to orbit with a rocket booster to attack targets from below then dropping down to line up another run. There's even a BoE-type mission with lots of flying ships(which you need to blow up) engaging a big friendly fleet, a 3rd faction shooting at everyone and tons of fighters engaged in a huge furball. The story is fine for this type of game. It's presented in mission dialogue and in VN-style seqments between the missions. The briefings are reasonably detailed and will give you a fair grasp on what you might be facing, barring any mid-mission surprises. The game could've used a few more character poses but the ones that are there look good enough. The main characters are the pilot you're flying as, your friendly voice with an internet connection for mid-mission updates and your uncle mechanic who maintains your plane and spouts exposition regarding the past. While not deep or original they're all likable and don't suffer from mid-story emo syndrome like a lot of these animesque characters seem to. While 20€ might seem a bit much for a game that looks this outdated and cheap(probably a result of different game prices for indies in Japan) it will provide plenty of fun for anyone who likes old school dogfighting. If it happens to be on sale you should probably pick it up.
Review 3
Purchased!
Oh hey it's a voiced, fun, extremely PS1/PS2 Ace Combat game. Play it, you fools!
Review 4
Purchased!
I have not yet finished the game but I can offer my input on its current state as of May31 2015. The gameplay resembles that of an older Ace Combat title though a little less refined. However I must state in a positive note that the aircraft have more realism in their physics regarding banking & stalling. On the down side the aircraft models are very simplistic (less refined) and the though the pilot is visible in the cockpit it looks like a puffy astronaut. Really though you wont be looking at that while shooting down enemies will you? I found the gameplay to be enjoyable though it felt a little unfinished at first with the interface trims/refinement & new control support it's improving. The story I haven't yet finished as I stated, but it's not bad so far in its anime visual novel style. Previously in this review I'd made mention of control support issues, these have as far as I can tell been resolved, I'm able to keybind my Logitech Xtreme 3d Pro & Logitech F310 how I want and even have them both plugged in at the same time. Previously the F310 only worked in D-input mode but it now works fine in X-input mode (x-box). Be aware if you alternate between these two control methods you may want to leave the sensitivity setting at none or you'll have to switch it between the two.
Review 5
Purchased!
Disclaimer: I've played AC5, AC0 (100%) and AC:AH. Loved the first two, couldn't be bothered to finish the last one. I've really enjoyed what's on offer here. It's the closest I got to actually playing an Ace Combat game on PC (I tried AH, bleh). The devs certainly have a knack for making these kinds of games, since the mission variety is huge and there are a lot of missions. The story is pretty interesting, too. My only gripe is that I wish the game had a bigger budget, since I believe the team could do wonders in this genre. Unlike the current Project Aces who seem to enjoy making multiplayer events on an outdated console. AC Infinity PC please :(. I'm definitely looking forward to what the team cooks up in the future. Note: this game is harder than AC0, since shooting missiles nilly-willy won't get you far. Dogfighting does require some effort which can be immensely satisfying, but you really need to think about your attack vector.
Review 6
Purchased!
RaidersSphere4th is an Ace Combat ripoff. It is a good one though. Pretty much the gameplay is the exact same as Ace Combat 1-4 with the visuals reminding me a lot of Ace Combat 3 Electrosphere. Many of the planes are made up, but a few seem to be references to actual planes or Ace Combat super planes. There is some nice mission variety going on with some missions being basic, "kill all the bad guys missions" while others get more interesting such as destroying groud targets with ecm coverage. The ecm only last for a little bit and jams all targeting system so you can only use your guns but the enemy can also only use theirs. Upon destroying all the targets in an area yo have to climb back up to 10,000 feet to avoid being detected when the ecm wears off and then repeat this process at different target sites. There are other missions that have variety like this but this one seemed to be the most distinct out of the ones I have played. Besides the gameplay the graphics are not great. They seem like early ps2 generation graphics with the actual aircraft models being the best graphically. As far as early access goes, it's in early access to sort out mulitplayer and to posssibly add some steam workshop support. I feel there are some typos in translation that could be fixed as well, and sometimes the mission complete screens get some weird formating bugs. If you want some classic Ace Combat gameplay and don't really care about the graphics then this game delivers. However, if you really care about graphics or you want multiplayer I would wait until after the game leaves early access to pick the game up. Sekai projects games seem to actually make it through early access unlike some others so I would say that it should not be long until the game is out of early access.
Review 7
Purchased!
What the hell, this is a hell of a fun game and pretty much a hidden gem. A must for Ace Combat fans. Great voice acting by pretty obscure seiyuus give a lot of life to the characters. The story is kinda all over the place though but who freakin cares.
Review 8
Purchased!
It's not a bad game, but I can't recommend to a general public- its heavily "doujin" quality, lot of places are bare bone and has tons annoying audio glitches (like music starts to loop on its own, or missile alert sound doesn't stop, no game credit ending) Graphic on screenshot is what you get. There are graphic option to it, but I tried max and the game looked like less than PS2 but played around 10FPS. (fyi I can play Dark Souls3 with max setting with no issue, I do play on desktop) I don't mind if its not pretty to look at, however if it is not optimized correctly that's where I draw a line The missiles are super short range that guns are more reliable to shoot down any air targets, and even rockets are easier to use than missiles. Plane design is nice, but it shares from all old raider sphere planes. Near the end the enemy planes has so much mobility that they can keep you on tail as long as they want, its really annoying to hear missile alert constantly, even worse if it loops. If you truly love ace combat, you'll like this game, especiall Ace Combat 3. However, the game doesn't really cared much about the ending. It just concluded without having any resolution. I finished the final mission and it just went back to title screen left me to feel unfinished. None of the character ever developed anything, but that's quite typical of Rectagle game- older raiders sphere did exact same.
Review 9
Purchased!
Its the Ace Combat we all dreamed of but never got after AC6 However it does make some changes which I feel give it a nice edge over Ace Combat. Such as freeform weapon selection based on pylons and actually useful allied AI. Some weapons do have issues though and can also give you quite a headache to use. AI is also aggressive and smart enough from normal difficulty onwards such that missiles usage are practically impossible unless head on or at close range. Not to mention that their missiles seem to be enhanced on hard mode. I'd say even Ace Combat vets would have to take the normal difficulty at maximum straight off the bat. (I'd like to think I'm okay considering I S-ranked most of ACX Ace difficulty and is in the midst of an Ace run in AC6) All in all, I highly recommend this for any Ace Combat fan and a cautious recommendation for those just checking in.
Review 10
Purchased!
Pro- * great story with lots of minor plot twists * no hands held gameplay * great soundtrack (not available on steam to play seperatly. no soundtest mode; hunt down ost on the web) * early 6th gen style graphics (looks more high end on higher shader settings) * diverse objective oriented missions (rarely does it ever amount to "kill everything") * final mission is epic (dont want to spoil it. kill big my friends.) * 3D vision, 3D-Dive (whatever that is), Oculus DK1&2 support. con- * control config was forged in hell (patched) * emphasis on the control config (good luck setting that rudder) (emphasis on patched) * no countermeasures; dodge missiles manually (may be a good thing) * water requires at least "High" shader settings to look good; which is poorly optimized * shaders are poorly optimized * Too much fun. You shall not escape. Despite it's flaws if you go in expecting a nostalgic flight combat game with a plot, take the time to configure your controller or joystick and, learn to dodge (unless you allready played ace combat or vector thrust (I haven't FYI) in which case I bet you will be fine) it's missions will give your money's worth.
Review 11
Purchased!
To put things in perspective: I'm an Ace Combat 2,4,5 and Zero fan, so there is a big chance that I'm biased towards the good stuff in this game, also I have never played any RaidersSphere game before. With that in mind here goes a short review of RaidersSphere 4th... The sound quality is not top noch, but the melodic, well arranged and overall memorable soundtrack makes up for it in spades. It is after all just as the rest of the game, heavily inspired by the good Ace Combat titles I mentioned earlier. It is probably the best part of the game, but just as a soundtrack is suppose to, it lifts the atmosphere to the skies. The graphics are unfortunately below average, which wouldn't bother me in the slightest (Xenogears is one of my favourite games), but for a game that revolves around flying, one would consider it crucial to have a decent skybox and a field of vision, which is not the case. The airplane and enemies models look decent and the cities look great. The airplanes themselves are inspired by real airplanes, with the exception of the "epic" ones. (can't say anything else without plunging into spoiler territory). The sky looks beter in some missions, but the average is not so good. Note that you won't be able to run the shaders at anything above "low" if you want to keep your frame rate anywhere acceptable. (not that they would help anyway) Still the biggest problem lies in low res mountain and wall textures which make it, believe it or not, very hard to judge the distance to possible collision and it did cost me a few lives... To speak more about lives, I who am usualy playing my flight games on harder difficulties was forced to switch this to EASY, after repeating several mission more then 10 times. I do use a Mad Catz flightstick, which could have been the reason behind it, and you might just be better with a gamepad, but don't say I didn't warn you. The missions vary in their goals and never boring, also it's worth to mention that the voice over is in Japanese, which I don't mind, but they do have a LOT of dialogs during mission, sometimes even with valuable info regarding how to finish the said mission. That being said, reading caption and trying to outmanouver up to six missiles at times made me crash more then once, but on the flip side; I had more then enough opportunities to read the dialogue enough times over to know it by heart. Talking about the dialogue, the story is told trough a combination of mission briefings, mid-mission dialogue and a vissual novel of sorts (take it with a grain of salt, I don't ussualy read those, but it looks like one). The main characters are well developed and it's not hard to notice that someone put some love into writing and designing them. They are not at all stand-ins, but interesting and entertaining more then one would expect. What I found most lackings was the villain's character development. They are tipical and very straightforward, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because they fill their roles with no issues, but I can't shake the feeling that just a little bit more could have been done to make them memorable and unique. The story itself has it's ups and downs. Combined with the soundtrack it serves you enough heartwarming, cozy and in contrast, ass kicking and inspireing moments. The setting is imaginitive and well thought trough, while the plot keeps itself interesting enough for you to want to see where it ends. And here we come to a point which saddens me the most; the ending, while awesomely done and epic, is still just that, an ending. There is no higher point to it, or even a twist to make it interesting. Not to say that any Ace Combat games anything different, but with a story otherwise well imagined, you will probably expect the ending to be somewhat different. (this could be just my wishfull thinking though, and you may still enjoy the ending as it is, so take that as you will)
Review 12
Purchased!
Plays similar to the PS2 era Ace Combat games. Fun, but lacking in polish a little bit. All audio is in Japanese.
Review 13
Purchased!
ACE COMBAT: ANIME This game plays like the PS1/PS2 era Ace Combat games and is TONS of fun. To be honest, it really is a hidden gem. A must for true Ace Combat fans. A really short list of pros & cons Pros: + 30 missions + Hard, but not too hard (Played on normal) + Fun gameplay in general + Decent story Cons: - PS1 era grapics - RWR is annoying as hell - Dev team said they where adding multiplayer support in 2015, then didn't. I would 100% reccomend buying it while it's on sale.
Review 14
Purchased!
tl;dr cool setting, good mission variety, brought down by cheating enemies, frustrating design, and a bad translation. Doujin Ace Combat. It's basically exactly what you'd expect based on that in terms of content and production values. What's cool here is the setting with some neat multi-layered sci-fi cities to fly around in, and it has superweapons to take down as well. The environments are suprisingly interesting despite the horrendous textures. Also, back when it came out it was so badly optimised it was basically unplayable, but on a modern computer you can probably manage to get 60fps on the second-highest graphics setting. What's not cool is the game's terrible balance. There are no high-G turns here, so your movement is slower and more deliberate than in Ace Combat. Missiles are more restricted, and the game is generally harder than Ace Combat has been since 04. That's fine for a while, but it gets ugly soon enough. Enemy planes can fly through terrain without issue, making chasing enemies heading towards the ground a suicide mission. Enemy missiles have ridiculous homing on them far beyond what the player's missiles are ever capable of, which makes avoiding them incredibly tiresome due to the long manoeuvres encouraging hit and run tactics, especially as later missions have more and more enemies firing missiles at you at once. Allied NPCs are completely worthless when it comes to taking down enemy planes or even drawing fire away from you, so any mission with a lot of enemy missile units is absolute hell of endlessly blazing warning alarms. It's far, far easier to stall your plane when flying around, whereas enemies have no problem maintaining speed while making sharp turns, even before getting to the Watchdogs that can fly around like AC7's drones in a game with half of AC7's mobility. The game uses a money system to buy planes and special weapons as they become available, but this is incredibly restrictive in terms of what you can afford, especially since with some high value stationary targets on some maps the allied NPCs can steal your kills and thus your funds. After saving for many missions I finally bought a new plane that became available, only for the next mission to have a better model of that same plane available for half the price, which just felt like the dev laughing in my face. Where I quit in frustration was after taking down one particularly annoying enemy superweapon (cool setting though) only to discover that whereas AC freezes the timer after mission objectives are completed, RS4 slapped me with a time out failure during the post-mission celebratory dialogue as the timer ran out during it. Oh and also the translation sucks, the guy in charge of it clearly fancied themselves a better writer than the original developer for how much they put their own spin on things instead of translating what was actually said. But it's Sekai Project, so I guess that's to be expected.
Review 15
Purchased!
Ace Combat but with more anime. A love letter to the earlier Ace combat titles with visual novel cutscenes.
Review 16
Purchased!
Pretty good arcade inspired by classic Ace Combat games. I'm not into the anime stuff, but the gameplay is solid. though the flyght model is a bit more forgiving than Vector Thrust and Ace Combat, overall is it's fun to play. There is a good diversity in missions so far, some of them pretty creative and interesting. Overall, I enjoy the gameplay of it. I also like some aspects of the setting. It's set on Venus at some point in the future, which reminds me Cowboy Bebop a bit. The visuals and sound feels surprisingly nostalgic, like the early 3d era of japanese videogames on PSOne and Dreamcast. Personally, I like graphics the way they are and the music greatly enhance overall appeal. But someone else could find those aspects rather unattractive. Overall, if you enjoy Ace Combat or something like Vector Thrust and you don't find the setting and visuals unattractive you should definitely try it out.
Review 17
Purchased!
This was unexpected. A flight sim + visual novel mix. And both parts are good. It leaves a couple of things unexplained, but it had a great resolution. Nice characters and entertaining action.
Review 18
Purchased!
A nice little arcade combat flight game, in the style of the older Ace Combat games. I like it, but there are a few notable flaws: - While the game runs well on my i7-3630QM/GT630M laptop in windowed, the game has major graphical issues when trying to run fullscreen. - The missile lock sound is a tad obnoxious, and you'll likely find yourself turning the volume of the game down pretty far because of it. - The game is grapically very dated. While it's not a glaring issue to me, some players may be turned off by the low poly models and the flat ground textures. All said, I enjoy the game and would definitely recommend it to anyone who likes arcade flight games.
Review 19
Purchased!
What I think about this game : It's an arcade combat flight sim that takes place on Planet Venus. The combat fight mechanics has the same (or at least similar) style as those of classic Ace Combat series. The AIs are quite good in this game. Like other good combat flight sims, we can't always rely on missiles alone as they can be so agile in maneuvering. So, this what makes dogfighting really fun in this game. Same goes for the friendly AIs. They are also competent in assisting the players when dealing with the enemies. As for the jets, it has a fair amounts of playable jets to choose from ( I haven't finished the game yet, so I don't know how many are in the game yet). The graphics, while seemingly outdated if compared to many other modern combat flight sim games , still looks OK. Of course, it's better ito enable "shader settings" at the launcher screen. Since I'm playing this on laptop GPU, enabling it a default quality level makes the game stutters. So, I set it to low level with shader settings enabled and it still gets decent quality. I personally think that the graphic style of this game is like a mix between Ace Combat 3, Rebel Raiders : Operation Nighthawk (but better than that), and Airforce Delta series. The storyline is quite decent. It also has a nice set of main characters. The SFXs are quite good, and so are the BGMs, especially if you're into electronic styled music with added symphonic elements. The voice-actings are done very well in this game and done good in providing the dramatic sense to the storyline. Well, since this is currently in Early Access, expect several bugs / glitches in the game. But I'm sure it's gonna be fixed sooner or later. Other than that, I strongly recommend this game, especially to those who loves arcade combat flight action games such as Ace Combat and Airfoce Delta series.
Review 20
Purchased!
This doujin arcade flight simulator comes from a long-lived series made by Rectangle, and is the first of the series brought to the west by the publisher Sekai Project. This game uses the latest version of SphereEngine, SphereEngine4th, which is Rectangle's in-house SDK for creating flight-sim games, with previous versions being used for games like The Witch Of Triplecanopy (which still hasn't released on Steam, but is available on DLSite). This game includes full controller support, but for a more Ace Combat-like experience you will have to change some buttons around on an Xbox controller. Fair warning. The story takes place in Venus, years after an immigration initiative and in the aftermath of an economic bubble's burst, where the the Sentinels of Terra, a UN organization, is trying to keep things from spiraling out of control, and the Venus Mining Initiative has gotten their hands on a monopoly because they were one of the few companies to survive the economic failure. The Sentinels and VMI are on the brink a hot war, and this is where things kick off. In the thick of it there is the Southline Airlines company, a family-operated Raider business of which Ellea, code Sonic-Venus, operates as the family's Raider Driver in search of her father who up and left some time ago. Raiders are next-generation fighters that are more compact but still pack a punch. They aren't usually equipped with stealth tech since most factions are still keeping an eye out for larger traditional fighters and aren't well equipped to tag Raiders at range until the fighting starts, and those who pilot Raiders are called Drivers due to the comparative simplicity of the hardware. The visual novel format of the story is well-timed and keeps the flow of the game moving as you move to picking weapons and Raiders to buy before the next fight ensues. Sound: The sound quality is quite good, and would have rivaled Ace Combat 4 and 5 back in the day. Chatter over the radio sounds noticeably improved, which is appropriate for the timeframe this game takes place in, and the background chatter, when it's present, adds that Ace Combat flair to the atmosphere. Music: The music is varied and well-crafted, suitably selling the part of the story you're in right now. From introducing the Southline family to the final showdown, the music will immerse you nicely. Gameplay: The gameplay is distinctly similar to Ace Combat, especially earlier iterations since AC4 and so on were the latest releases at the time, but the main difference is a Project Wingman-like pylon equip system and the fact that you're piloting small, agile and still well-armed aircraft. The way missiles work is also different, forcing you to jink last minute instead of just turning as hard as you can like in Ace Combat. Landing is also present, and becomes a plot point a few times in the story. Pros: A great Ace Combat inspired title that sits next to its contemporaries in terms of quality. Cons: Shaders are wack on RS4th, so expect performance drops, even on an RTX card. If you do suffer performance tanking, I suggest you turn them off because the game still looks good without, OR, you can use Reshade which does a better job overall. If Rectangle decides to, I'd like to see the earlier Raiders Sphere titles here on Steam, even if they don't translate it.
