I'm not saying that just because the series is set on an alternate Earth where the continents and countries are all made-up and unfamiliar. That's nothing terribly new in speculative fiction, after all. No, I'm talking about the tech base. It's mostly realistic? Except when it's not, and the discontinuities are... really something.

Case in point: The playable aircraft all seem to be real-world machines, but in some cases jarringly anachronistic ones. AC8 is set in 2029, but the starting aircraft are the A-model Tomcat and the Legacy Hornet, both of which have been out of service for years (in the F-14A's case, for twenty years, and the A-model was fairly out of date well before then).

On the other hand (spoilers, I guess) [ one of the principal enemy threats is something called a "land battleship", which appears to be literally a battleship running on a couple dozen Jawa sandcrawler tracks. With railguns. And in the mission Biboo played, and replayed, and replayed last night, it was attacking the base of a space elevator. ]

This is all so deliriously weird, I felt my grip on reality starting to slip just watching somebody else play it. I kind of want to get it now, even though I'm not good at that kind of game, which I guess is a sign of successful marketing. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.