Ace Combat 6

Jet fighters are basically designed to be awesome incarnate: fast, loud, destructive, and invincible to any other form of war machine.

In fact, the only problem with making games about jet planes is this: how does the game designer portray the godly power of these planes while still presenting a meaningful challenge to the player?

Ace Combat 6 dances that line admirably with its level design. While the player's jets are exaggerations of their real-life counterparts, the scenarios the game provides for them require the use of every bit of their physics-defying power.

Unlike Ace Combat 5, AC6 utilizes its fictional Emmerian Air Force in a somewhat believeable fashion-- as support for its ground forces. A large-scale attack in this game involves several concurrent operations, with groups of allies approaching their own objectives. The player is not tasked with winning the war by himself, but rather to assist the effort as a whole.

Unfortunately for the Emmerian military, these multi-operation missions are designed such that providing enough support for every operation to be successful is deliberately made to be impossible.

Though the player has the godly ability to easily destroy many targets from kilometers away, there will always be more allies praying for assistance than he can attend to. With great power comes even greater responsibility, indeed!

This level design philosophy forces the player to make decisions on who to support and who to leave on the wayside, i.e. to concede to his inability to win the war by himself. Creating this emotion inside the player is a triumph in level design-- while other flight action games communicate the worth of a multimillion dollar war machine through sheer destructive force, AC6 sends the same message by making the player understand that there are never enough of these machines to go around.