What makes a gameplay trailer cool? Is it the music? The action? The in-engine sequencing? How about the pacing or the gameplay features? A cool gameplay trailer needs to be composed of everything that makes the game fun and yet at the same time entice people with something special to let them know that the game is both unique and very well-polished.
Now there were some really superb gameplay trailers released throughout this year, two of the most memorable being the full level walkthrough for Saints Row: The Third's airplane sequence and Battlefield 3's highly memorable and action-packed multiplayer trailer. However, there was only one trailer this year that combined its gameplay and in-engine sequencing to create one of the best promotional packages in years and that honor goes to Namco Bandai's Ace Combat: Assault Horizon and the Dawning Skies gameplay trailer.
While the actual promo videos were broken down into two parts, the first part is what really sets everything in motion, giving gamers an unprecedented amount of dynamic aerial action and cinematic quality storytelling. It's hard not to be impressed with the Dawning Skies trailer for Ace Combat because it's just so well done and the fact that it's all in-engine with in-game play fuelling the action, you just have to step back and really appreciate the efforts of the developers, Project Aces. Whether you liked the game or not, this trailer definitely gives you the kind of goose bumps that very few other gameplay trailers could do, which is why this is the coolest gameplay trailer of 2011.
