Ace Combat 8 Is a Very Grounded Game Set in the Skies | IGN Preview

It starts with a helicopter fishing me out of the water with another survivor. The year is 2029: The Federation of Central Usea has been shattered by the Republic of Sotoa. My savior is the Endurance, a relic of an aircraft carrier still fighting the good fight even if victory no longer seems possible. After a perfunctory medical exam, I’m shoved back into a cockpit. But not as a pilot. Instead, as the navigator to Jan “Rex” Cope, the Wings of Theve, Usea’s legendary ace pilot.

It’s a lie. All of it. Cope has never shot anyone down. His kill count is entirely fabricated. Mostly, when trouble comes, he and his squadron kick in their afterburners and run. His job is to stay alive to make sure the Wings of Theve lives to fight another day. Folks need heroes. Gives them hope. And that’s more important than whether or not any single pilot is a legend.

My mission with Cope goes well right up until it doesn’t. When the actually-legendary Shadow 22 shows up hunting for us, Cope decides to run. Cope’s good, despite his lack of kills. He’s very, very good. But he’s not good enough. As our plane sinks into the sea, I grab his dog tags. “Start swimming, soldier,” he urges me, from beyond the grave. “Make it home alive.”

So I do. The Endurance needs a new Wings of Theve, and I’m it, complete with Cope’s actual callsign, “Rex.” My goal isn’t to shoot down enemy pilots or complete missions. Not really. It’s to be a symbol, a blank canvas upon which a propaganda machine might paint whatever story they like. It’s to come back alive so that story can continue. “I am become a name,” said Tennyson’s Ulysses. Like him, I am an idea of a myth. But when legend becomes fact, print the legend. Or in this case, hope it goes viral on social media.

Ace Combat has always, always been a political series. To be clear, none of this is a spoiler. It all happens in Ace Combat 8’s first mission, and if you’ve seen the reveal trailer, you’ve seen the core plot beats. But it makes for a fascinating setup for a story. Ace Combat has always, always been a political series. And despite the best efforts of many video games to co-opt the aesthetics and scenarios and mechanics of war while tying themselves into pretzels to avoid offending anyone or making a connection to the real world or saying anything of substance, war, even in fictional representations, is and always will be political. And as Kazutoki Kono, Ace Combat Series Brand Director, told me, Ace Combat 8’s story was very much inspired by what’s happening in the real world.

“In past Ace Combats, we think about, ‘Okay, well, where are we starting in this story? What's the circumstance of the world and what kind of hero do we want the players to feel like or become at the end?’ And we'll start reverse engineering the beats that would be required to reach that. And ultimately in the current landscape we thought about, ‘Well, how will the player feel when they become this ace pilot and hero in this world?’ And one factor was how that player is perceived through social media. And in thinking about the social media in our current society, it's flooded with timelines that you can't even tell whether or not they're true or false. So the world is in this state of chaos and we chose that as our starting point in looking at, ‘Okay, well, are these false wings or are they real?’”

It’s something that the story interrogates in the missions I play. When I take on the role of the Wings of Theve, I’m quickly forced into scenarios where I can’t just run. I have to take out enemy fighters. Tasha, a member of your squadron and former circus pilot who’s so talented on the stick that she can outfly other pilots and act as a decoy without notching kills, notices the change almost immediately. Cope’s style had its drawbacks, but it kept his squadron alive and they rarely had to shoot anyone down. Once I take over, though, things start to change, and the Wings of Theve quickly become less a legend and more of a name that inspires hatred in the hearts of your foes because you killed their friends.

But the story has an emotional core, too. You’ll spend time with the other pilots in your squadron – called Joker Flight – during briefings and chat before missions or while you’re walking to your planes. Something as simple as eating together matters, and Wings of Theve takes the time to show you that. Even the decision to have Cope stick around in your head as what Kono describes to me as the “voice of God [who] narrates you through the story” matters because it helped build a connection with my fellow pilots in the missions I played. It doesn’t hurt that all of these sequences are utterly stunning. Ace Combat has always been something of a technical marvel, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Ace Combat 8 is one of the best-looking video games I’ve ever seen, whether you’re in the cockpit or have your boots planted on the Endurance's deck.

I got to play several missions set across the early parts of Ace Combat’s campaign, and if you’ve ever played an Ace Combat game before, especially Ace Combat 7, you should feel right at home. One cool but subtle change in Ace Combat 8, however, is you can hit an enemy plane anywhere (as opposed to previous games, where you had to damage defined “containers” that would mark where the plane could take damage) and destroy them. Kono told me that he believes there are three pillars that define Ace Combat: “The first is photorealistic renditions of the sky and that sense of freedom as you fly through it. The second is the satisfaction you get from dogfights with enemies and shooting them down. And the third is this hero experience that you get from becoming the ace pilot that that story requires.”

All of those are here in spades. Wings of Theve is stunning; dogfights are incredibly satisfying (do yourself a favor and switch to expert controls, even if, like me, you’re a little rusty); and by the end of my time with Ace Combat 8, I did feel like the Wings of Theve, even though that clearly came at a cost to both myself and the other members of Joker Flight.

What I admired most about what I saw, though, was the mission design. In one, Joker Flight was tasked with taking out aircraft and ships on an island chain. As the mission opens, you run into an enemy squadron. I'd blow past them quickly, taking out what I could along the way, trying to get to the ports and airfields as soon as I could. It would take a moment for our foes to scramble their fighters and get their ships underway, and if I could beat them to it, I could take them out without much resistance.

What I admired most about what I saw, though, was the mission design. It was a good idea, in theory, and if I was a better pilot I might have managed it. But blowing past that first squadron meant they'd be hot on our heels as soon as they turned around, and that momentary advantage we enjoyed would only matter if we could do enough damage before ships were out of port and their planes were in the air. What won it for me was a change in tactics: I took out the fighters in the air first, even if it took a little bit longer, but it meant an easier time later on as long as I was smart.

What makes Wings of Theve's levels great, though, is that there are plenty of ways to accomplish your mission. Yeah, my way worked, but I also could have taken a tricky shortcut through a tight tunnel, racking up points and kills along the way. How you approach a mission is up to you

Part of that starts with the aircraft and weapons you select before each mission. A later mission tasked me with destroying a massive land battleship (which is exactly what it sounds like) armed with rail guns (which is exactly as scary as it sounds). “Okay,” I thought, stupidly. “I’ll use the F/A-18F, load that bad boy up with air-to-surface missiles and take him out, and I’ll take some anti-aircraft missiles as insurance.”

That was a really bad plan. After getting thoroughly worked because I couldn’t do enough damage to the land battleship, I dropped the anti-aircraft missiles for guided penetration bombs. And that was still hard, because I had to get close to the land battleship. But it worked. You can also set up your squadron before each mission, too, if you like (or set them to auto if you’re like me and just looking to get to the action). What’s remarkable about that mission, though, is that despite the inherent silliness of a land battleship, it carries a lot of pathos. People are screaming and dying and terrified, and it feels like it’s on you and your squadron to stop something that feels unbeatable.

It probably shouldn’t work, but it does, and part of that is based on how much attention to detail Kono says goes into making sure those lines on the radio land. “It's hard to describe how much attention to detail we put into it, but there is oftentimes a lot of radio communication that happens while you're in the jet and I'll often tell my sound team, ‘Hey, play this line of dialogue,’ because the dialogue has a lot of information as well, and then 0.7 seconds later we want to hit them with this line and if it was one second, it would create a different kind of emotional response. So it's very important that we shave off those 0.3 seconds. So that's the sort of granular level at which I'm looking at how that radio chatter hits the players.”

By far my favorite mission, though, was the final one of my demo. It brings everything that made my time with Wings of Theve work together. Our mission was simple: take out a group of massive transports carrying land battleship parts before they can get to Rocky Island. The issue? We’d be jammed and flying through cloud cover. We’d have to keep an eye out for their contrails and spot them ourselves.

Missions like this allow you to really appreciate the level of visual detail Ace Combat 8 brings to the party, not just because it looks good, but because it tells you something. “Just looking pretty is not going to be enough in terms of the visual expression,” Kono told me. The visuals need to fundamentally tie into the function of the gameplay itself. So the shape of the cloud, for example, if it's very thin and you're going to be at high altitude, if it's thicker, it's lower altitude. And when you see water droplets on the cockpit, that means you're within a cloud and if you chase this vapored streak, you'll know that there's probably a plane at the end of whatever that is and if enemies are showing black smoke, that means they've taken on a lot of damage. So the visual expression and fidelity of the graphics is one thing, but what that communicates to the player for us was going to be equally important.”

It was something I felt as I played that final mission. Following another plane through thick clouds wasn’t just scary because I couldn’t see, but because my plane would start icing up. But flying through a thinner cloud was beautiful because I could appreciate the water droplets that clung to my cockpit. When I chased down those transports because I recognized their contrails, followed them, and got close enough to line up my machine guns with their engine, that success was mine. I had a general idea of where they were, but I had to figure out their location and the altitude they were flying at. It was a designed success, of course. All games are. But I still felt like I’d pulled it off, which is the magic trick.

At its best, Ace Combat has always rewarded split-second decision making and smart play, and that’s still true based on my time with Wings of Theve. When the 55th Shadow Unit showed up, I got to experience the best of Ace Combat 8’s dogfighting in one place: hitting the perfect missile shot from a long-range lock because I’d chosen weapons that worked well for what the mission was asking of me; pulling off a high-G turn to evade a missile at the last second; dropping chaff and flares to stay behind that transport plane so I could strafe its engines long enough to take it down; and shooting down the transport flying highest so its debris would crash down onto the planes behind it. At its best, Ace Combat has always rewarded split-second decision making and smart play, and that’s still true based on my time with Wings of Theve.

When I asked Kono about allowing players the freedom to play how they chose while challenging them, he told me this. I think it speaks for itself: “Whenever I approach game design or like sort of level design, I think of myself looking at like a giant fish tank and I have a stick that I'm kind of stirring things up with. And I think game interactivity is all about, ‘Well, what do we attach to this stick? What toolkits does the player have?’ And in the case of Ace Combat, you really only have missiles, your loadout, your assault rifle, and the ability to fly freely any way you want.

“So you can't suddenly use magic or change your loadout or go into an inventory while you've already started stirring the stick. And when you're stirring up this fish tank with your unique stick and toolkit, I think about, ‘Well, from a game design perspective, what's going to happen inside this tank?’ And there are different ways we calculate damage, including the containers I mentioned earlier. So what kind of chemical reaction the stick causes within the tank I think is kind of what defines how the interactivity expands… Perhaps instead of the air to surface missiles, you attach bombs to this stick and the environment respond[s] in a way that [has] a much more positive feedback loop. So it's creating that fish tank and an environment that can accommodate different types of things and react in different ways.”

It’s a level of thoughtfulness I felt throughout my time with Ace Combat 8, and when I finally put my controller down, I left satisfied, but knowing I still had so much more to do. I wasn’t the pilot the FCU needed me to be, not yet. But I wanted to see the rest of Joker flight’s story, and I wanted to get back in that cockpit and be a better stick. The Wings of Theve is an idea, but there’s very little as powerful as an idea whose time has come, and I wanted to try to live up to that legend, which speaks to what I saw of Ace Combat 8’s story. Wings of Theve understands that motivation, but I think it knows a deeper truth, too: that war is barbaric and cruel and monstrous and that the only real war heroes exist in the stories we tell one another. That sometimes propaganda and truth are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same. Perhaps there’s no reconciling those things. But maybe the right plane in the sky can give you hope. And that’s not nothing.

Will Borger is an IGN freelancer. You can find him on Bluesky @edgarallanbro.