I continue to be impressed with the presentation the little Game Boy Advance can dish out. Ace Combat: Advance certainly gives an attractive performance, though this doesn’t save it from its major faults. Unsurprisingly, the game features a top-down view, rather than the first person perspective from the main series. Your plane zooms up and down in the landscape as you fly around destroying enemy targets and avoid being shot out of the sky. It’s the typical pseudo-3D graphics that every GBA aficionado is, by now, intimately familiar with.
The sound aspect of the game is generally uninspired, lacking the vibrant sounds, pumping soundtracks, and well-performed voice acting that have made the latest games in the series a true joy to play. The limited storage of the cartridge is no excuse either, except for maybe the lack of real voices – I’ve been inspired by MIDI many times in my life.