It can be very hard to get a lock on them and they like to tail you when you’re in the middle of fighting a boss. Enemies are typically very fast, some of them far quicker than any playable character. One of the main criticisms with Aero Fighters Assault is its immense difficulty. Spanky also has a very annoying voice, though this may be expected because he is a dolphin. At least his special does considerable damage too. He also has phoenix missiles, which are always useful, and those worthless air mines. His regular weapon, the beam sabre, does as much damage as a special, except you have to practically crash into a target just to get it to hit. Spanky flies a highly experimental aircraft, and as a result plays the most obtuse. Aero Fighters Assault loses a little bit of its personality through the lack of characters and much less colorful scenery, though the characters that are present are still silly as ever. The backgrounds are not nearly as colorful and detailed as they are in past installments, though this is mostly due to the low polygon-count 3D that looked state of the art in 1997.Īero Fighters Assault drops much of its huge and colorful cast of characters, reducing it down to four with two unlockable characters. In typical Aero Fighters tradition, you fly all around the world, culminating in a battle in space.

This is very apparent in the first level, which takes place over the city of Tokyo, completely flooded. Learning the controls is fairly easy once you know what each button does, and the ‘Z’ button being the trigger has always been one of the better parts of the N64’s sometimes clunky controller.Īero Fighters Assault‘s story involves an organization called Phutta Morgana heating the Antarctic and flooding the world. There are separate buttons for shot, homing attack, defensive attack, special attack, thrust, slow, and turning quickly.

The controls are somewhat complicated, but once you get used to them, Aero Fighters Assault becomes much easier to understand. Aero Fighters Assault is more of an Ace Combat or Starfox-style flight sim game. When the game came out, Video System boasted that an ex F-14 pilot was one of the programmers.

Perhaps sensing that scrolling shooters were becoming less popular with the gaming crowd, Video System contracted the final game in the Aero Fighters series to developer Paradigm Entertainment, the same guys behind Pilotwings.

Aero fighters assault n64 review