Over G’s main single player mode has a terribly amateurish storyline that follows your typical group of nations, inspired by the UN Security Council, complaining to you about some new threat. The dialogue and execution of the story scenes is especially painful, which is a pity since the developer has had the foresight to include a branching story, a concept that has been lost in the last decade of gaming. Like usual, it’s up to Gargoyle 1 and the other flyboys at Energy Airforce to fulfil the demands of the beaurocrats and blast everything out of the ground and sky. We admit that our expectations for plot in these aerial action games have been somewhat increased by the more recent Ace Combat titles, but it’s disappointing to see that Taito have little regard for what a good story can do for a game.
I want to see birds get sucked into the engines. Rare ones.
Over G’s main campaign has a bunch of main missions spread over 7 areas, with a number of little side missions and variations based on which story branch you take. The problem here is that there is little variety between missions – it’s usually just “destroy these planes” and “blow up these bases”. The game claims to have over 40 single player missions, but it would seem as though they are counting slight variations as being completely different battles. You get to select a wingman before each sortie, each of whom has his or her own style of flight and preference for planes. Missions typically only last 4-5 minutes, which is fine for the early sorties, but we were expecting that there might be a little more meat to the later battles. Still, playing through the single player game at even the most basic level will net you 425 achievement points. There are a number of smaller single player modes on offer, like a one on one dogfight, a quick endurance battle, and a custom battle mode. There are two options for multiplayer battles – one for all out deathmatch, and one for team based play. Over G supports up to 8 players, but chances are you’ll be hard pressed finding that many people to play with.
For a game with a name like Over G, you would think that the developer would place emphasis on factors such as the sense of speed, level of exhilaration and so on. Unfortunately, despite having over 30 different planes (from the F22 Raptor to the experimental X-35C Joint Strike Fighter) of varying speed, power and such, Over G fails to feel like it’s moving at any sort of rapid pace, nor do the planes actually feel all that different. The game can never really decide whether it wants to be a simulation or an arcade game; it has realistic parts like blacking out when making moves that strain the pilot, and more realistic turning, but the actual fighting really just involves getting a plane in front of you and pressing A when a big “SHOOT” prompt appears on screen. While games like Ace Combat were arcade focused and therefore weren’t too different in this regard, but there seemed to be a higher level of skill required to get a lock on your enemy’s planes, which combined with the greater sense of speed provided players with a much more satisfying experience.
Which of these buttons orders me a Coke?
Perhaps the most shocking part of Over G Fighters is the fact that the game fails to impress players visually. Given the fact that Taito has beaten Namco to the punch, you’d think that they’d really try to pump up the graphics to make the most of the power advantage, but Over G doesn’t even look as good as the four year old Ace Combat 4, let alone Ace Combat 5 and the upcoming Ace Combat Zero. Of course, Over G does have the advantage of sharpness, thanks to the 720p display resolution, but if you’re a gamer without a HDTV, you’ll fail to see why this game needed the power of the Xbox 360. Each of the 30 planes on offer benefits from higher polygon counts, and there’s a lot of detail within each of the planes, but the ground textures are just plain bad. When the PlayStation 2, with its paltry 4mb of texture memory, can churn out better looking textures, you know there’s something wrong. Over G’s sound is unspectacular; each mission is preceded by a voice over briefing which is done reasonably well, provided you can forgive the poor dialogue, each mission is filled with your typical 1980s action movie guitar strangling, and the in-mission audio is serviceable. We think that they could have done more, but there’s nothing painfully bad.
In the end, Over G Fighters is just a really unspectacular package. The single player campaign is short and lacks variety, there’s nobody to play multiplayer games with, the action itself is confused yet utterly simplistic, and the game fails to graphically compete with titles released four to five years ago on significantly weaker hardware. At best, Over G Fighters is a rental for those curious as to how Taito managed to blow such an easy opportunity to get one up on their rival.
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