M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes (PSP)
Sometimes you have an acronym you really want to make work but can’t think of a word for a certain letter, and that might have been the case with M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes where the first three words all seem a good fit for this combat racer but the “Heroes” part seems irrelevant. There are no rescue missions even in the challenge modes and there are no villains to beat, just a bunch of planes vying for the top spot as they fight and fly through race courses and battle arenas. In fact, while the game does not give its story while you play it, the story seems to be that the game is set in the future where unmanned aircraft have replaced piloted planes and the old models actually featured in the gameplay were scooped up by black market types and rich enthusiasts, meaning that the racing that does take place in the game is done by anything but heroes in an underground contest for cash and glory exclusively.
M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes is a jet plane racer, but while the Heroes part seems to be a term plucked out of nowhere, there is in fact room for modifying your racing aircraft and it is downright required to remain competitive as you work your way through the game’s difficulty levels. Unlocking the harder racing tournaments requires beating the easier ones first, so even though you start off with a fairly weak but decent starting jet, you’ll have the chance to earn prize money you can spend to either buy new vehicles or upgrade the wings, canards, tail, fins, engine, and guns for your jet of choice. These pieces of your plane all have a varying level of impact on the speed, maneuverability, and firepower of your vehicle, although firepower is mostly relevant for the arena combat stages that are often present in equal measure for the main game’s tournament modes.
Upgrading your aircraft and buying new ones with better base stats as necessary is sadly more tied to your success in the single player game of M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes than your flight skill. So long as your vehicle remains comparable with the competition, the computer players are easily defeated despite their AI adjusting their speed and performance if you’re in the lead. This rubber banding isn’t felt too much since you can survive full on collisions with the environment and still remain competitive in the race, but that is more because of the quick respawn meaning downtime doesn’t last long. Surprisingly though, you can be rather rough with your plane, scraping against walls and other forms of collision not really impeding your flight so long as you don’t slam head on into something or spend too long digging your nosecone into an obstacle. Really, it might be the game’s afterburner system that makes it all too easy for human players to overcome the early difficulties. So long as you fly low in a level you’ll fill up a meter, the player able to boost by spending that built up power. You would think the race course design would make flying low more dangerous then so there is a risk and reward system in place, but flying high has no real benefit save in places where you might want to grab an item or make avoiding a simple obstacle a tiny bit easier.
It’s easy to continuously build up afterburner boosts and spend them the whole race, and the courses themselves are small in number and lacking in any big shake-ups to change how you play. You might be racing through a canyon, weaving through the shipping containers of a port, or navigating your way around caves in a snowy mountain range, but besides a few sharp turns in the level designs and some obstacles like rocky arches or pillars, you’re not going to have to worry about these areas you can easily fly through. The shape of a race course is definitely important to test your skill in turning and managing your speed, but the game’s attempt to stretch its five race tracks into more variations by reversing the course or closing off areas to provide shorter and snappier races doesn’t alleviate the repetition. As you work your way to the harder races, playing these same tracks over and over will at least mean you’ll have memorized them pretty quickly. However, once you do reach the highest two difficulties in Career mode the game does suddenly become very hard. This isn’t done by improving the racer AI or introducing any interesting complications to the track, M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes achieves higher difficulty simply by throwing in the Baron jet plane as an enemy, this vehicle packing perfect stats well before you can reach them yourself even with smart and conservative spending. You could grind lower difficulties for cash to potentially be closer to this perfect plane that you can’t unlock until you’ve already beaten the Baron, so the only way to really overcome the Baron and win these final tournaments is through a lot of luck with the item system.
During the races there are item pick-ups up for grabs, these able to provide useful tools you can activate whenever you believe the situation is right. You might get something like Mach Power that can give a big boost to your afterburner meter, the ability to drop mines that the enemy planes surprisingly do hit, and if you want to be able to take down the Baron or any racer in front of you, the missiles are key to blowing them up, although the fast respawns benefit them as well. The luck comes in not only in whether or not enemies grab these power-ups during the race, but in the fact that certain item pick-ups aren’t guaranteed. You might be able to find something like the cluster rocket in a reliable spot every time that can hit so long as your aim is spot on, but getting missiles is often reliant on the random item coin despite their incredible usefulness in taking down the Baron or gaining ground in multiplayer where few other factors will vary between human players who know the tracks and understand the afterburner system. Missiles can also be avoided though, either with an invisibility power-up or by simply performing some aerial acrobatics with the right timing, something a helpful but loud warning allows you to easily set up. While doing a barrel roll to avoid a missile does come with the downside of disorienting you briefly, it’s often worth doing to avoid being blown up. Unsurprisingly, the computer-controlled planes get better and better at timing their dodges to make missiles less likely to work and thus the Baron races still feel more and more up to whether the game both decides to grant you missiles and then let them land.
M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes features more combat than just what appears in the races. The battle arenas that crop up during the Career mode are all about getting the most kills on the other planes in wide open areas. An oil rig, volcano, and open water all have a few different little areas to hide from incoming fire or search for better guaranteed item pick-ups so the level choice is somewhat meaningful despite there also being only five unique arenas, but these dogfights are surprisingly easy even once the Baron is added to them later on. At first you just need the missiles and they’ll home in enough to earn you plenty of kills, but later on the machine guns all planes are equipped with that are exclusive to this mode start to play more of a part in ensuring you get almost double the kills the AI opposition can manage. Your power stat comes into play here as it determines how long you need to sustain machine gun fire to kill an enemy plane, later planes able to do it in one volley before the weapon needs to cool down. If you kill enough planes in a row without dying though you’ll get an instant kill laser that basically lets the point gap increase with no recourse for losing players, so having the power to win even more feels like it further undermines any attempt to make these fights actually challenging.
Enemy planes gradually get a bit smarter but never much better at killing each other, and they often leave other planes alive but damaged so you can swoop in and potentially steal the kill. There does seem to be a bit of an issue with attributing kills when two people are gunning for the same jet, but the skill gap inherent in understanding which power-ups to keep grabbing and the tenacity to stick to one target instead of flitting around pointlessly makes the arena side of Career tournaments easier for human players, these often being a good place to make up for Baron losses in the race segments. Since a tournament is about total score based on placement in each part of the competition, you can possibly make up ground here despite how its easiness makes it rather boring, but you can also retry any race during a tournament so getting luck to line up in the actual races can sometimes just be a test of your willingness to keep trying.
An extra mode exists called Challenge where the same familiar set of levels are retooled to feature the same challenge ideas recontextualized in a few different ways. You can find yourself flying through a level collecting as many coins as you can with each lap, playing a game of capture the flag, or getting the instant kill laser so you can make quick pickings of your opponents. The challenge mode doesn’t do much to change the way you play and features the same difficulty progression where you need to keep playing the easy versions before you can eventually unlock the ones where luck and overcoming the Baron become the main focus, so besides as a break from the races once they start going downhill, Challenge doesn’t have much to offer.
THE VERDICT: M.A.C.H Modified Air Combat Heroes didn’t really seem to have a good idea on how to pull off its two gameplay types The combat-focused arenas are always too easy against AI and with humans it’s a race to grab the same useful power-ups, and even when missiles enter the picture you can do a quick barrel roll to shake them to weaken the viable options for successful kills. The racing also starts off far too easy in single-player and only becomes hard when the Baron with its perfect stats enter the opposition’s vehicle pool, luck starting to play a factor instead as you need the right random powers and have to hope the Baron will not do a barrel roll to avoid those precious missiles. Swinging from easy and a bit dull to dependent on luck rather than skill based on difficulty means there’s no real point where this PSP racer ever truly finds its footing, with even its interesting ideas like flying low to build up boost ruined by the fact they made doing so lack any real risk.
And so, I give M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes for PlayStation Portable…
A BAD rating. On paper there are plenty of decent concepts at play in M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes, but it feels like they were put in without any consideration for how they’ll influence play. Flying low to build up afterburner power is a good idea, provided you have some risk to doing so and some incentive to fly high at points besides quickly grabbing a power-up and then going low once more. Being able to avoid missiles isn’t a bad idea either, but the ease with which it happens and their importance in overcoming artificial late game difficulty means it ends up less about having the skill to outmaneuver a powerful item and more just making sure you have the space and power to do the flip. Aerial combat could have been an interesting extra mode, but the dogfights don’t feel like an even battle since simple tactics can so easily overcome the AI opponents. It’s little surprise the game does speed up the enemy jets when you’re winning since it seems M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes can’t earn a win legitimately, the player having to hope luck and upgrades come together well in the challenging portions and otherwise having too easy of a time before the game really starts whipping out its less fair tactics to put up a fight.
Almost every aspect of this jet plane racer could have worked if more effort was put into fair difficulty and more thought was put into how the systems intertwine. Instead, it’s a game that swings too hard between extremes of low challenge gameplay and races you only lose because you haven’t unlocked the perfect plane the game is using against you. The game controls fine despite the levels not pushing you to need to be careful, so this game almost feels like a rough draft for a jet racer. They have the basics down and systems implemented, but they didn’t hit that phase of development where they can go back and tweak things to play better or feature the tiny touches that could have allowed M.A.C.H. Modified Air Combat Heroes to actually draw the fun out of its seemingly decent set of ideas.