Easily In My Top 5 Of All Time!
... evrything has changed, but my love for this game rages on.
It's hard to explain this game to most people, even if they're into flight games like "Ace Combat" or "Heroes of the Pacific", because ther'e's no shooting.
Huzzawhaaaa?
Yeah, it's a game without violence... where's the fun in that? Well, hustle out to the clearance bins and find out... it's worth you fifty cents.
This is a game about the joy of flight. That sounds a little artsy, but in this case it applies. You have a plane on a runway, and each level tests your skills as an aerial acrobat in greater and more dangerously designed environments... you'll fly from the rocky ravines to the underground lakes and crazy wind mazes in an attempt to put together the pieces of a map which leads you to the Castle...
... there are missions refueling from a train or another plane in a cross-country run, treacherous slides and mountain passes, water spouts, volcanic caverns, landing on an aircraft carrier in the whippin' rain... the missions go on and on (with an eventual final goal in the heart of an amazing castle ruin)... it's just the most fun you'll ever have, and the most realistic control in terms of having all of the real controls you might have in a plane; Separate rudder and aeleron controls (which is ALL-IMPORTANT when simulating flight), throttle, retractable landing gear on most models, and the entire physics model for the game is without peer in terms of what it really feels like to fly a plane without becoming "Flight Simulator X" difficult... how do I know this? Because my folks were both small-aircraft pilots ofr my entire life, and I've taken the stick a few times over the years.
I don't know if "Ace Combat" feels real, but when you get on this game with a single-engine craft and you start flying, the use of the rudder and aelerons combined with the throttle is amazing, and learning these combinations is easy, but mastery is a different story, and of course it's key to the game.
If you make it through the game, you'll be rewarded with new models of planes or new minigames... and each course has a set of rings which can be difficult to collect but they contribute to your score, which in turn will open further plane mods and other goodies like radars which will help you locate hidden pathes or "locked" planes waiting on hidden runways scattered around the world...
... I guess I should have mentioned that each course or level if you will once completed, becomes open to you for Free Flight and exploration, or for just buzzing around and seeing if you can take a loop under a waterfall with your new mods to that hidden runway...
This game is just too cool... and it's one of the reasons why I have a PS2 stuck away, brand-new in the box, that I've never touched; So that when all of my consoles and friend's consoles are dead, I can STILL play this game for awhile. I've played through the game five times in total, and I've finished a lot of the side games in order to unlock every aircraft and every part and modification for each of them.
One of the few games out there I would call perfectly balanced, and a true 10... but don't take my word ofr it, go get you one!
See You Around The Playground!