I’d simply completed off a number of waves of fighter planes and assault helicopters headed for the final port nonetheless below the management of my determined nation, conserving our feeble probabilities alive for yet another day. I returned to our base, an growing older plane provider, to talk with the company bigwig who’d thrown in with our ragtag remainders. He pulled out his smartphone and confirmed me how he was manipulating photographs to make it appear like we had extra fighter jets than the few we possessed, projecting energy by way of misinformation.
Strangereal is getting a dose of 2026’s actuality.
As the first Ace Combat sport in seven years, and the first on this era of consoles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has a variety of technical and story modernizations. At a preview in Los Angeles, I performed a number of hours of the sport throughout six completely different missions. Relaxation assured: It wholly embodies the franchise’s specific taste of tense aerial fight with out the extreme complexity of ultrarealistic flight simulators.
It is also undeniably set in the Ace Combat world of Strangereal, a fictional setting of vaguely European-styled nations embattled in generational wars fought with real-world planes… in addition to huge flying wings and land battleships that would not look misplaced in an anime. But in my time with the sport, it is what the builders at Challenge Aces — Bandai Namco’s inside crew behind the Ace Combat collection — pulled from our real-world 2026 that caught with me.
It is integral to Challenge Aces’ framing for Ace Combat 8, which focuses on relationships between pilots and folks near the participant. The sport opens up with an unnamed participant character being rescued from the sea and brought aboard an plane provider carrying the final navy resistance of the Federation of Central Usea, or FCU, following its defeat by the Republic of Sotoa. Earlier than lengthy, the participant takes on the position of the titular Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot whose id is obscured in order that when one is shot down, one other takes their place.
Gamers can select between one in all three visible views: conventional HUD from the pilot’s seat below the cover, a canopy-free HUD wanting straight out from the airplane’s nostril and a behind-the-jet view (seen right here).
Taking up the mantle to protect the fantasy is an previous storytelling theme, but it surely takes on new life in Ace Combat 8. Challenge Aces wished to deliver the lens down from the skies to a extra private stage, connecting gamers with the folks they’re flying alongside and defending aboard the ship. However the breaks between missions, when gamers bond with these fictional characters, additionally present them taking pictures smartphone movies of the Wings of Theve which can be despatched far and extensive as promotional footage. As deliberately surreal as Strangereal is — an abstraction constructed to stage colossal wars and geopolitical upheaval — it is nonetheless a bit of weird to see real-world smartphone propaganda used to win hearts and minds bleed right into a franchise centered on fighter jet dogfights.
As CNET’s supervising editor of cell protection, it is surreal to see social media warfare make its means right into a navy sim. However when the media sat down with Kazutoki Kono, the Ace Combat collection model director, at the preview, and I requested him about the inclusion of smartphone propaganda, Kono stated he sees it as an extension of the participant’s journey towards turning into an ace pilot.
“Clearly, there’s huge boss fights, completely different encounters, tremendous difficult conditions that you will have to take care of in dogfight conditions, maybe different ace pilots which can be your rivals,” Kono stated. “However on a a lot bigger scale, I feel social media and misinformation is one other problem that groups have to beat these days. You could possibly say that social media is only one amongst a variety of challenges that must be overcome so the participant feels that sense of progress.”
Normal missiles will lock on inside 2,000 meters of a goal, however they will typically solely hit if the participant is flying behind the enemy.
It is a very particular alternative contemplating which parts of our 2026 actuality Challenge Aces did not embody — resembling drones, which have develop into increasingly more part of trendy warfare. I first spoke with Kono again in December after Ace Combat 8 was revealed at the Sport Awards 2025. He shared that the unmanned aerial automobile drone enemies included in Ace Combat 7 have been disliked by followers; they wished the man-on-man dogfight expertise with radio chatter and human rigidity.
“There may be at all times going to be this actuality line that we’ll wish to intention for. That being stated, we nonetheless cannot go for that line at the expense of the participant expertise,” Kono stated in December. “For the participant to have enjoyable is at all times going to be a precedence for us as a sport design philosophy.”
The cockpit HUD view possibility is the purist simulator view, but it surely’s understandably extra restricted than the different two choices.
Taking part in Ace Combat 8: Changing into the wings of legend
I used to be desirous about this push and pull between actuality and fiction as I sat down at my station for the preview. Kono’s feedback about eschewing real-world parts resembling the rise of UAV plane made me surprise how a lot of Ace Combat 8 could be geared towards preserving the dogfighting fantasy evoked in standard media resembling High Gun, whilst trendy air fight continues to veer towards drones and beyond-visual-range engagements.
Certainly, after my participant character was rescued and met the crew, he was despatched into the air in the backseat behind the present Wings of Theve, whose aviator sun shades and charming smile regarded uncannily like these of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in High Gun. In one other nod to misinformation, the pilot, Cope, has had his file of enemy kills enormously exaggerated. When an enemy ace shot our airplane down, Cope’s premature loss of life paves the means for the participant to take his mantle — although he sticks round as a ghostly presence to information you going ahead. It is a enjoyable little bit of torch-passing taste that additionally gives context, as the participant character is a traditional wordless protagonist.
The Professor is one in all three wingmen for the predominant character.
After that prologue, the first mission has the participant character taking over the mantle of the Wings of Theve as a publicity transfer to maintain morale up. The second and third missions deliver me along with my squadmates — former group faculty tutorial The Professor, taciturn Noise and former stunt pilot Tasha (whose colourful hair would not look misplaced on a Okay-pop idol).
In-game, you may command them to focus hearth on targets, select their very own or kind up on you. It is a good little bit of flexibility to fit your play type, although I typically misplaced observe of what they have been doing whereas I targeted on my mission targets. Largely, I loved the radio chatter as they ribbed each other.
It’s also possible to equipment them out with completely different plane and missile or bomb loadouts tailor-made to every mission, although I did not discover a lot of a distinction after I cut up them between A-10 Warthog ground-attack plane and Eurofighter Hurricane air-superiority jets. (It is potential I wasn’t paying shut sufficient consideration.) After beginning out in the F/A-18E multirole fighter — which Kono instructed me in December is his favourite and serves as the sport’s “hero plane”– gamers can unlock greater than 30 actual and fictional plane, every with its personal stats and payload choices. That selection makes some higher fitted to dogfights and others simpler towards floor targets.
Gamers will begin with the F/A-18E jet, however can spend factors earned finishing missions to unlock over 30 others.
Unlocking is dealt with by way of a tech tree of kinds, beginning with the F/A-18E and branching out not simply to new plane but additionally to perks, together with improved missile efficiency and bigger bomb payloads. These could be geared up earlier than missions, although every jet has a special perk capability. With greater than 100 customary missiles and dozens of further missile and bomb choices, armaments have at all times been the place Ace Combat shifts from practical aviation to arcade-style air fight. Nevertheless it serves the heroic-pilot fantasy nicely — and makes missed photographs rather a lot much less painful.
We jumped round for the final phase of the preview. The fourth mission was a very good mix of targets under and above, that includes harbors stuffed with naval vessels to bomb, protected by enemy fighter jets. Nevertheless it was the ninth mission that stopped me in my tracks: taking over a land battleship that regarded like the USS Iowa on treads. My goal was to immobilize it whereas the iron leviathan’s weapons, hovering quadcopter escorts and swirling defensive drone swarm tried to blast me out of the sky. They succeeded a couple of occasions, and it took a number of retries (and collapsed lodge buildings) to lastly lock the beast in place.
The formidable land battleship has three railgun turrets that may shoot the participant down from any distance.
The final mission we bought to play, the eleventh, had my squad taking over huge flying-wing plane transporting land battleship elements into enemy territory. Due to radar jamming, I needed to observe the skyborne behemoths by their lengthy contrails, then deliver my squad in shut and depend on short-range missiles and gunfire to take them down. Flanked by fighter escorts, I screamed by way of the clouds in a visually breathtaking sequence, seeing firsthand the sport’s Cloudly tech that Kono had described to me again in December.
Some targets like the Portage flying wing enemies (pictured) have a number of targets to hit earlier than the complete automobile goes down.
This sense of breathless journey amongst the clouds is one in all the three core pillars at the coronary heart of Ace Combat 8’s design philosophy, Kono instructed me and different media at the preview. Each resolution they made wanted to feed or strengthen one in all them.
“The primary [pillar] is photorealistic expression of the sky and giving the participant the freedom to soar by way of it how they see match,” Kono stated. “The second can also be at the participant’s discretion, which enemies to have interaction with and the satisfaction of dogfights in the sky. The third is that this technique of turning into an ace pilot in the world, so that you go from rookie to hero in the world of Ace Combat.” (Then he laughed, saying that there may be a fourth pillar they hadn’t even realized existed, given how vocal followers have been about the franchise’s background music.)
For all the effort dedicated to realism, from recreating the world’s most iconic fighter plane to simulating cloud moisture droplets on the cockpit cover, Ace Combat nonetheless delivers a strong fantasy: that of a skyborne gunfighter combating for what’s proper. Whereas I used to be caught off guard by Ace Combat 8’s resolution to include social media warfare, I used to be nonetheless swept up in watching my pilot’s legend develop — ideally by way of missiles and slick flying moderately than doctored smartphone movies.
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