A demo for the Campaign Mode of Ace Combat 6 was released this morning corresponding with E3. I was playing it at lunch today and I was really impressed with the graphics. Everything looks more realistic than I expected. The HUD has a lot of info on it, but I quickly found the few pieces of information that were critical and was able to ignore the rest. One of my favorite things, once I found it, was the option to keep holding down the button for launching missiles and the camera fallows the missile. It is a really cool to see the opposing aircraft explode up close. Just remember that you’re plane is still flying so don’t hold the launch button so long you crash. Although, the crash animation was pretty cool. When you die you get a cool replay camera option that lets you see your spectacular death over again. This same replay is offered at the end of the mission which is helpful for seeing how close you really came to getting shot down. Maybe you’ll be better at flying than I am so you will not need it, but for me it was helpful to see how enemy planes were getting shots on me.

I’m not really use to this type of flying game. The last time I played all the way through a flying game was Crimson Skies. I tried Blazing Angels but I just could not get into it. That said, the controls seemed very smooth, but I had trouble getting use to using the shoulder buttons for the yaw. Maybe it will be a little easier to control using the optional Flight Stick they are going to offer bundled with Ace Combat 6. I don’t see myself buying it since the bundle will cost $150, but if you’re into flying games then the flight stick might be the way to go. Once I got use to the actual flying portions of the control the demo was pretty easy. I used my special homing missiles for pretty much all of my kills. I never was able to get any kills with the machine gun or the regular missiles. Fortunately, there were plenty of the homing missiles. The one thing I do have an issue with on the controls is that you have to use the back button to switch between regular and homing missiles. I don’t like games using the back button for anything other than bringing up an in-game menu because it is not in a place that is easy to reach. I would rather have the missile switching done by hitting right/left on the D-Pad since that is not currently used. However, once I switched to the homing missiles I never switched back so I guess I was not really using it that often.

If you’re into flying games be sure to check out this demo and start saving for the $150 flight stick bundle. If flight games are not really your thing I’s still recommend checking out this demo because it looks beautiful. Just be ready for a bit of a learning curve with the controls.