Ace Combat 2

About Ace Combat 2

Ace Combat 2 (1997) is Namco's arcade-style PlayStation combat flight game of 24 jets and 21 missions, made because its designer felt Air Combat was technically lacking, and a half-million seller in Japan.

Ace Combat 2 in Depth

Presented more like an arcade game than other flight simulators of the time, it has the player fly 21 missions in a choice of 24 fighter jets, with objectives such as intercepting enemy squadrons, sinking an aircraft carrier or defending a base. Missions pay money to spend on new aircraft for the player's hangar. From the fourth mission a wingman can be brought along for support. The campaign starts largely linear and later branches. A fuel meter acts as a time limit, ending the mission if it runs dry. New to the series are "aces", elite enemy pilots who can be shot down to earn medals and unlock their special aircraft.

There are two difficulty settings: Novice, and Expert, which allows realistic manoeuvres such as rolls and high-g turns. To keep things approachable, the planes do not use their real-world performance data, and a simplified physics model keeps a sense of realism while staying easy to handle. The game supports the PlayStation Analog Joystick, Namco's NeGcon and later the Dual Analog Controller.

Making Ace Combat 2

Designer Masanori Kato, who had worked on Air Combat, saw that game as incomplete from a technical point of view and set out with a small team to use the PlayStation's hardware as fully as possible, giving the player a real sense of flight. They drew on aviation books, magazines and films, wanted far more variety than Air Combat's two mission types, and checked whether each new fighter would make missions more interesting. The team hoped for advice from a real pilot but could not get it. Kohta Takahashi and Nobuhide Isayama composed the music.

Namco released it in Japan on 30 May 1997, in North America in August and in Europe in October. It sold over 500,000 copies in Japan by May 1998, earning a Gold Prize from Sony, and scored 83 on Metacritic. Computer and Video Games called it "the most intense flight experience to ever grace a console" and IGN "one of the best flight simulators ever to come to the PlayStation", while some critics missed multiplayer and found it monotonous or too hard. It was remade for the 3DS as Ace Combat: Assault Horizon Legacy in 2011.