Square Enix’s first original title on the Xbox 360 is a collaboration between Game Arts, Seta and anima inc. Game Arts originally came up with the Silpheed concept back in the 80s on 8-bit home computers in Japan, Seta joined in development since the Mega CD release, and this time anima inc. has come on board to provide further polish to the game, making it worthy of the Square Enix logo on the front of the box, even if the publisher didn’t have a huge hand in the making of the game.

The game is said to be similar to the classic Wing Commander series on PC, though not having played any of those games myself, I’m more inclined to call it Ace Combat in space. As a newcomer to this genre, the controls are slightly daunting at first, as is most of the game actually. Thankfully, there is a choice of difficulty, including Easy, Normal and Hard. Besides general tweaks to the damage statistics, easy level adds extra cues to the in-flight communication so that you have more of an idea what to do. There are a number of tutorials, for flight controls, formation tactics and weapon selection. Though the tutorials may seem a little lengthy, the time invested in completing these is well spent for beginners and will result in a much more rewarding experience playing the game. Even after completing the tutorial and turning the game level down to easy, the first couple of missions are a little overwhelming. With further play, however, everything becomes a little more comfortable and the game finally starts to sink its claws in.

The typical flow of a mission is weapon preparation -> intro movie -> phase one -> movie -> phase two -> movie -> debriefing and results. Some of the missions feature more than two phases and can go on for quite some time. Each phase has a number of primary objectives, specified when the phase starts, and a number of secondary objectives, which are not directly specified. Primary objectives have a number of forms, such as destroy all enemies, stop incoming attacks, or escort friendly fleets. Secondary objectives are more varied still and you have to find them for yourself, usually through hints in the radio communications, or through intuition, which improves as you get used to the game system. If you die in a later phase of the mission, you can restart from the beginning of that phase, but you will lose your secondary objective accomplishments from the first phase, unfortunately. On easy settings, dieing is often the result of colliding with a large ship, or being destroyed by a battleship’s heavy-duty laser beams. Death rarely comes from dog fights unless you play on normal or hard difficulty. This is great for people who aren’t used to the genre, but players looking for more of a challenge should perhaps avoid this level.

Early missions are quite slow and feature a small number of enemies, but as the game progresses, things quickly become a lot more frantic and the screen is filled with swarms of small ships and fleets of destroyers, battleships and carriers. To cope with this, you need vastly superior weapons and these are provided with the weapon development system. Using points awarded at debriefing time, new weapons can be developed in a number of categories, including lasers, guns, missiles, bombs and a few others. Also, because the difficulty ramps up so heavily at various points, extra weapons are opened automatically at key points in the game. After developing weapons, they can be fitted to your craft, in one of four places. Each weapon has a specific place it must be equipped at, so there is some tactical aspect here. There is always one nose gun and three main weapons - one situated under the wings in pair formation, another pair at the rear of the ship and a third single weapon underneath the cockpit, behind the nose gun. The weapons all have wildly different graphics, resulting in some interesting ship designs, even though the base ship remains constant throughout the game.

The graphics are rather underwhelming at first, with the first couple of missions feeling rather empty, but as things start to kick into gear with the number of ships increasing, the graphics really start to take on a next-gen appearance. Small ships leave jet trails and flares, missiles leave smoke trails, and battleships give off huge explosions, sending rings of debris across the battlezone. The game maintains a good framerate for the most part (30fps), but there is some odd jumping occasionally which may be caused by a bug rather than a regular drop in framerate. There are also some nice camera effects when using overdrive to reach high speeds, and then dropping back down to regular speeds again - the view distorts smoothly to give an impression of quick speed changes. There are some nice realtime cutscenes during the missions, and some CG cutscenes before and after the missions too. The CG is noticeably lower resolution than the in-game cutscenes, however, with the 360 upscaling to 720p if you’re playing on a high resolution displays. On the flipside of this, the in-game text is actually very hard to read on low resolution displays, so things are kind of a mish mash, from a resolution perspective.

Sound is an area where the game really excels. Explosions, communication and other sound effects all happen in crystal clear 5.1 surround. The size of ships is well represented in the sound of the explosion, with megaton cruisers pumping out some really heavy low frequencies. The music is mostly composed by Kenichirou Fukui, Square Enix’s in-house musician behind the music in games like Einhander, Front Mission 5 and the upcoming Final Fantasy XII sequel, Revenant Wings. Fukui describes the work as orchestra-pop-techno but the sound is very cinematic and suits the tone of the game well, with pressure building up in tense areas, followed by much-deserved triumph.

The overall feel of the game is very cinematic, making my original comparison to Ace Combat feel more valid. anima inc. boasts more than one hour of CG animation in the game; rather impressive for a shooter and certainly this contributes to the overall feel of the game. The constant little cutscenes really help the story to blend with the action sequences. The character design, though somewhat generic, is pleasing enough on the eye and the sum of all the parts is a rather positive production. The game lacks Xbox Live support, unfortunately, so online dogfights are something that can only be dreamed about, but the game is quite replayable. With weapons being carried over through repeated plays through the game, scores can be improved upon each successive playthrough and hardcore players can go after those elusive secondary objectives and Gamerscore points through achievements. I cannot say for sure whether fans of the genre will enjoy what is offered here, but there doesn’t seem to be anything obviously objectionable. As a newcomer to the genre, however, I am thoroughly satisfied with the game and would recommend it to others in my position.

Screenshots borrowed, with permission, from Xboxyde.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 4th, 2006 at 6:37 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.