Up in the digital skies, I sortie with my squad (sortie, that was the word), staying quiet as they sound off over comms. A stalwart lecturer, a daredevil peacenik and a stoic rocker drifted off the edges of my wings (they’ll back you up if you bring them home). We cruise ahead, lighthearted bickering layered over views of the clearest blue over blankets of puffy white. A contact hits the edge of our radar, orders come spilling in from below, and as one, we peel off to find our enemy in the air (I can almost feel the wind).
The prologue kicking off Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the latest game in the fighter jet combat franchise that debuted in 1995, is riddled with voiceovers loftily espousing the aviator’s philosophy of communing with the skies. It’s a little much, I thought, as I struggled to adjust to the game’s controls. By the time I rolled credits around 25 hours later, the aircraft in my hangar were extensions of my digital body. I was up in the clouds alongside my nameless pilot and their squadmates.
As my first Ace Combat game, it’s unclear to me how much Wings of Theve retains and how much it innovates on its predecessors. That fresh perspective, and especially my inexperience with flight simulator games of all stripes, makes my wholehearted embrace of Ace Combat 8 all the more special. If you’ve been waiting to dive into a game flying jets around a fictional warzone, Wings of Theve could enchant you as it has me.
That’s partially a credit to the controls and gameplay, but it’s the earnest melodrama established in the game’s intro that builds and builds over each mission. Plucked from the ocean by the crew of an old aircraft carrier serving as the last hope of an invaded nation, you’re thrown into the sky in a ridealong with a legendary pilot. Targeted by an enemy ace, you go down, but get fished out of the water alone – with the pilot’s soul riding along with you, issuing wise parentheticals about the new squad you’re assigned to lead, about war, about flying itself.
In stakes, in setting, in characters, in echoed themes, in bombastic set pieces and midmission moments your attention is pointedly drawn to, the word that comes to mind when describing Ace Combat 8 is anime. (That’s a compliment.) Characters speak their minds in hushed whispers or loud barks, but always from beliefs welling in their chests. These missives come crackling over the radio, amplifying high-tension jet combat between metal machines with a spotlight on the humans at the controls.
Those big beliefs slam head-on into massive enemy vehicles, land- or airborne colossi bristling with weapons, another staple from anime skilfully deployed to ratchet up the challenge and spectacle. It should be silly to send your quartet of jets against land battleships (literal naval vessels footed with rows of tank treads), but their menacing blister of guns cracks the sky open with explosions, a sinful interruption to the sublime act of flight and a lethal threat to your squadmates. AC8 sells spectacle well.
From tightly paced missions to downtime on the carrier to character subplots to corporate intrigue to geopolitical strife, Ace Combat 8 dances between tightropes. It wastes little time, but lets conversations and weighty moments linger for players to absorb (again, anime, complimentary). It feels trimmed, honed down to just the hits.
That breezy pace makes the game’s more blatantly militaristic aspects easier to endure or enjoy, depending on how much you embrace the hawkish nature of a fighter pilot sim putting you in the cockpits of real-world weapons of war.
Read more: Ace Combat 8 Will Incorporate Dogfighting Tips From Real Jet Pilots
Screenshot by David Lumb/CNETResisting, or giving in, to the military fantasy
In the same vein as the adage that there are no antiwar films (and that combat in media is inherently promotional), military flight simulation games glorify warfare. Spotlighting the heroism of soldiers and the romance of fighter aces clashing in the sky unquestionably tilts these games into the “war is cool” genre of war stories. And by lavishing its fighter jets with flattering panning shots in cinematics and postmission recap footage, Ace Combat 8 shifts the tone toward war-machine worship.
It’s the stories your squaddies tell that reel the game back toward humanism. The stunt pilot wunderkind, Tasha, balances her loyalty to the squad with her desire never to shoot anyone down — just lure them right into your crosshairs. Coster and The Professor, your other squadmates, protect each other and risk everything for the people on the Endurance, the aging aircraft carrier serving as your home base. And that pilot riding shotgun in your mind, who was known for avoiding getting any kills, speaks of keeping the team alive and the glory of flight. Nobody loves fighting.
Nobody besides the player, of course. I grew up awed by American war machines with a parent working at a defense contractor (developing rockets, not bombs), so it’s tough not to love sitting in the cockpits of jets I’ve admired most of my life. Shooting down enemy after enemy in Ace Combat 8 with an impressive range of ordnance is a delight. There’s an undeniable glee in raining destruction on justified foes, especially the big armored behemoths on land or in the sky.
But the older I got, the more my war media matured to stories exploring the human cost, and I found Ace Combat 8 to be similarly more than a power fantasy. Striving to liberate your home country and subjugate the enemy to sue for peace, clashing with enemy aces in combat and ideology, destroying metal colossi — that makes AC8 feel like a stealth Gundam game. Yoshiyuki Tomino’s anime about giant mecha battling over the course of a horrific war, anchored around an ace and the carrier ship they call home alongside a crew with their own dramas, feels like an inspiration. While I still enjoyed the glee of blowing enemies out of the sky in AC8, the characters, like in Gundam, were quick to remind me that they just wanted to go home.
Ace Combat 8 has its own modern touches. A corporate bigwig taking it upon himself to be the Endurance’s social media coordinator manipulates images to make it seem like the ship’s dwindling air wing is far larger, then sends them into the world. Ace Combat series brand director Kazutoki Kono told me at a preview for the game in June that public image is just one of the player’s challenges: “On a much larger scale, I think social media and misinformation is another challenge that teams have to overcome nowadays.”
Without spoilers, the game engages with the dangers of spreading misinformation, chief among them the titular Wings of Theve itself — a title the player’s nameless pilot inherits from the dead legend who takes up residence in their head. Is the pilot really an ace if their record is constantly exaggerated, even if it’s done to boost the flagging morale of the scattered remnants of a nation? That’s squared against the realities of your squadmates and the very real danger they all fly into.
That question of authenticity is reflected in the choices made by Kono and the rest of the Project Aces team, who developed Ace Combat 8. Fans of its 2019 predecessor, Ace Combat 7, disliked fighting the hordes of unmanned drones in that game — “they actually enjoyed the man-on-man dogfight experience with the radio chatter and the heated discussions and conversations,” Kono told me in a chat last December. It’s clear how much they focused on pilot discussions in AC8 to uplift the humans at the controls, and it’s fitting that the team sought out real-life fighter pilots to improve the realism of their game.
Screenshot by David Lumb/CNETBy the end of Ace Combat 8, I felt pushed to my limits, hurling my jet through high-G turns to eke out the barest edge during tense dogfights and screaming across the sky to support my squaddies. Yet it’s always against a beautiful tableau of blue firmament and white cloud, an endless aerial landscape I felt awed to behold in mission after mission.
At the end of it all, when I fired my last missile, my aching hands finally relaxed. Together with my squad, I looked out at the sky, the site of so much conflict over a dramatic 30 missions. As the enemy wreckage drifted earthward, the sun glinted off our cockpits and the space between clouds cleared, ready for the bold aviator who can’t get enough of the blue yonder.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is out now for PC, Xbox Series X and S, and PlayStation 5.
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