I’ve been doing this for a very long time now. I’m not talking about the writing bit, although I have been at that for a little while now, instead I’m talking about playing video games; all sorts of video games in fact. One of the games that stuck with me all these years isn’t all that old. Ace Combat 4 is my hands down favorite flight game and would probably make the list of my all-time favorite gaming experiences. I went so far as to adopt the Mobius 1 call-sign to whatever I could. So when Vector Thrust came across my desk I was pretty intrigued.
The game is like some sort of spiritual successor to the Ace Combat series in both style and story presentation, but don’t let the games initial look and charm fool you as Vector Thrust drops the ball in one major way compared to the Ace Combat series; it’s just not all that fun. Everything about Vector Thrust look amazing on the surface. The game employs a really fun cell-shaded look that gives the game a unique style and offers players a number of modes to play and explore. The game itself is chock full of all sorts of aircraft and weapon load-outs so options are varied and aplenty.
The problems don’t arise, or didn’t for me, until the second mission within the games story campaign. Mission one was a nice little “get to know the game” sort of thing that did enough to get me excited and pumped for what was to come, unfortunately that joy quickly wore off. While the cell-shaded graphics look great on the planes, it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to any of the terrain. Everything just comes off like a 2D drawing with a filter thrown on-top of it. I know this is a game about being in the air, but when having to engage ground units, or when near coastline levels things look pretty shoddy.
But what about the flying part of this flight game? That part doesn’t fare much better as no matter what plane you get to fly, they all feel nearly identical with regards to how they handle in the air. Not only that, but the planes don’t feel like they have any inertia as they float around the sky. They all don’t seem to have any real weight to them, which I’m sure is hard to get right, but still. Nothing about the flight mechanics feels quite right, and this wouldn’t be a major problem if the game were of an arcade nature (I’m a huge fan of After Burner), but this isn’t the case with Vector Thrust. Everything about it plays to the Ace Combat fan, and while that series had it’s own issues with authenticity, Vector Thrust makes it look like Microsoft Flight Simulator.
The sound seems to do a pretty good job, but you’ll be laughing far too much to understand any of the story because of the bad voice acting. It’s one of the cases where I would have much rather just read the text myself instead of having it done by amateur voice actors. I could have sworn that I was listing to an episode of Red vs Blue than a serious game about geopolitical issues of war and peace. I’d love to go into more detail with the game’s story, but after nearly four hours of playing the games second mission I was forced to give up on the game altogether.
The mission in question throws you into a skirmish against three bomber squadrons that are supported by a wing of MiG fighters. Pretty standard stuff, and you do have a wing of your own helping, but the games mechanics make this level almost impossible for a number of reasons, especially this early in the campaign. It’s a lot of stuff to deal with so early on with MiG fighters locking on to you left and right, but here, a single missile has the ability to blow you out of the sky. That’s fine as you can also knock enemies out of the sky easily enough too, but the three bomber wings are a real gameplay concern. They have antiaircraft guns on each, so getting in close and using guns isn’t the best option, which is fine and I learned from that quickly. Missiles on the other hand are clunky, so there were many times they were wasted even when I was in direct line of sight and on the same vector. Annoying, sure, but what really kills the experience is that these bombers can take upwards of 10 missiles each which becomes a real problem when each of the three bomber wings has five planes each. So you’re looking at 120 plus missiles to take them down, yet you only have sixty at best, and that’s being generous as some planes carry more, but do much less damage. It’s bad, and couple that with MiG fighters that seem to constantly loop like they are on a roller-coaster and are hard to target and you get a really piss poor campaign experience; probably the worst I’ve experienced all year.
It was so bad that I stopped playing the game altogether for a few days because I was so frustrated with my experience. Maybe it was my fault and I was just crap at the game, maybe the game just needed to work out some bugs and balance issues, or maybe Vector Thrust is just inherently broken. This is a shame because once I ignored the poor campaign the rest of the game offered up a lot of genuine fun. You can design your own missions to play as well as playing through a mission mode that lets you better enjoy the game. It should also be noted the the Steam community is pretty good, helping each other out, but even the serious fans acknowledge the issues in play. Personally, if the team had nixed the atrocious campaign mode (the thing most players will begin with) and just stuck to the loose mission mode instead, Vector Thrust would have scored much, much higher. If you do pick this one up just stick to the mission mode as that’s where the game really shows what it can do.
If you are looking for that Ace Combat fix since that series has itself been pretty poor the last few years, Vector Thrust isn’t for you. There are a lot of pretty graphics and features that seem to only serve to cover up the broken game mechanics. If on the other hand you are looking for a flight game that has the potential to really come into its own after a few updates, you may want to keep this one on your radar, but I’d suggest you wait on it for a few more weeks. I should note that the game has multiplayer, but it was near impossible to find a match, so the team may have already screwed the pooch with this release.
*A copy was provided for this review*
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