I certainly did, until I played Ace Combat 7, whose take on the cannon is incredibly sad compared to Project Wingman’s. You’d think this is a fairly basic ask for an arcade dogfighting game. The cannon was an excellent weapon and a viable alternative to the 200 “standard missiles” they also jammed onto every plane I’m sure there was a small amount of aim assist involved (or some generous hitboxes, anyway) but my using the cannon to the point of running out of shells on almost every single mission was key is mostly down to being able to get my plane pointed exactly where I wanted so that I could hit things with it. Case in point: the cannon, which is present on every single aircraft and which is a big reason I liked Project Wingman so much the initial awkwardness of it all has been somewhat overwritten in my memory by the later experience of hitting one fighter with a pair of missiles in a head-on pass and then peeling away to shred their wingman with the cannon while my copilot shouts “GUN GUN GUN” over the radio. Once you get used to it it’s possible to do basic aerial maneuvers and dogfight with missiles quite effectively, but using anything that doesn’t have lock-on capability is almost out of the question. Many of my problems with Ace Combat 7 can be traced back to this inflexibility around the controls. I looked at the diagram showing how the standard control scheme worked for a full two minutes and just couldn’t visualise the mechanics for it in my head it seems to be patterned after Afterburner but I couldn’t see how that would work in a fully 3D environment.) ( Ace Combat 7 does offer a separate control scheme called “Standard” - the one described above is “Expert”, which is slightly weird when it’s just how aircraft work. All it has are a couple of basic button switches (so you can have yaw on the triggers if you want), and otherwise you’re stuck with the control scheme the game throws at you. The PC port of Ace Combat 7, on the other hand, does not let you rebind anything. Project Wingman at least offered a solution to this problem by allowing me to rebind the controls, putting roll on the right stick and yaw on the left and turning my aircraft into a terrifyingly accurate gun platform. The left stick does pitch and roll, and this is a huge problem for me because a controller analogue stick is less precise than a joystick it’s very difficult to roll without pitching and to pitch without rolling, making precision gunnery very difficult. The default controller layout is slightly saner than Project Wingman’s because throttle/brake are on the triggers and yaw is on the shoulder buttons, but Ace Combat 7 does the same baffling thing of dedicating the right stick to camera padlocks - looking above, below and behind you, which is occasionally useful in a dogfight but which ends up being mostly unused when the radar provides the bulk of this information anyway. Just as with Project Wingman, my first few minutes with Ace Combat 7 were spent wrestling with the controls. Much to my surprise, though, considering it’s the game with the larger budget and the more established history, it’s not Ace Combat 7 that comes off as the better of the two. They take a little while to show through, partly because a lot of them are pretty subtle choices around the weapon balancing and mission design - I had to go back and read through my Project Wingman review to put my finger on exactly why some of the stuff Ace Combat was doing felt off to me. The further I got into Ace Combat 7, though, the more I realised that there were differences between the two games. That another game has spent a lot of time and effort painstakingly replicating it in almost every detail is not particularly Ace Combat’s problem, and since I quite enjoyed my time with Project Wingman it didn’t really need to be a problem at all. Ace Combat looks a little better, and the UI is a little more polished, and there’s a few nice-to-have features like a post-mission replay for taking pretty screenshots, and otherwise I would have struggled to point to something that was materially different between the two. I didn’t realise just how closely Project Wingman copied Ace Combat in almost everything it did, to the point that my initial assessment was that the two games were practically identical. I didn’t have the context to properly understand that statement, though, thanks to never having played an Ace Combat game until two weeks ago. When I played Project Wingman at the start of last year I knew, roughly, what it was: an indie take on the Ace Combat series, billed as being by Ace Combat fans for Ace Combat fans. Man who has only played Project Wingman, playing Ace Combat 7 for the first time: “ Hmm, getting a lot of Project Wingman vibes from this.”
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