Sometimes, things don't turn out quite as you'd planned. When the Americans decided to spray the Vietnamese jungle with their shiny new chemical, Agent Orange, they probably hoped it'd just destroy the shrubbery, and not leave generations terribly mutated and deformed. And in a similar, but much less serious way, bitComposer games probably weren't expecting Air Conflicts Vietnam: Ultimate Edition to turn out like this.
It's a game that ticks plenty of boxes on paper. A flight sim (tick), set in the Vietnam war - a period of history less explored by games, yet alone flight sims (tick), promising a variety of mission types (tick), helicopters (tick) and a number of extra features for its PS4 Ultimate Edition - including making the light bar flash and flicker when you fire your minigun, which at least adds to the excitement at night (double tick). And let's be honest, with screens like this, it kind of looks the part too, doesn't it?
Sun, dirty cockpits and more gauges than a number nine bus.
But Air Conflicts: Vietnam just wasn't meant to be. The third game in a series that seems to have been on a steady downwards trajectory ever since its first (and best) Air Conflicts game, Vietnam is a mess, with broken controls, a really, really weird flight model that somehow manages to make it feel like you're not actually flying, and missions that are over as soon as you've started them. And that makes us sad, because it's something that should have been so much better.
Take the helicopters, for example. Here are things that were simultaneously a crucial part of the Vietnam war, and something that flight sims rarely ever touch on - the one recent example being the equally terrible Ace Combat: Assault Horizon. And yet they're something that, in the context of the game, are easy to fly, but impossible to actually use. Flying a helicopter around, you should be able to rain down fiery death on those below, but instead you're little more than a sitting duck, as actually aiming the helicopter's cannons is nigh on impossible, and the rockets, which are mostly unguided, are equally tricky to hit anything with. Both aim directly in front of your helicopter, so you'll need to point your nose where you want to shoot - but in the game, there's no way to hover and point your nose down at the ground. If you tilt forward even slightly, you'll be zooming off at top speed - and good luck hitting anything then. It probably doesn't help that enemies are also impossibly hard to shoot, absorbing hundreds of rounds from your chain gun without even breaking a sweat, before spontaneously exploding once you change angle ever so slightly.
The back of this Chinook kind of sums up our feelings at the moment.
Missions that let you fly in normal planes sadly aren't much better. Bombing missions mostly involve simply flying towards a target that's all of a few hundred feet away, switching to the bomb sight view, and dropping some bombs. If you're particularly lucky, you may then have to manually switch to one of your fighters to take out any enemy MIGs that try and attack, but even then, it isn't much better. Not only does the game never really tell you which plane you should be switching to (so you can attempt to do certain chunks of each mission as a totally inappropriate type of aircraft, if you don't realise you're supposed to have switched), but the air combat itself is pretty dreadful. Try and do any manoeuvre, like a loop, and the camera has a coronary. Enemy planes fly past at seemingly a few thousand miles an hour, zipping by in the blink of an eye, and can turn on a pin despite going at nigh on 600 miles an hour. If you do manage to get one on the screen for long enough to actually start targeting it, you're never entirely sure if you've actually managed to lock on, or whether the text saying "missile lock" on screen means they've got a lock on you instead...
Either way, most planes can be downed with a single missile, and if you're unlucky enough to have an enemy that knows how to drop a missile confusing flare, you may have to use two. Once you've killed the three enemies that bother showing up, that's it. Mission accomplished.
It's not that there isn't some variety, either - it's just that there just isn't enough of it, and everything feels so awkward you don't really appreciate the variety when it's there. Some missions see you taking over the gunner position of a helicopter, shooting the slow moving Vietnamese troops, who all play the exact same sound effect when they die, while other missions see you spraying Agent Orange over a forest (or another of the rainbow herbicides), recreating the US's ill fated Vietnam strategy. For the most part though, the missions aren't so much short and sweet as short, repetitive and boring.
Let's just try not to think of what could have been...
The edition we've reviewed, on the PS4, is actually classed as the Ultimate Edition of the game, coming with a number of new bells and whistles to take advantage of the extra processing power offered by the shiny new hardware. One of the biggest new features is a new campaign, told from the perspective of a soldier in the Vietnam Air Force, which sees you flying MIGs rather than Phantoms, and playing for the other side, as it were. The only problem is, it's mostly all more of the same, with little in the way of variety, and a difficultly level that's been ramped through the roof. With checkpoints that seem to save a few seconds before you get destroyed by four missiles, leaving you to restart from the checkpoint and suffer exactly the same fate, repeatedly, it's not all that much fun.
And that's the biggest problem with Air Conflicts: Vietnam. What should have been an interesting trip into a period of air combat that's often ignored has instead ended up as a poor game, crippled by a broken flight model that means the one thing you actually do in the game - fly planes - isn't actually that much fun. You'll never play a flight sim that has controls as juddery, unpredictable, and otherwise awkward as this. It probably doesn't help that despite being an upgraded "ultimate" version, the game still suffers from some pretty extreme slowdown jerkiness, something that's pretty inexcusable in a game that isn't the most graphically taxing.
Taking all the fun out of flying, Air Conflicts: Vietnam, sadly, is a game that's probably best forgotten. If there is another Air Conflicts, we can only hope it learns the lessons of its steady downwards slide, rather than carrying on further down the broken path. For a better PS4 flight experience, check out the free War Thunder instead.
Format Reviewed: Playstation 4
