Ambitious, missed potential, confused, anti-nationalist. Yeah. Emotionally aware, dramatic, pays attention to its individual characters while tripping over itself for what it actually stands for.
They had a great opportunity with the anti-war stuff, not that it's terrible, but it's like... well, it eventually resolves itself into nationalism being bad, which is true, but to get there it also felt like it had to give up another thing it got close to: something along the lines of "war is manufactured by the ones who don't have to experience it." but that gets dashed aside for couple of twists that I won't detail because I don't want to give this a full spoiler tag.
Lovely cast of characters, albeit somewhat scatter-brained usage of them. The method of feeding you cutscenes that are mostly from a non-military non-player perspective is always something I liked, and the aesthetic of shooting it through a camera for journalism that also exists in some places is nice... There's a lot going on in this, it gets very direct with shit like the military silencing journalists (temporarily, in this case) so they don't report on things that should be known, the citizens of your originating country don't fucking care about the war and think it's pointless... It has ambition, like I said before.
It plays nice. It has horrid team-AI, with a caveat: they are decent at damaging enemy planes, they are godawful at finishing them off. It's very scripted, which okay, fine, it's way more focused on making you engage with the narrative and the spectacle (stuff like the ICBM lighting up the entire sky), I don't think it's a huge issue. It's not very difficult outside of a couple of obtuse occasions. It has lots of hectic radio chatter, for me it helps prop up some of the border-line snoozefest levels, but if you think it isn't convincing enough, yeah, there's nothing helping some of these missions. Lots of infinitely respawning pairs of jets and whatnot to keep you occupied. It's whatever.
It's not bad, but it's very... fantastical. It doesn't have the balls to commit to the grand vision that it felt like it was capable of, it hit some really weird twists and story beats in the later bits, and is generally kind of strange.
Emulated via PCSX2 on Linux.
They had a great opportunity with the anti-war stuff, not that it's terrible, but it's like... well, it eventually resolves itself into nationalism being bad, which is true, but to get there it also felt like it had to give up another thing it got close to: something along the lines of "war is manufactured by the ones who don't have to experience it." but that gets dashed aside for couple of twists that I won't detail because I don't want to give this a full spoiler tag.
Lovely cast of characters, albeit somewhat scatter-brained usage of them. The method of feeding you cutscenes that are mostly from a non-military non-player perspective is always something I liked, and the aesthetic of shooting it through a camera for journalism that also exists in some places is nice... There's a lot going on in this, it gets very direct with shit like the military silencing journalists (temporarily, in this case) so they don't report on things that should be known, the citizens of your originating country don't fucking care about the war and think it's pointless... It has ambition, like I said before.
It plays nice. It has horrid team-AI, with a caveat: they are decent at damaging enemy planes, they are godawful at finishing them off. It's very scripted, which okay, fine, it's way more focused on making you engage with the narrative and the spectacle (stuff like the ICBM lighting up the entire sky), I don't think it's a huge issue. It's not very difficult outside of a couple of obtuse occasions. It has lots of hectic radio chatter, for me it helps prop up some of the border-line snoozefest levels, but if you think it isn't convincing enough, yeah, there's nothing helping some of these missions. Lots of infinitely respawning pairs of jets and whatnot to keep you occupied. It's whatever.
It's not bad, but it's very... fantastical. It doesn't have the balls to commit to the grand vision that it felt like it was capable of, it hit some really weird twists and story beats in the later bits, and is generally kind of strange.
Emulated via PCSX2 on Linux.