Lethal Skies 2 Playthrough (No Commentary)
6Sidewinder Series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPO56tlewLYT3lrZFvK3sxrTflLR6AoJ3
Also known as Sidewinder V in Japan.
The final game in the Sidewinder series. It’s unfortunate because they were clearly moving in the right direction with this game and I don’t mean when it comes to copying Ace Combat. I mean toward being a fun game to play. It’s still pretty frustrating at times with some truly awful missions, though. Mission 4 is hands down the worst ravine mission I’ve ever played.
This is a PS2 game and PS2 emulation is rife with issues that will never, ever be fixed. You will see some oddities. It’s out of my hands.
Please note that this is segmented and edited.
Notes
As always, I dislike flying in third person and so I use the cockpit view and occasionally HUD view for dark/particularly difficult missions. Really don’t care how you feel about this, I’m playing the game here. Feel free to click off if this is a problem.
There are several missions with weather conditions that cause turbulence, so if it looks like I’m spazzing out for no reason, I’m actually fighting turbulence. Having parts of your plane damaged and overheating also causes control issues. The flight model is harder than Ace Combat’s.
The game has several “EX” or “Side Trax” missions you can unlock after clearing mission 16 but these are just altered versions of the missions shown in this video. I didn’t bother. There are two special missions too, but the requirement for the first one is exceedingly difficult/potentially busted for no good reason and I refuse to play along, bashing my head against the requirement for hours and hours hoping it works or not.
I’ve stated in the past how much I hate how these kinds of game, games in general, have to break the rules/mechanics/physics in order to deliver difficult encounters.
In this case, this game wants to have this epic showdown with the enemy ace and it just doesn’t work because the only way to make it hard is by having the AI way over perform and what this means for the player is that they get to fly in circles over and over and over again blindly tossing rounds out hoping to catch the AI as it shifts patterns because it’s impossible to keep up with the cheating. It's not as bad as the final boss of Joint Assault but it is still the very opposite of fun.
It’s not a problem unique to this game, this series or even this genre, so I can’t hold it against it too much. I simply think difficultly should be a natural result of mechanics and not be forced like it frequently is.
00:00 Intro
04:51 Mission 1 - First Contact
09:04 Mission 2 - Blood Storm
12:49 Mission 3 - Delta
16:35 Mission 4 - Break Through
22:45 Mission 5 - Front Line
28:55 Mission 6.1 - Gran Blue
35:04 Mission 6.2 - Gran Blue [Deeper]
38:57 Mission 7 - Escape From Azrad
43:07 Mission 8 - Turning Point
49:43 Mission 9.1 - Intruder
56:09 Mission 9.2 - Intruder [Higher]
1:00:21 Mission 10 - Paradise Lost
1:05:01 Mission 11 - The Day of Las Mayos
1:11:11 Mission 12 - Confusion
1:18:32 Mission 13 - Rush
1:28:29 Mission 14 - Road To Victory
1:35:14 Mission 15 - World End
1:40:37 Mission 16 - New World
1:47:46 Ending/Credits