Ace Combat 7 is the latest entry in the Ace Combat franchise, hinting at a franchise revival.
After all, it has been dormant for quite some time now.
So the game puts you in the shoes of an ace pilot, it does not aim to be at all realistic: The only thing realistic here are the plane models really, and not much else. You can carry tons of ordnance, your gun has unlimited ammunition, you can pull impossibly tight maneuvers disregarding Gs completely and you can also shrug off a few hits.

Alright, let's afterburn straight to the

PROS

+The game feels extremely polished and lubricated. The flying is great and every plane feels good to fly, the controls are extremely responsive and well thought out. I suggest playing with a controller, though.
+The graphics and sound design are very well made, and especially the clouds need to be separately mentioned for how absolutely magnificent they look. This game truly shows that sometimes Unreal Engine 4 can look good. This doesn't make it a good engine, though.
+The game is moderately difficult. I almost breezed through it, but some missions can be rather difficult. Consider that i have played many flight games before though.
+The story is definitely high quality. It is a bit short, but well made nonetheless.
+Surprisingly few bugs!

CONS

-The story is also worse than past entries though. Mainly because the characters were a bit forgettable.
-The multiplayer unfortunately is a total trainwreck. It has absolutely no anti-cheat and only two modes. Also some planes are completely broken and will outmatch others completely.
-The game is not very replayable and after 35-40 hours you have pretty much done anything that could be done.


VERDICT

Ace Combat 7 is a refreshing title, that for me saved 2019. Not only did it not go epic exclusive, but also sold extremely well for the small niche it aims at satiating. Hopefully this marks a new era for the series, an era of prosperity.
It's a game built with love, and as all games built with love, it delivers.

FINAL SCORE

I rate Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

9.5/10

Project Wingman is a flight action game that definitely kept me waiting: it has been kickstarted and developed by fans of the Ace Combat series and triest to emulate it at the best of it's abilities. So how's Project Wingman? Let's break the sound barrier into this!
PW is not a realistic flight simulation, so do not buy it expecting that: Your plane can pull extremely tight maneuvers, can tank a few missiles, and carries several hundred of them. What it is however is a fun action game with airplanes! First off, the flying is fantastic: it is not quite as "light" as Ace Combat 7's and actually has some weight to it, much like Ace Combat Zero's flying mechanics. That's a plus in my book. Your plane can carry a variety of weapons besides the gun and the standard missiles that will always be with you: in Project Wingman you can carry up to three special weapons instead of only one. Unfortunately, i found the special weapon selection to be a bit lacking: it does have all the necessary ones like multi-lock missiles for anti-air and air-to-ground work, it has unguided rockets, semi-active missiles, gunpods, bombs(bombs suck by the way) but it does not really have anything extravagant. Some of the late game aircraft have a couple surprises, but you still feel a lack of interesting weaponry; still, what's there is good and reliable, except for bombs, those are impressively bad due to low ammo count and small blast radius that make them just not worth using. The aircraft selection is alright, the number of aicraft is fairly good but there's a severe lack of attackers: in PW there's only two dedicated attackers, but almost every single mission bar a couple in the campaign have ground units. I have noticed while playing the campaign that i did not make nearly enough money to buy the entire aicraft fleet, meaning that it must be replayed in order to get every aircraft. The game offers a story mode and a conquest mode: the story was almost on par with an Ace Combat title minus cutscenes of course, because of the small budget of the game; still, the dialogues are very good and well written - oh, and if you bring a two seater aircraft, your WSO talks! The campaign mode overal was very good, offering a variety of sandboxy missions were your objective is mainly to blow stuff up, probably could've used some objective variation but all in all it works.
The Conquest mode is a drug-like substance roguelike mode where you explode your way through randomly generated missions of increasingly higher difficulty, while earning points that allow you to buy aircraft. It is to note that planes bought here are not shared with the campaign and vice-versa. In-between sorties you will be able to hire allies to help you out and you'll need them due to the sheer amount of enemies you'll have to fight. Conquest gets extremely difficult as you go on, eventually you'll die and lose everything except your hangar fleet. Yeah, you get to keep the planes you bought but you lose your allies. And your progress. This mode is incredibly fun, my only gripe is that there are extremely few air to ground missions in this mode and even those don't really have a very high target densitiy and have you fight planes after the main objective so flying an attacker in Conquest equals to suicide.
Finally, Project Wingman also has a VR mode: it works fine but you'll have to lower your settings a lot to make it run somewhat decently. Being able to look around and use the cockpit screens as your radar is always a great pleasure and the VR mode definitely delivers, albeit it is held back by a lack of motion controller support. All in all, i had a blast playing Project Wingman, if not for a few problems here and there that can and probably will be easily fixed.
I give Project Wingman 8.8/10