Recently I went to visit a friend who had become crazy for the new Ace Combat Infinity F2P game on PS3. I was familiar with the better entries in the series otherwise didn’t know anything about it. My buddy fired up the game and it’s easily one of the greatest shooting galleries I have seen but to call it a flight simulator might be a bit of a stretch of the imagination. I downloaded the game on his recommendation and assurance that he hasn’t spent a dime other than purchasing the $20 campaign.
The game is good, there are large numbers of targets and there is a variety of difficulty in air to air engagements as two teams of players go head to head to rack up the highest score, but it really feels like a free-for-all as I wound up caring less about my team winning and more about seeing my own name in the highlight MVP shot that occurs at the end of each sortie, especially when I was stuck with crappy F-4 with no upgrades. This is a genuinely fun game.
This is a a fantastic looking game! If you are brave enough you can fly right through the center of this enormous heavy command cruiser, but don’t expect to find any targets in there, a sad sad oversight.
Now for the flaws that take all of those positives and throws them out the window.
The game feels like a mugging
The game runs on units of fuel and gives you up to 3 free fuel which is the most “supplied”(free) fuel you can hold at any given time. This means 3 free sorties before you have to wait for a resupply, which occurs every 4 hours. Initially upon release the sorties required one fuel to play but now you can spend up to 3 fuel at the same time for “bonus rewards” and it feels like they adjusted the xp gain to fit this new model. This is a fine example of “pay to win” since when you spend more money you get faster access to better aircraft and are rewarded more experience and game money.
The loading screens will gleefully remind you that spending the extra fuel when Aigaion (a boss encounter, pictured above) appears will reap large amounts of money from the encounter. Here is where the problem really starts with the F2P model. Aigaion is a special raid encounter which you cannot select from the menu, it has a chance of appearing randomly after a regular mission, meaning it generally only appears after you have spent some or all of your free fuel (between 1 and 3 sorties). What they are really saying is “spend money if you want to get anywhere in this game” and at the cost of a dollar per unit of fuel ($1 per play) this is pretty outrageous. The death of the arcade game came at the $1 per play price tag and it seems like it will be the death of an otherwise fantastic console game as well. You can buy the unlimited play package but playing in this mode severely restricts the rewards gained all the way to the “why bother” level or reward.
The frustrations of the lobby
Sometimes just getting to the action takes far too long. I spent a long time in waiting rooms. There are timed objectives and I would sometimes have to quit rooms I just joined because I was working on an objective for a particular map and there is NO way of knowing what map is being played in the room you are joining. Hosting also seems problematic, despite having a green connection icon I have wound up dropping all of the players when the game tries to load and since hosting a room is the only way to guarantee I would to work on my timed objectives. There was also the matter of the special raid encounters that only have a chance of happening after a regular mission, you might never get to play those encounters if your connection drops after every match! You might see how this game can be little more than a pile of frustration.
Why the game is doomed
Denial of service is just a bad business tactic. While players are waiting for their free fuel deliveries they are bound to find other games to play. They are going to become invested in those games and wander away from ACE Combat, a game which is highly dependent on matchmaking. A small user-base can be devastating for this kind of game as players wait longer and longer for their room to fill so that they can begin their sorties. I absolutely love the game but the price of “free” is way too high once I had used up the generous stockpile of fuel I earned through the tutorial objectives it was going to start costing a lot of money if I wanted to play the awesome boss encounter stages. I would rather just walk away now than invest any more time in a game whose developers see me as a perpetually open wallet, and in case I wasn’t clear earlier, I really really like this game and it hurts that it is going to fail for no other reason that that of avarice.
