Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve Review

Ace Combat's long-running formula gets a bolder presentation, flexible aircraft progression, and a story that embraces its strange identity.

More than thirty years into the series, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is now defined by the very quirks that once made Ace Combat feel so strange and out of place. You get arcade-style jet combat rather than a strict flight simulator, fictional wars instead of real-world military history, dramatic radio conversations, huge set pieces, and music that can turn an ordinary dogfight into something much bigger. 

The latest entry arrives more than seven years after Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown and carries the experience Project Aces has built across the franchise. The setting places you in 2029, during a war that has left the Federation of Central Usea badly damaged.

The Republic of Sotoa has invaded and occupied much of the country, scattering its military forces and leaving refugees and surviving personnel aboard the aging carrier Endurance. You begin in a supporting role before circumstances push you into the cockpit and eventually into the identity of the legendary Wings of Theve.

That legend is deliberately complicated. The famous pilot is presented as a symbol of hope, but the myth was manufactured as propaganda. The person behind it becomes important to your story in a way that is both strange and very fitting for this series.

After Wings is shot down, his presence continues through your character, Rex. His memories, comments, and perspective become part of the campaign, making the story feel like a military drama mixed with a supernatural or psychological gimmick.

You experience much of the narrative from a first-person viewpoint between missions.

Cutscenes let you interact with people through small actions such as salutes and handshakes, while the squad develops through conversations during and after operations. Jan Cope, the commanding presence tied to your story, stays involved throughout the campaign, while Dealer handles communications in his own poker-inspired way of speaking.

Your Joker Flight squad also brings its own personalities, including Professor Baxter, Tasha, and Coster. Tasha stands out in particular, since she's a civilian pilot who had never killed anyone before being pulled into the conflict. At the same time, Coster is associated with music and even gets involved in a rescue operation connected to a rock band.

The writing is not always subtle. You get earnest speeches about borders, heroism, loss, and the people affected by war, alongside ideas about social media, artificial intelligence, misinformation, and manipulated images. Those themes are present, but they are not explored with the depth their premise could support.

Instead, the campaign uses them as part of a larger melodramatic military story. At times, the dialogue feels as exaggerated as older Japanese games, and some scenes can feel awkward or overly dramatic. Still, that earnestness is part of what gives Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve its personality. You are not getting a restrained war drama.

You are getting a story that wants its myths, pilots, villains, music, and sky to feel larger than life.

That approach works because the flying remains the center of everything. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve gives you an arcade flight system that is easy to understand without making the aircraft feel weightless. You accelerate, brake, fire the machine gun, launch missiles, switch weapons, target enemies, and issue squad commands.

With Expert controls, you can manually roll the aircraft and make tighter adjustments in the air, while the simplified option makes the controls easier for newcomers. Once you become comfortable with Expert controls, the movement starts to feel natural.

The planes have enough weight to make every maneuver matter. High-G turns pull you through tight engagements, missile barrages force quick reactions, and enemy aircraft can punish you when you stop paying attention to their movement.

You constantly read the sky, judge trajectories, position yourself behind targets, and decide when to commit to an attack. It stays accessible because Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve doesn't demand the precision of a hardcore simulator, but it still offers enough control to make improving your flying worthwhile.

Your aircraft choice also changes how you approach missions.

The progression system branches through an aircraft tree, allowing you to unlock new planes, special weapons, and parts using MRP earned from missions, training, and other activities. Some aircraft are built for air-to-air fighting, others specialize in attacking ground targets, and multirole options sit in between.

Reconnaissance aircraft offer another role, though that category isn't essential to the main campaign. Parts give you another layer of control over your loadout. Different upgrades can improve maneuverability, speed, missile locking, weapon strength, or ammunition capacity.

A ground-heavy operation can reward a loadout built around heavier weapons, while another mission can make speed, maneuverability, and reliable missile attacks more useful. Special weapons can lock onto multiple targets or provide other advantages, but carrying them also means managing limited ammunition.

The campaign contains 30 missions, and the variety is one of its strongest features. You are not simply sent into the same open sky and told to shoot down aircraft repeatedly. One operation can place you behind mountain cover while long-range missiles threaten your position. Another can focus on supporting ground forces, destroying key structures, or taking down large numbers of enemies.

Elsewhere, you may have to follow contrails toward stealth aircraft, avoid radar detection while flying low, work through clouds, or chase a rocket after it launches. Some missions deliberately create those big cinematic moments that define Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. You can face giant land battleships, railguns, huge groups of targets, or individual ace pilots who force you into close one-on-one engagements.

Objectives can also change as the story develops, so a mission that starts as one type of operation can turn into something very different.

The cloud system matters a great deal here, because it isn't just a visual touch meant to make the sky look prettier. Clouds can interfere with your awareness, hide aircraft, and break missile locks when used correctly. Rain can spread across the cockpit, and weather can make the environment feel like part of the mission rather than a background image.

Combat itself stays straightforward, but the situations built around it provide the depth. You use standard missiles for most engagements, machine guns when you get close enough, and special weapons when the mission or target makes them worthwhile.

Some weapons can lock onto several aircraft, while others suit ground targets better. Flare deployment helps you survive incoming missiles, and advanced maneuvers such as the Cobra can give you another way to change your position in a dogfight. The strongest part of the combat is combining these simple tools with mission scripting.

You can spend one moment maintaining radar awareness and the next dealing with a completely different threat. Larger aircraft can expose several targets for you to lock onto, while ground operations can turn the battlefield into a much busier environment. The campaign also gives you squad commands that have more purpose than simple flavor.

You can direct teammates toward special weapons, aggressive attacks, or fallback behavior,

There are a few rough edges. Some of the 30 missions feel stretched by simpler objectives, and the pacing occasionally dips when Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve moves through more basic tasks. More open-ended annihilation missions would also have been welcome, since they let you freely choose targets while working under a time limit.

Reconnaissance doesn't become as important as its aircraft category might suggest, and squad commands can sometimes feel less influential once the battlefield gets crowded. Even with those limitations, the campaign gives you enough reasons to replay missions. Four difficulty levels, from Rookie through Elite, change how demanding the combat becomes.

Your results also feed into rankings based on factors such as score, time, and restarts. You can return with different aircraft, weapons, upgrades, and approaches, which makes the aircraft tree more meaningful than a simple unlock checklist. The actual act of flying is also unusually satisfying. The planes move through detailed environments filled with mountains, buildings, coastlines, clouds, sunlight, and weather.

You get a strong sense of speed without losing control, and the scenery gives you plenty to notice when the battlefield briefly becomes quiet. The cloud rendering is particularly effective, while sunsets and HDR lighting give the larger skies a cinematic quality without making them feel disconnected from Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve.

The visual design also serves the mechanics.

You can lose sight of an aircraft inside a cloud, use terrain to avoid threats, or fly close to the ground during radar-avoidance sequences. Rain on the cockpit adds atmosphere, but it also reinforces the feeling of being physically inside the aircraft.

On PS5, the performance options include Performance and Fidelity modes, with Performance targeting 60 frames per second. The game also uses DualSense adaptive triggers, while the PC version is similarly optimized. It also supports XBOX Series X and Series S. Sound is just as important as the visuals.

The soundtrack moves between orchestral pieces, Spanish guitar, rock, and J-rock influences, depending on what the campaign needs. Music can become more intense as a mission develops, with musical layers and motifs responding to what is happening on screen. Instead of simply playing a track from beginning to end, the score can feel like it is building alongside the operation. You also hear the battlefield constantly.

Aircraft engines, missile warnings, weapons, radio calls, explosions, and enemy communications all compete for your attention. That creates immersion, but the amount of radio chatter can become a problem. At busy moments, command instructions, squadmates, ground forces, enemy taunts, and warning systems can overlap with combat sounds and music. Important information can occasionally get buried in the noise.

Still, the overall sound design does a lot to sell the scale of the conflict.

The music also gives certain characters extra personality. Coster's guitar and his love of music give the squad a few calm moments between missions, and as the campaign goes on, the themes it keeps coming back to start to mean something different. The score is not simply there to make combat sound exciting. It helps establish the factions' identity, underline emotional turns, and make the biggest encounters feel like events.

The online side adds a substantial second layer, although the campaign remains the part that can be judged most clearly here. The online hub lets you create a character, manage a hangar, visit shops, take on challenges, and play arcade-style extras such as Pac-Man and Galaga.

Randomized supply rewards, cosmetic items, skins, emblems, and an Ace Pass with free and premium progression are available. Online aircraft and parts are handled separately from most campaign progression. The game also offers several multiplayer formats, including large 100-player battles, cooperative modes, PvP battles, four-versus-four matches, eight-player free-for-alls, and limited-time activities such as Scramble and Emergency Sorties.

Co-op modes can use threat levels and score multipliers, giving you another reason to focus on objectives instead of simply chasing kills. However, questions around monetization, battle-pass progression, and whether paid options could create meaningful advantages remain important considerations for the online side.

For the single-player campaign, though, the formula feels like a natural continuation of what Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has been building toward.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve does not abandon its arcade roots to chase realism. Instead, it makes the aircraft, environments, missions, music, and story work together more closely. The result is a campaign where a ridiculous plot device can sit beside a serious idea about war, and somehow both can make sense within the same mission.

You can criticize the story for leaving some modern themes underdeveloped, and you can notice uneven pacing between major set pieces. The radio chatter can become excessive, some objectives feel less memorable, and the multiplayer's long-term balance cannot be fully judged from the campaign alone.

Yet the core flying remains strong enough that those issues rarely undermine the entire experience. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve works because it understands what it's supposed to feel like. You get accessible controls, demanding aerial battles, dramatic mission changes, strange character writing, huge skies, and a soundtrack that knows exactly when to become louder.

The story doesn't always land cleanly, but its sincerity makes the melodrama easier to accept. The campaign also benefits from progression that supports experimentation. You are not locked into one aircraft or one fighting style. As you earn MRP and open new branches of the aircraft tree, you can change how you handle later missions.

Upgrades can strengthen a weakness or push a plane further toward a particular role.

That flexibility encourages you to revisit earlier operations and see how a different machine changes the same encounter. The most memorable moments come when all of those systems line up. You can dodge a missile, slip through clouds, find a target's tail, and watch the soundtrack rise at the same time.

A battlefield that looked chaotic seconds earlier suddenly becomes readable, and your next maneuver determines whether you survive the exchange. That is where the series' particular kind of arcade flight combat makes the most sense. By the end, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve feels less like a reinvention and more like a confident continuation.

It takes the accessible flight model, mission-driven campaign, aircraft customization, cinematic presentation, and musical identity that have defined the franchise and pushes them further. The story has rough spots, and the online structure deserves its own scrutiny, but the campaign gives you a strong reason to keep flying.

You get a 30-mission campaign built around varied objectives, flexible aircraft progression, detailed skies, dramatic sound design, and an intentionally melodramatic war story. The writing can be awkward, and some missions drag, but the flying, mission variety, customization, music, and presentation consistently bring the experience back together.