There is a stretch of time during which every adolescent male is obsessed with posters. I have vivid memories of being dropped off at the mall with my friends, where we would scour the two or three stores with the best selections. We argued endlessly about which comic book characters, rock stars and supermodels were worth putting on our bedroom walls, but we all agreed on two things. First, the Lamborghini Countach was f**cking awesome, and anyone who didn't have a poster of it was a total loser. Second, we all wanted to be military pilots. And we came to the conclusion that the easiest way to get started was to buy totally sweet posters of F-15s, F-16s and F/A-18s and stare at them while pretending to do our homework.
Videogames like Ace Combat: Joint Assault exist because that sort of jet craziness never really goes away. If you think airplanes are just big hunks of boring metal, you'll probably never change your mind. But if you think they're cool as hell, you always will. The problem is, it's tough to bring the excitement, complexity and drama of piloting military aircraft to the masses. Games that attempt to simulate the experience risk jettisoning the fun. Those that focus squarely on fun often lose the sense of realism that makes these planes interesting in the first place.
The Ace Combat series has always been more about exciting, accessible and sometimes over-the-top aerial action than strict realism, although the latest installment, Ace Combat: Joint Assault, tries to paint a coat of authenticity over its whimsy by using actual cities such as Tokyo, San Francisco and London as settings. It's a good idea in theory, but it doesn't add much to the typical Ace Combat experience. They serve mainly as backdrops and have no real ties to the individual missions. At one point I was assured London was burning, which, although tragic, sounded like a cool thing to see. Unfortunately, it just looked like a pile of brownish blocks that were not on fire.
"Real world" settings are one of the big selling points for Joint Assault, the follow-up to 2006's Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception. The others are an "enhanced combat" view that zooms in on your plane when you accelerate and a host of co-operative and competitive online multiplayer modes. For me, the latter is the only real reason to pick up Ace Combat: Joint Assault. The campaign missions are repetitive and rather dull, the voice acting is hilariously bad, and the storyline is nonsensical. If you can believe it, the main story revolves around insurance. That's right, insurance. If there's a more boring subject for a game about multi-million-dollar attack aircraft, please let me know in advance so I can bring a pillow.
The multiplayer is where Joint Assault comes to life. Gather a group of friends over via ad-hoc or infrastructure mode and choose to co-operate in the campaign missions (up to four players) or face off in the competitive mode (up to eight players). Joint Assault's campaign missions have multiple branches that can be tackled simultaneously with other players. What's more, in many missions, the outcome of one player's objective will have an effect on another's. Cool, right?
The multiplayer options in Joint Assault are plentiful. You can limit invitees by rank, share career data back and forth, set mission parameters and create teams in Vs. modes. If you get a solid group of friends together with multiple copies of Joint Assault, you're in for some serious stick time.
But if you're going to be playing solo, there's just not that much to get excited about in Ace Combat: Joint Assault. Sure, you can unlock dozens of planes, emblems, weapons and paint jobs as you make your way through the missions. But most of the missions are uninspired and cheap. "Oh, no! The giant flying fortress that's firing Electro Laser Cannons also has 12 anti-aircraft guns on it! Let's take them all out! Awesome, we took them all out! Wait, why did they all come back again? Let's destroy them again and hope they don't come back! S**t, they came back again!" You get the idea.
Aside from a few cool moments like unlocking the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber, and, oddly, flying a persnickety executive around in an unarmed jumbo jet, there was nothing about this pocket pilot game that got me all that excited about flying. Given the choice between buying Ace Combat: Joint Assault (to play alone) and an equally priced bundle of airplane posters, I'd probably choose the latter.
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