Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve Review

I dabbled a bit in the last Ace Combat game, but Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is the first time I’ve sat down and finished one of these aerial combat games all the way to the final battle. As the eighth mainline entry, this game doesn’t shy away from wild, often large-sounding terminology and names in its fictional setting, but I still found it a great place to jump into the series. Most importantly, it gave me the exact feeling I would want to get from the game: the thrill of flying, the beauty and terror of aerial combat, and all with the ability to not get bogged down by hard-core sim controls, though the ability to bump up your difficulty is going to be here if you want that.

The clouds in Ace Combat 8 are simply the most beautiful clouds I have ever seen in a video game. And it’s hard not to keep thinking about them. You’ll be flying next to them, through them, dodging and hopefully losing missiles on your tail, all the while not wanting to stay in them too long and have your aircraft freeze up.

Amongst the sheer beauty of everything happening around you in the sky, Ace Combat is all about the dogfighting. And it feels fantastic. Chasing opponents’ craft in the sky, you’ll decide when to fire missiles, predict their movements, and swing in the direction they’ll swerve to try to lose you. In later chapters, these dogfights turn into long, brutal chase sequences against aircraft immune to lock-on weaponry. You’ll be swerving, turning, gliding and twirling like ballerinas in the sky on each other’s tails, trying to line up the perfect line of sight to hit them with your machine gun. It’s the lean-forward-on-your-couch, moment-to-moment thrill.

Each of the game’s thirty campaign missions changes up the pace enough to keep things fresh. From the thrill of dogfights against other aircraft to taking down sea-based artillery and massive tank weaponry on land. Some of it means chipping away at their armour while surviving an onslaught of incoming fire, then lining up a Death Star-like weave of the perfect shot to destroy them.

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As you move through each mission, you’re not alone; you have the rest of your “wings” with you, whom you can command to defend, go off on their own, or lock onto a specific target. And you’ll hear and see them take down enemies, so it doesn’t feel like fake AI ordering that doesn’t achieve anything.

Constant banter with your teammates runs throughout missions. Chatter ranges from banter and jokes to cries of anguish at key story moments. But the relationship between you and your crew is at the heart of the game, even if each mission feeds into a larger conflict in the fictional world of Strangereal. Here, every faction seems to love planes and has its own obsession with some superweapon, and this game’s main one is a space-based laser targeting system that can send devastating attacks down to the ground and decimate foes.

Between missions, you’ll get a mixture of mission intel and cutscenes that play out in real time with a small amount of interaction. And by small I mean “Press X to shake hands” level. The character you play has become a propaganda invention used to rally people behind an idea. Ukraine’s Ghosts of Kyiv obviously inspire it, but in this game, even though you’re stepping into a fictional role, you start to make the legend real. As the game progresses and missions turn from sending Katiness Everdeen out into the battlefield to show face and ensure you shoot down planes yourself, the legend grows, as does your team behind you, and the ‘Wings of Theve.’

Commentating in your head at times, and your head is the original ‘Wings,’ who never shot down anything. He spits lyrically about war, the losses, and the people’s misunderstanding of it. But ultimately, although Ace Combat 8 wants you to think this game has a lot to say about war and its cost, it doesn’t really. It’s an empty bottle with a glossy, beautiful wrapper. Its narrative is corny, but not in a knowing way. It was up to you to believe in it, which I struggled to do. Fortunately, the core characters and the banter between them, in the air and on the ground, are good and make the journey worth sticking through each cutscene. You’re playing Ace Combat 8 for the flying spectacle and aerial combat at the end of the day. While it’s nice to have a story, I don’t think anything will push you through the missions to see the next cutscene. It’s padding between missions and airtime.

Once you’re done with the campaign, you can jump into online mode and spend the rest of your time proving your worth. Of which I am not worthy. And if you really want, there’s a store you need to spend real money on to unlock and purchase decals and other things for your ship, which I’m not a big fan of. You can’t unlock any premium currency, even by finishing the campaign. But if you choose to, more power to you.

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