4.5/5 ★ – Nestunt's review of ACE COMBAT™ 7: SKIES UNKNOWN.

I have a bias against games that only let you play with the vehicle and not the person inside it. So, it is with surprise that I find the new Ace Combat this high on the list. Looking back on my experience with it, the first thing that comes to mind is the humanism of the game. Despite the potential sterility of just controlling an airplane, the missions are so smartly sprinkled with intercom dialogue between pilots and between pilots and the people on land that you become aware of the lives that are at stake. The cutscenes and briefings before the action also have life-like writing, with a tone that paints a picture of geopolitical drama and individual conundrums, thus showing you how the views and decisions of the characters you get to know scale in comparison to the world. After all, wars and history are borne by people. Multiplying this effect is the malleable scenario design in each mission. Not only you get to do different tasks, demonstrating the importance of the air force in times of war, but there are also a lot of missions in which things don’t go according to plan, leading to human responses from everybody involved that end up having consequences to the flow of the narrative and the fate of the countries in conflict.