Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve review: soaring combat, snoreworthy story

Ace Combat 8, the latest installment in Project Aces’ long-running arcade flight sim series, is here. Packed inside this game’s cargo hold is a medley of melodrama, mission types, and a beautiful new look, but it’s somewhat over capacity when it comes to cutscenes.

You’ll discover this right from the off: Ace Combat 8 is the first game in the series where its cutscenes are entirely from a first-person perspective.

You step into the shoes of Rex, a pilot in service with the navy of the Federation of Central Usea (FCU). Sotoa, a nation of former nomads, has decided to emulate the Mongols of our reality and has conquest in mind, with the FCU already almost completely subjugated at the start of the game. Said shoes are likely very damp, with events kicking off on a life raft after the helicopter you were in went down.

Soon, you’re back in the sky as a navigator for Jan “Rex” Cope, the original Rex, who is the mythical Wings of Theve of the game’s subtitle. This strongly evokes the Ghost of Kyiv, a mythical pilot heavily propagandized early in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, but Cope soon comes a cropper and gets killed, forcing you to take over his role.

A huge part of the game’s narrative is about propaganda and the role that social media plays in modern warfare. Wings, as a pilot, can’t be allowed to die, so you need to fill in and lead his Joker Flight unit. The former Rex, however, doesn’t disappear; his spirit serves as a near-omniscient narrator for the rest of the game’s escapades.

Flying without wings

What escapades they are, too. Over the course of the game, which is significantly longer than Ace Combat 7 (with my playthrough clocking in at around 18 hours to complete all 30 missions), you’ll do almost everything you could reasonably expect a pilot to do. Dogfights, close air support, attacks on enemy ships, and more.

Joker Flight will accompany you through most of it, and happily, every member has a well-fleshed-out personality. There’s Ellington “Professor” Baxter, an easy-going and ever-professional former university lecturer; Tasha Severskaya, an ex-stunt pilot; and William “Noise” Coster, a taciturn musician who provides soundtracks to some of your battles.

While this lineup gets chopped and changed as you progress through the story, it’s these three at your side for the vast majority of the game. They’re great, and they make the entire squadron feel cohesive, and the stakes feel real when one of them gets in trouble.

The same can’t be said for the wider crew of the Carrier Endurance, your home away from home. Your commander and D.D., a propaganda officer of the shadowy Enso Order corporation, are broadly cliched, and spending time with them feels tedious.

Unfortunately, you’ll be watching a series of lengthy cutscenes before you’re actually flying a plane, and the prologue mission is effectively another cutscene as you escape the vexatious aim of The Shadows, Sotoa’s elite pilots.

There’s occasionally mild participation encouraged of you, such as standing up at attention or shaking someone’s hand by pressing a button. I’m genuinely somewhat surprised that the series is bold enough to give us QTEs again, after the infamous tragicomedy of the “press triangle to fist pump” moment in Ace Combat: Assault Horizon.

You’re not out of the woods when you’re done with the first mission, though. Scattered throughout the game like little narrative landmines are cutscenes that go on for far too long and rarely give you a payoff worth your time. It feels like an Ace Combat game that was co-developed by Hideo Kojima at several points. But for all of this opera, the ending feels remarkably flat.

Without spoiling anything, the game spends hours building up a foe who then crumbles within a few minutes of dogfighting. Then it does it again! It makes the stakes feel wasted.

Cloudy with a chance of missiles

None of that matters, though, when you throttle up, break the sound barrier, and punch through the clouds in pursuit of an enemy, or dive, shrieking, towards a tank that you’re about to remind about the superiority of being able to move in three dimensions. What clouds, too.

If I may digress for a moment, Ace Combat 8 has by far the best-looking clouds in any game I’ve played. They rely on proprietary software called Cloudly, and it leads to them feeling far more lifelike than ever before. Beautiful and light on the outside, dense in the middle, like an inverse cookie, they look and feel absolutely stupendous.

Ace Combat has always had a knack for making you feel like an ace, and this new entry is no exception. Wheeling around the sky like Maverick, pulling off impossible maneuvers in a plane like an A-10 Thunderbolt, and pulling up from a collision course at the last possible moment all fulfil the fantasy that the title promises.

Here, you are the greatest pilot to ever live. Difficulty is very well-balanced, too, with the Shadows feeling noticeably tougher, harking back to the days of facing off against enemy aces in F-22 Interceptor on the Mega Drive, if you’re as old as I am.

The problem is, spectacular clouds aside, there doesn’t seem to be all that much that separates this game from Ace Combat 7. It harkens back to Ace Combat 5 in a lot of ways: for instance, you can give wingmen commands again and pick their aircraft, but it doesn’t seem to make a ton of difference in-game.

Missions are broadly successful or unsuccessful regardless of how you command your wingmen, while loadouts only really matter to the extent of picking roughly the right aircraft for the mission. This leads to the issue of wondering why you’d choose to play this game rather than Ace Combat 7, other than the clouds looking nicer, especially as you can buy it with all DLC for a fraction of the price.

I’m realising how negative a lot of this sounds, and that really does just come down to how cumbersomely crowbarred in a lot of the story is. Once you’ve been through it and are willing to skip cutscenes, you’re left with a brisk, exciting, fun game. It is perhaps emblematic of both the best and worst aspects of the Ace Combat series, with a narrative that feels it has earned plaudits that it doesn’t deserve, while the meat of the game is absolutely fantastic.

One key measure of this is that I’ve been going back to it since I beat it, unlocking new aircraft from the large Aircraft Tree and replaying missions with different loadouts. I’ll likely lose a lot of hours to the multiplayer, too, because, once again, it lacks a lot of what there is to dislike.

It’s a game that is infuriating in its bloviation, but when you soar above the clouds and take down enemy jets, hearing their cries of confusion over the radio, you won’t care anymore. A great, gorgeous game, but one that likes the sound of its own voice just a little too much.

Should you play Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

Accessibility settings are limited, but are present. The game features a colorblind mode that changes the green HUD to violet. There are also text-to-speech settings present.

In addition to these, you can also choose between two flight models: one that gives you more granular control over your aircraft and one that makes the game handle much more simply, making it more like After Burner.

How I reviewed Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve

To review Ace Combat 8, I finished the entire main storyline and then went back to play several missions in Free Mission mode.

I ran the game at high graphics settings on my Nvidia RTX 4070-powered gaming PC and had a generally solid 60 fps that only dipped during particularly hectic moments. I’m yet to go online, but I’m looking forward to trying it out once the servers are populated.

I played the game using a standard Xbox Wireless Controller, which worked perfectly throughout.