Intro
When an evil military organization threatens the well-being of the world,
Team SW will be there. When the President of some foreign country needs a liver
transplant, Team SW will be there. When giant spider tanks and super helicopters
attack ruined cities, Team SW will be there. When you need a game to play that
will give you the same play mechanics as Ace Combat but without the storyline,
Team SW will be there; welcome to the world of Lethal Skies.
Gameplay: 7.5/10
The main
selling factor of Lethal Skies is definitely the campaign mode, wherein
you fly your way through a series of missions that come complete with briefings,
score cards, and so on, occasionally unlocking other features such as training
levels and extra planes. Although your objectives can feature a wide range of
goals, more often than not the idea is to simply shoot down all enemies and call
it a day. You won't be alone in these ventures however, as you can choose your
wingmen from a select group of elite pilots; the more flight time you give them,
the better their ranking will be, turning them into better pilots.
There
are of course other modes, such as free flight and dogfighting modes; after all,
sometimes it's just nice to take the old family F-14 out for a spin around the
continent. Sadly, this novelty wears off rather fast, leaving you wishing for
the option to allow a second person to play. However, the replayability is helped
somewhat by the fact that you can go back and play any of the levels over again
in an attempt to try for a higher score in order to unlock something new. Similarly,
you can adjust the difficulty at any time between the levels, in case things get
a bit too heated for you.
If there was one thing that I would have to
mention about Lethal Skies, it would be that it simply isn't very original
or unique at all. There is almost nothing that Lethal Skies offers that
Ace Combat currently doesn't or hasn't done before. In fact, some of
the level design and missions feel and look like direct lifts from the Ace
Combat series. In all, it will be rather hard for Lethal Skies to
make a decent impression on the gaming community when it more or less feels like
it simply copies elements from titles that have already secured their position
on the charts.
Graphics: 7/10
The visuals are rather nice, if you don't mind dealing with jaggies. The
planes themselves are all considerably nice-looking, with significant detail and
whatnot, though perhaps the coolest visual feature would be the environments.
For example, you can actually fly up above the clouds, causing the terrain and
planes beneath you to become hazy due to the atmospheric distortion. Also, the
ground terrain is pretty spiffy, though at times it can be rather hard to gauge
at a glance how close you are to the ground.
Sound: 8/10
While
the music of Lethal Skies isn’t half bad, the same cannot be said
for the voices of your fellow pilots. It isn't so much that the voice actors themselves
were mediocre as it was that, between their fancy European accents and the simulated
radio static, I simply could not understand what they were saying half the time.
Even when I could decode their chatter, it was more often than not untimely and
overly annoying as certain sayings became repeat offenders. Control:
8/10
Generally, things felt very responsive while I was cruising the skies:
the target controls all work rather well, yet the flight controls themselves could
have benefited from some tightening, as it is somewhat hard to line up with some
of the ground targets when you're using the machine gun. Also, the menu systems
are slightly confusing when you try to do the custom setup for a missile payload,
although this is nothing worth really complaining about. Overall:
7.5/10
I really hate to recommend other titles in the closing statement of
a review, but sometimes there really isn't any way to avoid it. If you’re
interested in this particular genre, you might want to perhaps pick up the latest
Ace Combat incarnation and give it a shot before considering Lethal
Skies; however, if you've already worked through the best of what the market
has to offer, then by all means give Lethal Skies a chance for some more
of the same. Either way, this is a title that will likely find itself better suited
to a rental rather than a concrete purchase. [
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