The Xbox 360 video game, Ace Combat 6, is set to get Xbox One backwards compatibility sometime today. Ace Combat 6's new Xbox One product page is currently live in the Microsoft Store, however, the game itself doesn't appear to be available just yet at the time of this writing. Ace Combat 6 is a military action-strategy game that originally launched back in 2007. It features a strong focus on flying military aircraft but also contains other aspects of such as naval combat as well. Here's the official game description and trailer: Witness high definition graphics rendering the world around you into super realistic war zones, made possible only by next generation processing power. Lead not only aerial combat units but also naval and ground combat units to victory. Massive conflicts unfold on a “living battlefield” integrated by the “Dynamic Operation System” where up to six independent aerial, ground, and naval battles can break out at once as allies and enemies clash in real-time. Ace Combat 6's sequel, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, is set to launch on the Xbox One family of consoles tomorrow and will be available in both a Deluxe and regular version. Digital pre-orders for both are now live. Are you a fan of the Ace Combat video games? Let us know why or why not in the comments below and then follow us on Pinterest for more Xbox gaming content. Share This Post:<doc-sep>Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is now playable on Microsoft's Xbox One consoles. The game is the latest in the Ace Combat series and comes just a day after its Xbox 360 predecessor, Ace Combat 6, gained Xbox One backwards compatibility. Interestingly, those who buy Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown on Xbox One will also receive Ace Combat 6 for free as part of a limited time promotion. Here's the official game description and trailer: Become an ace pilot and soar through photorealistic skies with full 360 degree movement; down enemy aircraft and experience the thrill of engaging in realistic sorties! Aerial combat has never looked or felt better! Project Aces aims to revolutionize the sky with this entry in the series, offering an experience so immersive it feels like you're piloting an actual aircraft! Weather and the environment affect your aircraft and the HUD, adding a sense of extreme realism never felt before in a flight combat game. Epic dogfights await! Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is available in a regular edition and a Deluxe Edition which comes with the base game and six packages of additional in-game content. Have you played Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown yet on your Xbox One? Share your thoughts on it with the community in the comments below and then follow us on Pinterest for more Xbox gaming content. Share This Post:<doc-sep>Developer Project Aces Publisher Bandai Namco Platform(s) PC, PS4, XB1 Review Code Provided Microtransactions None Our Score 8 No video game has ever made me physically perspire to the degree Ace Combat has, ever since I played AC04 endlessly on my PS2 – it was the only game I had for a few months when I first received the console. The cutting-edge visuals, roaring and immersive sound and the rousing score all came together with tight, expertly designed flight combat to create some of my fondest controller-driven memories. Ace Combat 7 did not disappoint in this regard – I’ve lost my grip on my analog sticks countless times in my initial playthrough. This game has everything series veterans have been waiting for since Ace Combat 6 way back in 2007, so if you’re a fellow fan on the fence or waiting for the PC release in a couple of weeks, know that you are in for a highly enjoyable experience and should not hesitate to pick up Ace Combat 7. With that said, this game is not without its blemishes, especially in the story and the new gameplay mechanics. Before we dive too deep into all of that though, let’s get a little background for the uninitiated. Ace Combat 6 technically was not the last game in the series before 7; we’ve had several others, including the rightfully-maligned Assault Horizon, which dropped the “Strangereal” setting of the series in favor of the real world. Since then, there hasn’t been a mainline single-player-focused entry in the series. Strangereal is the now-official, previously fan-created nickname for the world of Ace Combat. It’s Earth, more or less, with a modern/near-future level of technology and a splash of anime/sci-fi influence for good measure. Nuclear weapons have been entirely removed from the picture after they were used in a scorched-earth maneuver by the country Belka in this world’s 1995. Instead, various superweapons populate the battlefields of Strangereal, many of them originally designed to shoot down an asteroid that ultimately still made planetfall in broken chunks. These impacts are the root cause of much of the geopolitical conflict and thus much of the warfare that the games center on. Ace Combat 7 dives head first right back into the complex lore and geopolitics of Strangereal – everything that happened in previous games is still canon, which means a great deal of baggage and history is there to work with. Set in 2019, on the long-suffering continent of Usea, the nation of Erusea declares war on just about everyone, swiftly capturing the majority of the continent by leveraging a massive fleet of drones, among other assets, including the Arsenal Bird drone carrier and the Space Elevator. The 20-mission campaign sees the player character, a pilot from the country Osea callsign Trigger, take part in a wide range of scenarios during the war to retake Usea. Many of these scenarios will be familiar to series veterans: massive, multi-front battles against air, sea and land targets, massive furball dogfights with dozens of aircraft duking it out in the clouds, white-knuckle covert flights through canyons to avoid radar and searchlights, one-on-one duels with enemy ace pilots who can match and even surpass your every move, it’s all there. Plus, of course, the requisite tunnel flight. All of it is expertly crafted and finely tuned to create an ebb and flow of feeling drunk with power followed by moments of sheer terror and panic as the tides of battle are constantly turning. A few missions, music tracks and dialogue references in particular evoke extremely strong memories and nostalgia, and it is clear that Project Aces wants to signal that they’re back to what they do best. It’s also clear that they have a glut of ideas in the 12 year gap, and it is the rush to implement so many of them that I believe hurts the game the most, especially in the story and the gameplay. Though it was never the strongest part of the series, each game has always told a fairly contained story focusing on a core theme with a small amount of characters, usually on all sides of the conflict and told through an even split of cutscenes and in-mission events and dialogue. Here, it’s clear the team has a lot of ideas for their return to Strangereal, from the usual anti-war philosophizing to drones vs. human pilots, to over-reliance on technology and the very concept of borders and nations. One of these themes is fully realized and examined through gameplay and story (more on this shortly), while the rest either fall by the wayside or disappear entirely. None of the characters really stood out to me either, especially the wingmen, and the fact that there are several narrators hurts the already shoddy pacing. New additions to gameplay focus mainly around weather. The much-touted feature has been clouds, which serve as concealment for both you and your enemies as well as aiding in evading missiles. The trade-off is not only in visibility, but also in the danger of your aircraft icing up, affecting performance and coating your canopy in a sheet of ice. This is a feature that acts as a throughline for the whole game, and you can always count on a cloud to have your back if they’re around. Unless it’s a storm cloud, of course. Clouds are fine, fun even sometimes, and are an overall positive addition to the dynamic of the gameplay. The storm clouds on the other hand are gimmicky and frustrating, first showing up in a boss fight to add an unnecessary layer of frustration by striking you with lightning seemingly at random, frying your instruments temporarily and steering your plane towards the nearby ground or rock formation. The game never goes into the specific mechanics behind these clouds, your support aircraft just tells you to avoid them as the boss meanwhile hides in them to seemingly no ill-effect. This lack of NPC-affecting hazards is a larger problem that has admittedly existed in the series as a whole to an extent, but it’s become much more noticeable and disadvantageous to the player with this installment. Air currents also pop up at just the right inopportune moments – seldom do they appear randomly during missions where the stakes are low enough that you can get some practice. It’s always in an already-stressful situation as your plane suddenly drifts right, left or up on its own rather violently. The game offers no help in figuring out how to counter this, and instead expects trial and error it seems. A couple of weather-based set pieces utilizing air currents and storms are actually enjoyable in their intensity, adding to the stakes impressed upon you by the context of the mission, but overall it feels like many of these weather features were thrown in without proper tuning and consideration; it would be great to see them improved and worked in more smoothly in the future. The addition of mid-mission checkpoints is perhaps the only thing that makes the trial-and-error gameplay bearable – you can recover from a failure and be back in action with refilled ammo and health inside of 10 seconds. Gameplay-wise, there are a few “gimmicks” that are actually quite enjoyable, namely the times where you’re forced to hold fire or a wrench is otherwise thrown into the usual fire-at-will proceedings. One particular mission comes after a moment in the story where the theme of overreliance on technology really gets hammered home, resulting in every unit being labeled unknown on your HUD, including your allies, amid a multi-sided conflict in a dense cityscape while you are tasked with escorting a VIP. You can fire at anything, but if you do so before identifying your target, you might end up roasting an ally. This feature carries on for a few more missions, and it was a really cool way to shake things up – if there’s one thing Ace Combat can do, it’s make a fun escort mission. It would be nice if the game had done more with UI tricks and thematic integration like this and less with tossing my plane around like a frisbee.<doc-sep>
On the verge of the release of Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, it was today announced that the most recent numbered entry in the saga, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, has now come to the Xbox One via backward compatibility. Ace Combat 6, which is the most recent numbered entry in the series, first launched all the way back in 2007, early on in the Xbox 360’s life cycle. Since that time, we’ve received a handful of other games in the franchise but none of them were part of the larger mainline series until that of Ace Combat 7, which will release this Friday, January 18. In addition, those for pre-order Ace Combat 7 for the Xbox One will also receive a free copy of Ace Combat 6 as well. This is a promotion that we were already aware of previously, but it’s still a cool inclusion regardless. If you’re going to be picking up AC7 digitally this weekend, you may as well just pre-order the game right now to get AC6 for free while you’re at it. And hey, if you somehow still have your old Xbox 360 disc for Fires of Liberation sitting around as well, you can pop that into your Xbox One right now as well. ACE COMBAT 6: Fires of Liberation is coming to Xbox One Backward Compatibility today (and included as a bonus for a limited time when you pre-order or purchase ACE COMBAT 7: Skies Unknown) https://t.co/qPMRNs2ZLo pic.twitter.com/BOvaoQzxCj — Larry Hryb (@majornelson) January 16, 2019