Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan wars:0/10 got scammed originally read the title as the BALKAN wars and not BELKAN
anyways, this is a jet fighting game sponsored by the american military-industrial complex, like, really, lockheed martin and northropp grumman logos are in the opening screen of the game.
The game story is focused on the story of this legendary war hero, who was a mercenary that took down a lot of planes and made great advancements towards peace and shit. The actual story is told in a very RTS format, like really, it felt REALLY similar to something like Command & Conquer. You have individual missions with different objectives, in which you get a cutscene, maybe involving live action footage explaining the context, then you go to a mission overview in a really cool UI and then you play the mission
I'm a big sucker for RTS and especially RTS campaigns, they always feel so memorable to me. Although, the RTS genre is basically dead because of the success of starcraft 2. Instead of making cool narrative games with killer campaigns like warcraft 3, they tried focusing on e-sports, and since no game has been able to replicate starcraft 2, the genre has died. So i'm REALLY happy to see something that has the same energy and creates the same emotional response for me
Now, the actual campaign has some problems, first of all, it has no tutorial. Ace combat is a game with a very franchised and established playerbase, and this game is one of the most hardcore games in the franchise, so for them it's fine to not have a tutorial, but for me, the first hour was just me trying to figure out how to fly the plane and shoot, and honestly, it wasn't until halfway through the game I learnt how to use the special weapons. That was not a good experience.
Secondly, the game balance. There are three types of mission this game. air to air, air to ground, and the two of them combined, sometimes they let you choose, the problem with this, is that with the exception of the penultimate mission, air to ground is WAY easier, it's a night and day difference, so basically the difficulty curve of the game fluctuates depending if it's air to air or air to ground, and whenever you have to choose, you would have to be insane to pick something that is not air to ground. You don't really get more rewards for picking the harder mission, and even from a narrative point of view, it doesn't make sense to pick the harder mission. You're a soldier, you can die at any moments, have your allies have died already, why the fuck would you risk your own life even more in purpouse?
Also, related to the previous problem, the mission objectives don't feel varied enough, some missions are exactly the same as the other one but in a different environment, with the only exception of the penultimate mission (which also is, in my opinion, the best mission of the game!), so yeah, no culling of stratholme for you
The next problem runs a bit deeper, and that is the morality system. There are civilians and things that don't pose a thread in this game, they are shown in a different color in a radar. These are never essential objectives, and you can spare them. At the end of each mission a bar fills up with 3 areas, which determine if you're sparing civilians, if you're murdering them, or if you're in between, this affects some of the dialogue, some unlocks (this isn't really clear tho, I only discovered it affected unlock until now that I just googled it LMAO), and what enemies appear in the next mission, not the actual mission objectives, just some specific enemies
Thing is, I don't really feel it's very polished, there really won't be much differences if you kill everyone, in fact, some missions can become significantly easier if you do it, since some missions are based on score, and killing civilians give score, choosing not to kill civilians reduces the number of targets and sometimes force you to fight harder targets, and if you kill civilians in a mission that isn't score based, you still get more credits. With the game being sponsored by the american military-industrial complex (making it in a way political propaganda) and the story being about a cool war hero, yeah, I don't know what they want me to think about their stance on nuking civilians
However, even with all of these flaws, the game was fun, the actual core gameplay was solid, flying the plane was fun and engaging, and the actual story, even if I disagree with some of the messaging and with it being quite simple, was still interesting. I see a LOT of potential in this franchise, I don't really know (or really think), that there is any other ace combat that really fixes those problems, but if you just fixed those problems, and made a campaign that is more similar to warcraft 3 in terms of actual mission objectives and storytelling, it could be one of my favourite games of all time. The RTS genre may not revive, but this will do. I really hope this franchise keeps getting support and that ace combat 8 is a banger videogame, because I will very likely be playing it.
placed in c tier
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next: deus ex
haven't started your lie in april
you might enjoy it more, or maybe you won't vibe with it 
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