It’s been over 20 years since the Ace Combat series was brought to life. The frantic franchise is an arcade-driven flight shooter in which you command all sorts of airships, mixing and matching different weapons and customizing your loadout to best fit each mission’s needs. The games are also, well, quite bonkers more often than not, featuring stories that are, quite frankly, campy and absurd in interesting ways. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown featured a JPEG of a dog in a cutscene, as well as a ridiculously long name pronounced in a stern, serious voice.
Whenever you boot up an Ace Combat game, you roughly know to expect the aforementioned elements, while the accompanying presentation and features do the heavy lifting to push things ever forward. At times, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve just almost achieves this goal, but largely, it remains a fairly tame experience, despite trying hard to innovate in the process.
I’d like to preface the review by mentioning that I’ll only cover the single-player campaign of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve as, unfortunately, online capabilities were not enabled during the pre-release process I was in. This is also a good opportunity to mention just how much developer Bandai Namco Aces is betting on it, pushing for a live service angle, including a battle pass and the series’ first online lobby, which will feature an air base populated by other users’ custom avatars. From there, you can team up with others and take on an array of modes, including co-op and support for cross platform play. Time will tell how exactly this will all turn out with a lobby filled with random people, and how the developer aims to use the model for longevity in the times ahead.
The new story features 30 missions, and is bolstered by a focus on first-person cutscenes where almost every character stares at the camera, and therefore at you, for a bit too long at times. There’s a good balance between cutscenes and the time you spend inside an airship aiming at red dots on your radar, but the former definitely has a strong presence here that takes some time getting used to.
As the title not-so-subtly implies, you’re the lead of the Wings of Theve after the baton is passed onto you following an unexpected tragedy. As an already established squad, you get a cohort of accompanying characters that will join you in the skies as well as at base during missions. Don’t expect any standout personalities from them, however, as they all fit fairly common archetypes. Yet, there’s really strong animation and voice over work that help bring them to life, even if the story itself doesn’t really allow them to truly shine or leave a substantial mark.
Speaking of which, there are additions to the way you interact with the story that initially seem to hint at more player agency than they actually commit to. During cutscenes, you can zoom in on characters and, from time to time, respond to button prompts to shake hands or read a document. Then, when on a mission, you’ll often be asked for input regarding strategies, as well as receiving yes or no questions that tend to be more banter. Both of these features add some color to the experience, but that’s as far as they go, as they don’t influence the story or your relationship with characters in any way. Aside from cutscenes, you’ll mostly be looking at others as planes in the distance during missions.
One neat addition is being able to choose your squad’s loadout, which includes the airship and secondary weapons. Depending on the mission type, you’ll likely need to cover air-to-air or air-to-ground combat, or sometimes both, for which a hybrid-type airship is more beneficial. Of course, the key here is to mix and match, and have your squad compensate for any of your weakest stats with their own loadout. You can’t fully customize your squad’s stats, however, as powerups and addons are exclusive to your own airship. And, if you don’t wanna fuss with any of it, you can choose to auto-sort and, 99 percent of the time, hear the handler say “that is a great formation for this mission” without much effort involved.
Throughout the campaign, you can expect multiple objective types that will inevitably repeat over time. Missions are fairly linear, mostly having you go from point A to B while taking down enemy airships, destroying ground targets like towers and turrets, and of course, fly in circles to try and nail missiles to moving navy units. Others are more of a free roam affair, taking you into a large map with a vast number of enemies to take down and a score threshold to meet in a certain time.
The latter felt great until they began to appear way more often than not, which led me to realize that the time limit and the score goal don’t gel together that well. I always ended up not only meeting but exceeding the necessary score with a long chunk of time to spare. Sure, I continued fighting and killing other units on the map, but I wish I could just skip ahead. Some missions do involve certain story events that happen after the main objective is done, which is nice, but doesn’t make up for the minutes you spend flying pretty much aimlessly in between.
When it comes to the moment-to-moment flying, it plays fairly similar to Ace Combat 7, which isn’t a bad thing. Select your weapon of choice, lock on a target, and see the projectiles hit or miss in real time as photorealistic clouds and a gorgeous sunset obfuscate your vision. Your loadout choices do play a big part in how you tackle each mission, and you will always feel the difference between airships that have low or high maneuverability. It’s also possible to give commands to your squad, which range from attacking the target you currently have tagged, each doing their own thing, providing cover by focusing on any enemies targeting you, and also enabling secondary weapons. Don’t expect them to blaze through everything, but they can be competent enough to take down targets without you having to do all the work.
Throughout my time with Ace Combat 8, I experienced several moments where the stakes of a mission were high and tension was preventing me from landing that one final attack to bring it home. Pulling off last-minute stunts before a timer runs out never gets old, and it’s moments like these that make the experience feel exhilarating. After a while, however, the overall story wasn’t grabbing my attention anymore, and the campaign seemed unnecessarily long at times, as it could have benefitted from fewer missions and a stronger focus on its core strengths instead.
Still, there’s a particular feeling to Ace Combat that still remains at the core of Wings of Theve, which is as alluring as ever. Some of its new additions might not be enough to stand out in this long-running series, and its focus on live service features may paint a different future for where the franchise is flying toward. Yet, up there, in the skies, after completing a successful mission, there’s a specific tone and rhythm that is tempting to seek over and over, even when the accompanying experience is overly familiar.
