by “Oh, a game by Sid Meier with planes? So, a plane builder/simulator I’m guessing?” *clicks on game* “Oh… dear. What is this.”
SM’s Ace Patrol is surprisingly a hexagonal strategy game involving the command of up to 4 planes in a take-turn simulated dog-fight experience set in… some war… sometime. Over in Europe or something. Er, maybe it was WWI. I dunno. I didn’t pay attention… to the game or my history classes. (Also, if you want this to get weirder, it was made by 2K–the same people who brought you BioShock and Borderlands.)
Recently I’ve been in a pattern of embellishing my reviews, but I’m just gonna give you this one straight up. Don’t play this game. It’s not worth your time.
The game starts out with you picking a pilot… but it wont’ really matter because you’ll get them all anyway. It then throws you into some tutorial missions, and then onto the campaign screen where you can manage your planes, pilots and missions. I also found that for some reason, someone had set the difficulty to the easiest setting which I raised. Each mission was an interesting yet simple simulation of what grid-based aircraft piloting would look like, with easy-to understand accounting for elevation, G-Force, and other factors, but in the end, you’ll probably just end up clicking arrows on whatever lets you deal the most damage to an enemy plane, without really thinking about what you’re doing.
Your pilots will gain levels and skills, with a wide variety of plane techniques, but I’ll be honest–I didn’t read any of them or try to figure out what they did, because in the end, I knew it would matter, so I just clicked on random ones for each pilot when it came time for upgrades. Also, is it me, or do you just want to punch each of the pilots in the face too?
I played enough levels to get to what I assume was a milestone mission where I had to take down a Zeppelin, upon which I was showered with more upgrades and skills that I scattered about my pilots without rhyme or reason. All I did to win the mission was click on arrows and make sure that my pilots were focus-firing. The game is somewhat amusing but has little substance and is a time waster in the strictest sense. Lightweight gamers may enjoy this, but it’s barely above the complexity of a Facebook game.
