Airforce Delta Strike

Airforce Delta Strike, the latest incarnation of Konami’s arcade flight combat game that debuted way back when on Sega’s Dreamcast, makes its way to the Playstation 2 with mixed results.  The game, which tells the story of the Earth Defense Alliance Fore’s battle against the vastly superior Orbital Citizen’s Community, who is focused on taking control of the planet Earth, focuses on one squadron of the EDAF, the Delta Squadron.  Delta Squadron, a ragtag unit of misfits that is known as a “problem” unit, serves as your home unit.  Assuming the identity and aircraft of a pretty healthy roster of characters within Delta Squadron, you do battle with the OCC across sixty missions running the typical gambit of aerial combat missions ranging from dog fighting, to escort missions, to seek and destroy missions.  Pretty standard stuff.

The story of Delta Squadron and your squad of pilots is told through “anime” style screens that barely qualify as being animated and through the radio chatter while you’re in the air.  Static characters pop on and off the screen usually with text boxes, with their faces changing to match not the dialog, but their current mood.  It does a sufficient job of progressing the story and everyone’s motives for doing this, that, or the other, but it certainly isn’t an immersive experience.  However, the story telling fares far better when it is told through the radio chatter.  While at times confusing and virtually impossible to follow every conversation strand at every moment, you hear everyone’s conversation while in the air, friend and foe alike.  This is especially impressive if your system is hooked up to a surround sound system as you’re constantly hearing something going on all around you, virtually all of the time.  It adds a lot to the atmosphere of the game and certainly helps ramp up tension in the air, because the voice actors do an admirable job of conveying the life or death and victory or defeat emotions of aerial combat.  Just don’t count on gleaning the entire story that is being told from the conversations, as you’ll find yourself normally zoning in on the most frantic or loudest conversation, which doesn’t always seem to be the most important.

As far as the gameplay goes, as I mentioned earlier, you’ll be doing pretty much what you’ve done in every other game of this nature.  There’s a nice amount of missions (60 in all), but each is merely a variation of basically the same three types of missions: dog fighting against the OCC’s ace pilots, destroying enemy bases, and protecting allied property.  The story, of what you’re able to follow, is enough to keep you plowing through the missions, but you will get to the point rather quickly where you feel you’ve already done this a few times too many.  As you complete these missions you earn credits that you can use to upgrade your current stable of aircraft by purchasing new aircraft or by adding new weapons; or you can use your credits to repair aircraft you’ve either wrecked or gotten shot down.  Passing missions of course opens up new missions, but it also branches out periodically where you must choose from new pilots with their own stable of planes.  This is a nice edition because it helps keep things fresh by allowing you to focus on different chapters of the story, as well as allowing you access to different planes without having to purchase them.  In between, you have the option of visiting various areas of your base such as the operations room, the shop, your living quarters, the briefing room, the hangar, the meeting room, and the runway; all of which are pretty self-explanatory.  By checking out these locales you can purchase aircraft and upgrades, as well as visit with the other personnel of your squadron to further the story.  The vast majority of the time, this is purely optional to playing the game.  It really just comes down to how much of the story you want to know.

The control of the aircraft is certainly the game’s strength.  The planes are responsive across the board and perform differently enough for you to be able to notice differences between them all.  You are given three different control schemes that are perfectly suited to the skill level of the game, depending on what you want to be able to with the plane and how much control you really want to have.  Konami has taken a decidedly simple approach to the control schemes, which is nice, since this game is intended to be strictly arcade in nature versus being more flight sim oriented.  The biggest problem with the control is that all of the planes appear to be incredibly slow, offering a minimal sense of speed, something desperately needed in arcade shooters of this type.  While there is a noticeable difference between slower and faster craft, they all seem to be stuck in slow-mo world.

Where the game ultimately fails to impress is in the graphics department.  This game honestly looks like it would have been at home on the PS1 and despite not having played the DC iteration of this game in years, I’m pretty confident it looked better than this game does.  The graphics are in a word “muddy”, especially when flying over terra firma.  Everything seems to blend together in reds and browns; with the only indication of what you’re supposed to be shooting at, is the appearance of the targeting reticule.  Konami has produced some absolutely beautiful looking PS2 games, so this came as a bit of a surprise.  Even the aircraft models fall on the bland side, featuring some serious aliasing issues, as there’s not a smooth edge to be found.  Thankfully the sound of the game manages to outdo the graphical shortcomings.  The radio chatter is impressive and fun to listen to and the planes, as well as the destruction they mete out all sound suitably accurate.  You’ll hear your plane accelerate, even if you don’t see it, and the explosions are suitably loud, and well, explosive.

In the end, while the game does have some technical shortcomings, I found myself still drawn to playing it.  The story is fun, if not a little convoluted, and the controls are silky smooth and simple, allowing you to concentrate on accomplishing missions rather than trying to figure out an overly complicated control scheme.  The game is enjoyable to play and it’s easy to see where possibly a little more time in development might have produced a game that gives Namco's outstanding Ace Combat series a run for its money.  As it stands, it falls short of those high standards, but it is still worth playing through for all of you armchair flying aces with itchy trigger fingers.

Gameplay: 7
Missions get repetitive a short way into the game, but the aircraft control like a dream.  The story goes a long way towards keeping things interesting and moving forward, giving purpose to the mission at hand.

Graphics: 5.5 
Muddy and jagged.  There’s really no other way to describe it.  Konami and the PS2 are capable of better.

Sound: 9.0
Radio chatter is exciting and unique in the way that you hear everything going on, in every cockpit in the air.  The aircraft scream, the “swoosh” of an aircraft banking hard in front of you, as well as the explosions all meld together to create a very realistic sounding game.  The voice actors really did a bang up job with their scripts.

Difficulty: Medium
There is a nice balance of difficulty that ramps up gradually as your skills in piloting the aircraft increases.  Only a couple of missions manage to feel impossible, but with a little bit of determination and patience, you’ll eventually find your way through.

Concept: 7
The deep story is a nice touch for a game of this type, but beyond that, everything else is the standard fare.

Overall: 6.5
Airforce Delta Strike is a game that has a fair list of problems and complaints, but it remains fun even in the face of its shortcomings.