You’re a pilot, but rather than sitting in the cockpit of a fighter jet, the opening of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve finds you picked up from a life raft bobbing in the ocean, then dropped onto the deck of the Endurance, one of the few remaining FCU battleships. The war is not going well for the FCU, and since they’re woefully undermanned, you’re immediately thrust into a fighter jet as a navigator, sat behind living legend Rex ‘The Wings of Theve’ Cope, despite barely having had time to dry behind your ears.
Here, on a mission attempting to protect a commercial flight, you’re once again on the wrong end of the Satoan ace pilot’s missiles, and as you plunge into the ocean, you see the body of Rex slowly descend into the depths.
That’s not the end of Rex Cope, or his handle The Wings of Theve, though. D.D., the FCU’s social media guru and master manipulator, sees the opportunity to keep Cope’s death under wraps, giving you his dog tags, name and position at the head of Joker wing, all in an effort to keep the myth and legend of The Wings of Theve alive.
Cope’s not gone, either. As he died, his soul seemingly imprinted on your own, and you’re haunted by his melancholic, disembodied voice, a constant narrator and commentator through every moment of Ace Combat 8. It makes for a decidedly off-kilter tone, his gruff voice – he sounds just like James Spader’s Ultron for the MCU – emanating eerily from the DualSense alongside your TV speaker, as he passes judgment on your decisions or pushes his own outlook and agenda on you.
The sense of necessity runs deep through the narrative of Ace Combat 8, whether in your inherited position as the Wings of Theve, Cope’s own sense of obligation, or in the increasingly desperate missions that you run. This isn’t a fight for glory or for territory, it’s for survival, and the narrative does a good job of balancing its gung-ho, Top Gun-esque moments with a touch of moralising and consideration.
Narratively, this is the most cohesive that Ace Combat has ever been, and you’re surrounded by characters that you’ll like by the end of the game, whether that’s the thoughtful Professor who serves as your loyal wingman, music-fan Coster, or the breezily naïve Tasha. It does feel as though the team have avoided marrying their war-based game with truly meaningful real-world commentary, but there is a focus on the consequences and victims of conflict. My only further disappointment was the feigned illusion of interaction in cutscenes, with button presses to jump up or sit down simply being a way of making sure you’re paying attention. Still, that’s not really why you’re here.
Once you’re behind the stick, the air combat has all of the drama and definition that we’ve come to expect from this series. Dogfighting is taut, requiring smooth and precise flight to drop in behind your opponent in order to get a positive lock for your missiles, or to give yourself the best chance with your machine guns. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has a revised hitbox for your guns, and they are much more reliable than we’ve seen from the series before. It still requires skill to pull off kills with the guns, but they don’t feel unfair, as they could do in previous games.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve offers two graphical settings on PS5, with performance mode targeting 60fps, at a reduced visual fidelity, while graphics mode adds some pretty frippery at the cost of a 30fps target. Combat is largely smooth and responsive, though you can see some hits to the frame rate when battles are at their most chaotic, mildly struggling with multiple explosions, effects and enemy fighters at the same time. That’s amplified in Graphics mode, but the game is still a real looker when playing in Performance and I didn’t find it overly distracting.
Overall, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve looks fantastic wherever you play, with some seriously impressive visual effects such as water forming on your canopy when flying through clouds, or vapour trails as you manoeuvre, but on the base PS5 you might find a few moments where it causes the action to slow down.
There’s definitely been a push from Project Aces in terms of accessibility and approachability, while still catering to both their long-term fans and those looking for a more realistic experience. As such, there’s the option to change your difficulty through the campaign, mission by mission, so you can press on if you’re finding a particular objective too tough, or you can dial things up if you want it to feel more dangerous and immediate.
Pro players can also take things a step further with the Expert controls as well, which give you an unprecedented level of control over your aircraft, though they’ll take more time to acclimatise to, especially if you’ve spent a lot of time with the standard controls.
I can’t say I’ve ever found Ace Combat games to be too difficult, though I still failed the odd mission in Wings of Theve on the standard setting while missing out on some particularly annoying foes – those sneaky attack helicopters can get in the bin, and don’t get me started on the railgun.
You can swing things in your favour with the expansive upgrade tree. Successfully completing each campaign mission nets you a bunch of credits, earned through achieving mission-sensitive objectives and shooting things out of the sky. You’ll unlock enhancements that you can slot into each of your aircraft, boosting your planes’ manoeuvrability or increasing your weaponry’s efficiency, as well as unlocking new aircraft, improving on older models, or bringing unique specialisms to bear. No matter which aircraft it is, they’re all modelled with exceptional detail, and just hanging around in the hangar can be fun while the camera pans around them, while the cinematic soundtrack thumps away.
There is, as with all of the Ace Combat games, an inherent amount of repetition to the missions, albeit punctuated by some of the wilder, larger-scale battles to mix things up. If you’ve not been won over by previous entries in the series, I don’t think this eighth mainline entry will do anything to change that, but if you’re a fan of air combat games, and particularly a more arcade-focused setup, Ace Combat remains the Top Gun.
While we’ve not fully explored the online multiplayer of Ace Combat 8 before review, it touts a social area capable of supporting up to 100 players, before you break out into separate game modes. There’s 4-player co-op, 4v4 headfighting, and then special missions which can go up to 8 players taking on the colossal weapons from the campaign together. It’s by far and away the biggest Ace Combat online offering yet and I’m chomping at the bit to try out the excellent dogfighting action with real people at the controls of the other aircraft, once the game is fully available next week.
