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Game review
ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE
From: Project Aces / Bandai Namco
For: PS5, XBox X/S, PC
★★★★
Can you really make a war-themed piece of entertainment that’s truly anti-war? It’s one for the English majors and philosophers perhaps, and also very specifically for the Project Aces team at Bandai Namco, back for their eighth go at Ace Combat. Though the series is now more than thirty years old (!), the 2026 edition of the flight combat games arrives once again trying to carefully tightrope-walk a approach that argues both A) war is very bad and a plague on our species and it would be much better if we all put aside our differences and worked together to our mutual benefit (no disagreement); and B) it’s super cool to unleash a salvo of rockets at a gigantic battleship and then pull your A-10 out of its dive into a snap roll just in time to avoid ploughing into the gigantic struts of a huge space elevator (no disagreement). Duality of man, innit?
For the uninitiated, the Ace Combat games make their ongoing attempts at this ludonarrative dissonance easier by shifting events over to a sort of alt-Earth with a different arrangement of landmasses and countries and history, where (for some reason) they’ve come up with all the same fighter plane designs as us, but which also leaves the game designers free to lob in enlivening elements that we haven’t quite got round to realising on our version of the planet yet, like ‘‘land battleships’’, satellite doomsday weapons or that aforementioned space elevator.
There’s a whole fictional history to all this (doubtless there’s a wiki somewhere), but all you really need to know for the purposes of Wings of Theve is that you’re taking the role of Rex, one of the last remaining pilots of the Federation of Usea, a large nation which has been all-but-defeated after an invasion by the rival nation of Sotoa, and who is thrust by circumstances into the Dread Pirate Roberts-like role of the Wings of Theve — a fictional ace more or less made up for propaganda purposes. It’s thus up to you to take to the skies to turn the war around and put some substance into the legend.
Ace Combat’s ‘‘realistic-but-not’’ approach continues into gameplay itself; flying the not-so-friendly skies isn’t a Microsoft Flight Simulator-like experience (you’ll never have to worry about a flap or remembering to lower your landing gear), but there’s enough in the complexity of the flight controls, all the beautifully mapped terrain underneath you and some neat details — like rain splattering on your canopy as you plunge into a spectacular cloudbank — to make it feel properly like you’ve taken to the skies. Just blatting along a few metres above the ocean waves is pretty tops (just make sure you pay attention if a voice from the speaker in your controller starts telling you to pull up).
But you’re not alone out there, of course. The Sotoans don’t fancy you interfering with their all-but-assured victory and will provide plenty of opposition. This means the the 30 or so campaign missions essentially consist of you flitting around trying to get missile locks on air, ground or naval targets many, many times, but the lengths Wings of Theve goes to to constantly inject some variety or a little twist into this basic formula is admirable. At various times you’ll fly not only escorts but stealth missions and obstacle course escapes, go up against gigantic land and air superweapons, have to identify targets visually or be railgunned out of the sky if you fly too high. You also have a squad of wingmen at your (basic) command in each mission, and when you throw in a giant upgrade tree of various shiny new aircraft and weapons to slowly unlock, there’s plenty of ways to approach things.
In between all the actual flying, you’ll be getting plenty of another Ace Combat staple: melodrama. A big cast of characters moves in and out of the CnCs and sitreps and AWACs of it all via plentiful cutscenes (some extensive), tactical map displays and a lot of in-mission radio chat (which can actually be hard to pay enough attention to when you’re busy, you know, flying a damn fighter jet through a warzone) to tell the story of the conflict. ‘‘War is hell’’ is that main series theme again here, but there’s also an evil corporation in the mix, ideas about misinformation and nationalism and even a rueful ghost, all in a narrative style that could be described as ‘‘classically Japanese videogame’’.
Your mileage may vary on all this; there were some lines that made your somewhat cynical reviewer burst out laughing, but if you’re prepared to pick up what it’s laying down there’s effective stuff too, like hearing the despairing last words of the guys in the tank column who are dying because you didn’t get your showboating tail over the ridgeline fast enough to save them, you useless idiot. It all comes to a showstopping finale with some of the game’s most memorable and frantic missions and, even if you might feel like reaching for a cracker occasionally as things start heading in a cheese-resembling direction, once again the effort certainly can’t be faulted.
For those so inclined, post-campaign there’s also an exhaustive suite of online multiplayer options with cross-platform support (and even a little bit of its own world-building) and modes that range from 8-player free-for-all furballs to co-operating with friends against AI enemies or bosses and a sort of battlefield supremacy. Though I haven’t had the chance to spend a lot of time with it yet, there looks to be plenty there to keep you flying, although — how 2026 — the unfortunate grime of microtransactions does lie over things somewhat. Sigh.
Overall though, after a more than 7-year gap since Ace Combat 7, Wings of Theve is a highly polished effort that shows why this somewhat esoteric series has nevertheless built a dedicated fanbase that keeps coming back for more. You’re telling me I can both live out my Top Gun power fantasies and contemplate man’s inhumanity to man, all in the same evening? Sign me up.