Controller Support

Not long ago, I wrote positively about Ace Combat 7. Granted, I was under the influence of alcohol, and that delicious poison will make you enjoy just about anything, but AC7 demonstrated its strengths even after the effects vanished. The superb presentation and open-ended gameplay was refreshing in an age often plagued by face slapping restrictions. What I realized very quickly however is that Ace Combat 7's restrictions aren't in its gameplay...

But it's controls.

Having not grown up with flight games and very rarely if ever used the left analog stick or mouse inverted, I always invert standard flight controls. Default flight controls are more realistic and does make logical sense, being mapped in the same way your normal real life hand functions are, but the muscle memory of press my right thumb forward to look up has been imprinted onto me over 20+ years, and Ace Combat 7 addresses that, sort of.

You can invert the flight on a Gamepad. 

Flight stick?

No.

Oddly, a single joystick, which even at its lowest price costs the same as a regular Xbox or PS4 controller, has no adjustments, tweaks, or control changes of any kind. In-fact, unless it's a Thrustmaster product, the game won't recognize your device at all, for TM owners, that image right above is all the customization you have.

So controller?

Except the right stick doesn't do anything related to the aircraft, it can only adjust the camera. Dual stick flying is impossible, yet completely feasible in far less complex aircraft's featured in games like Battlefield. Yet amazingly, it goes a step further than that.

I'm used to finding odd ways to solve problems to achieve a goal. For instance, I can't map a type of controller? I'll just fool my computer into thinking its an ordinary gamepad! I've done it with steering wheels, PS3 controllers, and its how people use Guitar Hero controllers to beat Dark Souls.

Yet, when mapping a Joystick to the computer's mouse output, something that Ace Combat 7 does let you invert, the game still doesn't implement it. I spent hours trying to get a flight game to understand flight up by press up, and was utterly defeated.

...

Uh... yeah, there's not really a point to this.

Moral of the story is I guess, know when to cut your losses?