izigame.me

Imagine a game built entirely around Assault Horizon's dogfight mode. Well, here it is. Everything you shoot at triggers a mode where you slip in behind your enemy and shoot at them while your plane essentially steers itself and does all the hard work of tailing your opponent for you. It wasn't fun in Assault Horizon, and it certainly isn't made more fun by having to use it to take out every single target. In addition, if you lead a target well enough, it triggers this mode and you slide in behind them, regardless of where you were shooting at them from.
The game also uses a system where you switch between the two pilots. Which sounds cool, but really isn't. Whichever pilot you aren't playing sticks right with you, so they'll be almost exactly where you were anyway when you switch. They also nag you to "give them a target". At first, I was looking for wingman orders like in Ace Combat 5 and Zero, but turns out they were just yelling at me to switch and play them for no real reason. So no real advantage to having two, as far as I can tell. The only reason to switch seems to be that Amelia is the one with bombs. And the bombing system is fantastically unintuitive, but I'll talk about that more later.
I can't speak for the story, as I'm not all that far, so I'll update this once I've finished. So far though, it comes off as rushed. Kind of like a game in Early Access. Which is a shame, because I at least appreciate what they're trying to do.
And while I can't comment much on story yet, the characters have been pretty offputting. Jack has been very "there" and not much else. He's unremarkable, which may be why his having to chime in everytime he kills something got on my nerves pretty fast. Generic one-liners one after the other. But that's not anything in comparison to Amelia. Right out of the gate, it was obvious she was going to be the generic "strong female" character that pops up in fiction when the writer has no idea how to actually create a strong female character. She's just the trope; there's no actual character attached to it. So neither of them are interesting, but that isn't the real problem. The real problem is while I was shooting ground targets with Amelia, the one-liner she dropped was "Oops, I did it again". And yes, she said it just like the Britney Spears song. And yes, I did caugh up blood.
Lastly, the bombing controls. When you switch to bombs, it siwtches to look beneath your plane at two red circles. These circles move about if you are moving, and line up when you steady to make your bombing crossair. The issue here is that you can't see where you are going or if you are lined up with the target. And when you adjust, the circles scatter. Which wouldn't be a huge deal, but here's the thing: It doesn't matter if you're over the target area, and eyeball the shot on top of the target. It doesn't matter if you are so low to the ground you can't miss. If the circles aren't lined up when you drop the bomb, you miss the target. A two way road, actually, since you can be super high up and hit the target fine as long as they line up. It's a bad mechanic that is more about using the targeting system they have in place than actually hitting your target.
So that's my opinion. The gameplay is tedious, and it just isn't fun. The story is uninteresting, the characters are uninteresting, and there's nothing that really stands out. The game looks good while playing, but that's offset by the cutscenes and the odd way everyone delivers their lines.
I'll update after I finish, but I really don't see a reason to pick it up. And I don't expect that will change.