Thanks to Bandai Namco, we got our hands on Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. We've played quite a bit of it and so far, here's what we think:
It is very pretty.
From the get-go, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is immediately striking. You can tell that it has a lot of polish. The aircraft show off amazing detail and going from the runway into the dog fight is seamless. All the replay features just make for pure eye candy. If you're into aviation, especially modern military aviation, you're going to LOVE how Ace Combat 7 looks.
Controls require finesse.
While the controls are quite accessible, a new player will immediately be able to tell that there is a lot of room to improve. Ace Combat 7 is still way easier to control than Battlefield 4's aerial combat in my opinion, but it's easy to see that while the controls are easy to learn, they're going to be quite hard to master. It's a low barrier to entry but with also a really high skill ceiling.
Voice acting is on point, for the most part.
One of the things that, in my opinion, usually makes or breaks Japanese games translated to English is the voice acting. There's a certain quality to the voice acting of most Japanese language games acted out in English. It isn't really bad, but it's not my cup of tea. Ace Combat 7 didn't have that and had very natural sounding VO from what I've seen.
Combat is satisfying.
While I haven't gotten to a point with ramped up difficulty, the little that I did get to play felt great. Ramping up speed and gaining altitude, shooting missles, firing off your machine gun, it all feels amazing. Getting shot down feels quite visceral, too.
Framerate is silky smooth.
On the PS4 Pro, the game ran at a smooth 60 fps, which made dog fights that much more satisfying to play.
That's what we have on it so far. Soon, we'll be able to dive deeper into the game and have a more solid opinion on the game, but so far, it's looking like a 4 out of 5 game.
Everything's pretty fun so far
Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown launches for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on January 18, 2019 and Steam on February 1, 2019.