Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve review: The weight of the world on your wings

A magnificent campaign full of compelling characters, exciting missions, sleek aircraft, and promising multiplayer make Ace Combat 8 a high-adrenaline delight.

When I heard Ace Combat 8 was in the works with Kazutoki Kono in the director's chair, I was thrilled. It’s been around seven long years since the last mainline game, and there’s little else that tries to do what Ace Combat does the way it does it. So here we are. Did this, the ninth game in the series, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, live up to the hype? I dare say you had better believe it. Beautiful skies full of a variety of aircraft and aerial combat are accompanied by a compelling campaign, amazing soundtrack, and a fun range of multiplayer modes I can’t wait to play more of with other fans.

Placing their hopes in you

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve brings us back to the war-torn alternate Earth known as Strangereal. In this instance, we join the Federation of Central Usea (FCU) as it’s on the run from the hostile nation of Sotoa after the latter used orbital strikes to bomb the FCU out of its home country. The FCU survives as a flotilla of naval ships carrying a few aircraft and many military and citizens that escaped. Among them is “Wings,” AKA Jan “Rex” Cope and his squad. Cope acts as Wing 1, a legendary pilot meant to instill hope in the FCU people. Social media speaks of an Ace that always comes back and Cope and his team are always supposed to be sure that happens.

… Until it doesn’t. Tragedy strikes and Cope is taken out of the equation. But the world doesn’t know Wings is down, and so as the last person to fly with him, his weapons specialist co-pilot, it falls to you to take his mantle. It also fall to his surviving team to make sure you stay “Wings” for as long as you can. The lines are kind of hammy at times, but Ace Combat 8 has a brilliant flow for its plot. The characters still moved me. Not just Baxter, Tasha, and Coster, but the other squads - Queen, Joker, the Immortals, and many of the ship staff, too. Ace Combat 8 goes out of its way to convey to you that these are displaced people who had lives before they were pilots and ship hands. So much so that you can feel their convictions even in the skies on the comms as they fight alongside you. And speaking of which, the sheer scale of standing in the middle of an armada and meeting the characters face to face and then seeing how little your modest home fleet is when you’re up in the skies looking down on the tiny FCU armada is breathtaking.

Part of that is that Ace Combat 8 is one of the most gorgeous games I’ve seen this year. Every map in Ace Combat 8 is a vast sandbox of skies, seas, and various terrain in a wide collection of day/night and weather conditions. And the craft you experience it from are just as detailed if not more so for being a focal point nearly all the time. There are around 30 aircraft in this game and they serve distinct roles that make having a wide variety a must for effective mission completion, but they’re also beautifully detailed inside and out in a way that made me always want to keep the camera first-person in the cockpit even when the game is easier to play in third-person. Amplifying all these juicy visuals and narratives is a soundtrack that cooks red hot nearly right away. You'll often hear from fans that Ace Combat soundtracks have been cooking for a long time, and composers Ryo Watanabe, Mitsuhiro Kitadani, and Keiki Kobayashi returned to deliver that fire alongside the rest of the musical team.

We’re not running anymore

As a flight combat game, Ace Combat has always leaned into being more fun than science and physics. You can do things with these jets that defy gravity, but it’s all the more fun and plays to the overall energy for it. In the single-player campaign, your job is almost always to engage and strike at enemy aircraft, naval units, land targets, and some ridiculously cool (and fun to destroy) superweapons. Along your way to a mission, you get to go through your aircraft tree, buy new upgrades and jets, and then prep yourself and the rest of Wings squad for the mission.

It matters how you prep the whole squad because you can  command the Wings squad to cover you, carry out a direct attack, use special armaments like ground bombs, and disperse to target multiple enemies. The jets are broken up into different specialties between fighter, bomber, electronic warfare, and some hybrids. I found that if I didn’t arm up or set my squad with the right composition, it made things a lot harder than they needed to be. Sure, you could just fly the F-18 through it all, but you’ll get more done faster if you change it up and make your fellow Wings do the same, and I liked that the choice matters. There are also difficulties that range from bristling and hardcore all the way down to a gentle Story mode if you’d rather just not worry about it.

Up in the sky, flight and combat in Ace Combat 8 feels just as incredible. If you’re worried about how technical Ace Combat 8 will be, you really shouldn’t be. This series has always veered a bit towards arcade-like and bombastic rather than being a hardcore flight sim, and Ace Combat 8 doesn’t shy away from that. You can even make the controls easier to handle with automatic or manual rolling and pitching. You’ll still have to make sure you don’t crash into the ground, but I was impressed with the options offered whether I wanted to play a simple style or be more technical with it. You can even straight up skip sequences like manual landing and take off if you’d rather not deal with it. Wings of Theve clearly wants us all to stick around and have fun, but if you’re looking for a stiffer challenge, the higher difficulties and adjustable controls help with that.

Never alone in these skies

Bandai Namco has been toting the multiplayer in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve as the franchise’s “largest online mode.” And I can safely after a private multiplayer session with the developers that I’m on board so far. Wings of Theve multiplayer is broken into PvP, PvE, and PvPvE modes with quite a bit of amusing variety.

My favorite was a mode where two teams compete indirectly in a mission to achieve the highest objective score against air and ground enemies. It’s not about shooting each other down as much as hitting the targets as much as possible. Don’t get me wrong, though. You’ll do plenty of shooting at your fellow players in other modes. There’s a straight-up deathmatch mode if you want to go whole hog on chaos and fighting for your life in the skies. There are also special raids that can happen between missions where you’ll have to go out and fight against special targets. There are even superweapons from previous Ace Combat games.

In the lobby, you get to customize your pilot, buy and upgrade your aircraft, customize it with cosmetics, do training exercises, and even just kill time. The online lobbies have live arcades where you can play classics like Galaga, New Rally-X and Dragon Spirit. I also saw Mappy on the back wall, so these could see some rotation. It’s a fun lobby system for a wide variety of multiplayer activity. I am a little concerned about how long it takes to upgrade aircraft, where it feels like you could easily fall behind other players with better craft, but that’s more of a concern focused on PvP.

Earn your Wings

As Ace Combat makes its round again, I had friends and colleagues that weren’t wholly familiar asking why I was so excited about a flight game. I happily explained that Ace Combat is more like a guitar solo played with aircraft. I certainly couldn’t have guessed how on the nose I’d be in that statement with Ace Combat 8 (you’ll see why this is funny if you play it), but I’m glad it went out of its way to once again prove me correct. This is a fantastic flight combat experience and I’m going to be shooting for high scores and multiplayer sorties well after this review. You should join me in these wide-open skies.

This review is based on a digital PlayStation 5 copy provided by the publisher. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve comes out on October 2, 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, with early access starting for Deluxe Edition on September 29, 2026.

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Review for
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve
9
Pros

• Fantastic story campaign and characters
• Exciting combat and control
• Good range of complexity for aces and simplicity for beginnners
• Amazing visuals on the ground and in the sky
• Wide variety of aircraft to equip your squadron with
• Robust multiplayer options
• Incredible soundtrack

Cons

• Voice acting sometimes hammy
• PvP could be tough for newbies resource-wise