Recent reviews by Charlie Tango, Eurocopoter EC135

One thing that's not obvious from the product description is that this also seems to include all the skins for Phantom II. You don't need to unlock them or anything (other than the standard restriction on all skins in campaign mode, i.e. you have to finish the campaign once before you can customise looks during the campaign); they'll just show up as skin options for the Phantom. Description could definitely do a better job of clarifying that.

Now, on with the needlessly long review for the relatively straightforward offering.

If AC7 is your first Ace Combat, there's basically no reason to buy this. If you're new, the reason you'd be buying it is presumably for the aircraft unlock. However, in real life, the F-4 Phantom II is retired from active military service in most of the countries that once actively fielded it, and AC7 very much treats the plane as such -- other than it's rather high top speed capabilities, the plane is beaten in basically every respect by the F-16C, which is this game's *free starter plane*... and the planes you can unlock in game only get better from there, not worse. There are a few other free planes you get, I think as you complete the campaign, which are arguably on a similar tier to the Phantom (the F-104C and the Mig-21b), but even they are (at least according to the in-game plane statistics -- I'm sure some will disagree with this assessment) better in Air-to-Air combat than the Phantom, and while the Phantom beats both in Air-to-Ground stats, it's worth remembering that the game is called "Ace Combat" because you spend most of the game trying to become a flying ace by shooting other planes out of the sky. The extremely slight air-to-ground capability improvement over those free planes is not likely to be worth 3 dollars, or even a sale price of 1 dollar. In short, unless you *really* feel a need to complete your skin/aircraft/DLC collection, this is not a buy for the newcomers to the franchise... and if you fall into that camp, you're not really reading reviews for this $3 DLC anyway, now are you.

However, if you're an AC fan/veteran, you're definitely buying this, even if only on sale. After all it's our friendly neighborhood flying brick! Not only do you get Mobius 1's iconic plane *and* accompanying livery (and also some other livery that, let's be honest, you'll probably never use on the Phantom), you also get Yellow-13's skin on the Su-37, Razgriz's F-14D skin, and Pixy's F-15C skin. As a franchise nostalgia cash-in, this is pretty tamely priced... which perhaps makes sense since this was free if you either pre-ordered the game or bought within I think a week of release?

If there's a criticism that could be made, this arguably should've been included in the season pass, but oh well.

Awesome game with great music!