WorthPlaying writes: "Ever since I first booted up Ace Combat, I've reserved a special place in my heart for flight combat games. Among the more exciting sensations in all of gaming is that of pushing a super jet to the very limits of human endurance, along with the adrenaline rush that comes with twisting, looping and diving in order to lock onto an enemy and fire off a missile. Unfortunately, Rebel Raiders: Operation Nighthawk for the Wii can't deliver any thrills whatsoever, and you are left with a soulless waste of effort, a game that would have been better left forgotten by the annals of history.
The story in Raiders is your typical generic farce: An evil government creates worldwide totalitarian regime, and it's up to a rag-tag group of rebels to rage against the machine. It's essentially the cut and paste Star Wars/Ace Combat rip-off, but with absolutely zero depth. I'm willing to forgive an unoriginal story in a game when it's at least presented in a convincing manner, but Raiders isn't even trying. The script is terrible, with the dialogue appearing to have been run through a Babelfish translation and stuck directly into the game, and the delivery of the lines is so unconvincing that you begin to wonder if Kando just recorded the table reading of the script and used that as the final version. Furthermore, every character in the game is completely unremarkable, and you don't develop any sort of bond to anyone in the universe. This is likely because all of the game's personalities are conveyed via static image during missions, and everyone is referred to by call sign rather than by name. The result is that you're left really not caring about these rebellious spirits, and you kind of wish they would just hang it up so that you could end this atrocious mess of a game."
