Customer Reviews

Ace Combat 4: Shattered Skies: Prima's Official Strategy Guide

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The books aswome it help me get all the hidden aircraft and beat the game in all modes

Do yourself a favor if you have the Ace Combat 4 Game and order this strategy guide.It has info and pictures of every plane and it's attributes like speed,mobility,stability,armor and special weapons used by each plane.It also tells you how each plane rates from air to air and air to ground.Also included is info and pictures of every special weapon.It describes how to get a s rating on each mission as well as showing you objectives you must complete on each level and of course many pictures of every level.This book goes beyond the manuel that is included with the game.Unfortuanly this book is out of print but you can order one used like I did from amazon.

I bought this guide because I already own the guides to Ace Combat 5 and Ace Combat Zero. Those guides were very helpful and published by Prima. Even though I had already beaten Ace Combat 4, with no guide, I was curious as to what the guide for ACE4 looked like. Finding a used copy on Amazon, for a reasonable price, I bought it.

As to the guide itself, I can see it as offering valuable advice for a first timer. Knowing what to expect on each and every mission certainly would have made things easier my first time around. Not to mention it would have saved me from brute forcing the Stonehenge mission the hard way. I wasn't aware you could destroy the ECM jammer in the middle of the array to kill all jamming. Instead I dropped a fuel air explosive bomb on each gun and used my machine gun to make sure each gun went down. All the while upset my own missiles would not acquire a target lock. The entire time the Stonehenge anti-aircraft defenses and air cover are firing missiles on me. Oh well live and learn.

The guide also contains stats on all the planes within the game. Which is handy considering the stats can sometimes be difficult to see within the game itself. In the end you can find walk throughs and stat guides on the internet for free. However I suppose I'm old fashioned as I wanted an actual glossy printed guide to hold in my hands.

If you love the Ace Combat series for the Sony PS/PS2 as much as I do, it is quite easy to have an immediate interest in these officially-dedicated "strategy guides". However, it is important to realize exactly what you are getting:

These official strategy guides can be compared to a Major League Baseball program that one would buy at any regular season baseball game or arguably the MLB All-Star Game/The MLB World Series. If you already know the game of baseball, these programs offer high-quality, high-gloss artwork and illustrations that fall more into the category of a collectors item than truly an instructional guide supporting strategies/instructions focusing on how to play the game itself. Granted, this Guides do briefly summarize each aircraft, weapons, and mission level with brief detail, synopsis', and supportive illustrations however, the reader will not necessarily learn anything new or unique in how to face, pursue, or more effectively play the game itself. If one is striving to find strategy-detail, this can be better found in the hundreds, if not thousands of instructional support detail merely by enabling "Google" to direct you to the myriad of free gaming sites that offer more data than any one strategy guide could offer.

In conclusion and barring any internet access, this Strategy Guide is an upgrade from the small instructional booklet that comes with the game however this will better serve the Collector and fan of Ace Combat 04 and having said this, the quality of this Guide is at a very high-level with thick and glossy illustration and plenty of verbiage not necessarily offering any "ah ha" information that will answer or expedite your gaming performance.

When i get this guide i thought that finally i could be able to get all the secret color plane of the game! but uh i finished it expert and now plaing ace level all without using this book that yes has good photos, mission and plane description but tell them to catch a glim to brady games guide before writing another incomplete work. you know, i have discover by myself that i have to destroy in mission the plane i was searching for but i was buing the guide to find in which mission they where!... uh ok this enough but probably i [wasted] my money.