Airforce Delta Review: Playing EVERY Sega Dreamcast Game (2/248)
Chronicling my mission to collect, play, and review every single officially licensed NA Sega Dreamcast game ever released, all using actual original hardware—in order of release date!
Game Title: Airforce Delta
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Release: September 9, 1999 (NA)
Platforms: Dreamcast and Game Boy Color
I’m collecting, playing, and reviewing every single Sega Dreamcast NA game in order of release and the second game on the list is Airforce Delta (aka Deadly Skies in Europe). You can read more about my process and the project as a whole right here.
The video versions of these reviews, linked above, will go into slightly different details as I commentate over the footage. I’m writing these blog versions first, but not reading from them directly, so consider this more of a companion piece to the video, not a script of what I’m reading.
Airforce Delta for Sega Dreamcast Review
Airforce Delta is a flight combat game. This means it’s not entirely focused on flight simulation like AeroWings was, but instead incorporates combat elements like dog fights and tasks you with battling against other planes in the air. At the time of release, it was often compared directly to Ace Combat 2, which was released two years prior on the original PlayStation.
At the time a game releases, it’s often important, at least for the clarity of consumers, to compare games to their contemporaries. It helps put design decisions into context and fleshes out the genre in a way that will let consumers make informed decisions. But the issue you run into a lot of the time is that by comparing a game heavily to another game, you’re no longer assessing the game on its own merits.
GameSpot’s review of Airforce Delta heavily compares it to Ace Combat 2 and it’s one of the few readily available reviews of the game online from a prominent media outlet since so many websites are gone now and older magazines aren’t accessible. The result? The vast majority of “discourse” about this game online whether it be social media, YouTube, or something else, tends to just write it off as an Ace Combat 2 clone. I don’t think that’s fair.
When a landmark title for a genre releases it’s bound to redefine conventions and expectations, so following suit a couple of years later to give players what they want and love isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
All of this is to say that while I do think Airforce Delta for Dreamcast borrows heavily from the framework Ace Combat 2 essentially created, I don’t think that in and of itself is such a terrible sin that the game isn’t worth taking a look at. Because as a matter of fact, it’s quite fun!
I’ve never been a huge flight game fan, whether that be simulators, combat games, or otherwise, so I guess that means my “casual” nature is showing. The reality of the situation though is that most people who play games are casual players.
What I like about Airforce Delta is that it knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything that it’s not. What I mean by that is that every mission is basically just a very light amount of narrative window dressing to contextualize why you’re shooting down these other planes and then it sets you loose. After you get through the first few opening missions, the objective variety starts to expand and some of the creativity is really on display.
There aren’t a ton of missions to complete, but I had a really fun time making my way through this one. As you finish missions you’ll collect cash that can be used to buy new planes. The catch here is that if you crash during a mission, then that plane is destroyed and gone from your collection. You can sell planes you no longer use as well, and will likely have to rebuy planes you’ve crashed at some point or another.
It’s a fun risk analysis to ask yourself if you want to risk your deadly, but much pricier machine, to increase your chances of success, or do a trial run with a cheaper plane first before retrying it with a better one.
Thankfully controls are very simple and I never felt like I was at a disadvantage for only having a single analog stick since the game does a nice job of naturally leveling you out often.
After playing AeroWings, it was a relief that I didn’t have a drill sergeant screaming at me every time I messed up and I never had to complete training scenarios proving I knew how to turn in the air or land my jet. Airforce Delta cuts away all that extra fluff that has no place in a combat experience and lets you get right down to the nitty-gritty of blasting away your enemies.
There isn’t a ton of replayability here other than upping the difficulty levels, but it makes up for that structural simplicity by being dead simple to pick up and play. And like I said before, it’s just a blast and nails the adrenaline-pumping intensity only a great dogfight can provide.
Closing Thoughts
Airforce Delta is a game that stuck around for a little while with a handful of entries and spin-offs. A year after its debut on Sega Dreamcast, a Game Boy Color version was released which employed a slow-moving vertical shooter format instead. Considering the technical limitations, it’s actually kind of cool and impressive, but it’s generally a much worse and less fun experience.
There are sequels to Airforce Delta on Xbox and GBA, as well as a final Western entry on PlayStation 2, so the series did have some life for a while.
Overall, I had fun with Airforce Delta. I think my adoration for the Sega Dreamcast, nostalgia for the era, and general leniency to be less critical of an older game I never played could be coloring my judgment here a bit, but I do think they nailed a solid gameplay loop and recognized why Ace Combat was so popular at the time.
For more insight into what I thought about Airforce Delta, make sure to check out the video at the top of this blog or right here. That’s my full rundown on the game with footage captured directly from my own actual Sega Dreamcast.
Check out the table here if you want to know what’s coming up on the list and how my collection is coming along. The next game in the queue for this series will be Blue Stinger from developer Climax Graphics and publisher Activision, a very quirky action-adventure game that was inspired by survival horror titles like Resident Evil.
Let me know what you think of Airforce Delta, or this series as a whole, down in the comments!
Thanks for the review! I've been meaning to buy this one for my Dreamcast and you've reminded me :)
Absolutely awesome to see a Dreamcast-focused writer on here, please continue
That's a great point about the disappearance of legacy media. It's such a massive loss to not have all that work and history.