Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve review

The first thing I noticed about Ace Combat 8 was the weight. My F-18C’s control yoke felt more like the reins of a mustang, guiding my aircraft’s control surfaces while afterburners strained against an ocean’s worth of air pressure, desperately pleading for a faster climb or a tighter turn as bandits closed on my six o’clock.

If that sounds dramatic, that’s because it is. While Ace Combat has always married its arcade flight action to bombastic theatrics, Wings of Theve soars to greater heights than the series ever has before. Most missions had me zig-zagging between deadlocked frontlines, paving the way for allied advances and turning the tide of seemingly unwinnable battles. Diving to street level to unload a salvo of rockets on an advancing enemy tank column will invite fevered cheers from beleaguered comrades, while your retreating foes tremble at your power, cursing your name as you soar back into the safety of the clouds.

That cloud cover is given real mechanical importance by way of a dynamic weather engine that permeates almost every mission. Clouds loom over battlefields like skyscrapers, offering moments of much needed reprieve from relentless missile barrages at the cost of blinding and disorienting you in a sea of ice and turbulence, which enemy fighters will try to capitalize on.

Some of Wings of Theve’s best moments were when pursuers boxed me into a dense pocket of cloud cover, forcing me to blindly hammer the throttle and commit to a mach-three, nose-down drag race. I can’t count how many times I leaned in close to my ultrawide monitor in a killing trance, trailing the serpentine contrails like the guiding lines of a racing game. Both weather and handling changes massively elevate Wings of Theve’s aerial gameplay over previous games in the series, with dogfights eschewing the High-G Turn spam that characterized Ace Combat 6 and 7’s campaigns for hair-raising chases.

You’ll be menaced by the Republic of Sotoa’s ace fighter squadron, “The Shadows”, who dramatically proclaim their arrival by broadcasting their traditional hunting songs on open channels. While the Shadows lack some of the individual character of the ace squadrons that characterized prior games, with each one boasting a similar black and gold livery, there’s a wonderful variety to the character of the individual pilots. Taking a scalpel to these formations will result in unique dialogue, like the cries of a student who outlived her mentor, or a veteran’s stoic acceptance that this is his last flight.

Higher than ever

Wings of Theve also boasts the series’ strongest writing to date. I’m thrilled to say that prequel miniseries Hour Zero’s decidedly dated portrayal of the Republic of Sotoa (relying on some bygone “War on Terror” tropes) isn’t echoed in the game itself—while there’s some superficial connections one could draw between them and contemporary MENA countries, Sotoa is far more a technocratic khanate than a rogue terror state.

Fleeing the rapid desertification of their homeland wrought by the industrialization of neighboring superpowers, Sotoa seeks to dismantle and colonize their western neighbors, with an invasion force spearheaded by a fleet of supermassive land battleships—enormous amphibious war machines—protected by kinetic bombardment satellites, the presence of which can be oppressively felt across the game.

An early highlight is when D-Day esque mission to capture a beachhead is dramatically interrupted by a land battleship blanketing the skies in a sheet of constant railgun fire from hundreds of kilometers away, leaving you and your allies madly scrambling in a fevered retreat. Hours later, I saw that same land battleship engage allies in a neighboring province, the barrage of cannonfire lighting up the midnight sky with a sunrise of tungsten and fire.

Above: An encounter with “Podarge” aerial transport crafts.

These superweapon encounters stand tall, even in a series tripping over them—while taking on the land battleship fleet can occasionally feel a little too rigid on replays (with the ability to deal damage gated behind the timing of scripted allied bombing runs) there is an undeniable, spine-tingling spectacle to seeing cities crumble beneath their treads.

More thrilling were the supermassive “Podarge” aerial transport crafts, flying tight like WW2 bombers while laying down thick blankets of flak in overlapping cones of fire. Shrouded by radar-obscuring jamming planes, hunting these leviathan planes again had me hunched inches away from my monitor, shaking off pursuers while attempting to discern the difference between contrails and stratus clouds.

I encountered a pair of Podarges again a few hours later, almost kissing the ground while lugging a payload of land battleships to reinforce the base I was besieging. It’s a moment I don’t think I’ll ever forget—engines roaring, the twin transports deploying a tide-turning payload, then banking, hard, both ships careening past me in a near-miss with such intensity that the strain of their airframes elicited a pained shriek, something halfway between a whale call and a death cry.

Guns, guns, guns

Another area where Wings of Theve improves on its predecessors is its approach to mission design—the prevalence of free-form annihilation missions, where you’re tasked with reaching a target score within a limited timeframe, means that air-to-ground specialized airframes are viable choices for most of Wings of Theve’s runtime, with nothing like Ace Combat 7’s feel-bad mid-mission switchups (Pipeline Destruction, Battle for Farbanti).

You’ll be briefed on the locations of local airfields and highways where enemy fighters will launch from, easily negated by a salvo of rockets, bombing-run, or pre-emptive strike from your wingmen. When reinforcements do flow into the mission area, your intelligence officer will announce the make, model, and heading of enemy aircraft into the area. It’s a wonderfully immersive quality of life feature that helps keep you immersed in the action, minimizing the time spent deciphering a radar screen.

The hodgepodge squadron of irregulars that you fall into the seat of, Joker Flight, grew on me quickly, deftly responding to my orders, downing whole flights of bandits and crippling superweapon subsystems. Noise is a bona-fide music geek, practicing guitar between sorties and gushing over his favorite band, while Tasha is a bubbly foreign stunt pilot turned reluctant soldier, reckoning with the blood she has to spill to live up to her mother’s legacy. Mentoring them both is Baxter, an aging college professor turned reserve pilot, struggling under the weight of a military conspiracy to keep the legacy of the legendary ace “The Wings of Theve” alive at any cost. The real “Wings”, your deceased predecessor Jane Rex Cope, manifests as a delirious ghost drowning in an ocean of exhaustion, only able to deliver the occasional wounded poetic to you as his legacy gradually unravels.

Afterburners to full

There’s also a wonderful interplay between narrative, music, and dialogue—that aforementioned Sotoan hunting song is a common leitmotif across Wings of Theve, with each Shadow downed in a mission seemingly removing a voice from the choir. More often than not though, your allies will belligerently drown out those chants themselves by blasting their own music instead. This results in some truly beautiful harmonization where the game’s already eye-watering orchestral score is elevated by both Tragically Hip-esque rock choruses and monastic tribal chanting, a dynamic ensemble that sent chills down my spine in tight, ten minute minute intervals.

There is a consistently high quality of both writing and dialogue across Ace Combat 8’s campaign that I think even series veterans will find surprising. Dialogue still has that dubbed anime charm, delivered at an “Stand Alone Complex” standard. Mark Bodie’s performance as Cope is a stand-out as well—the depth of exhaustion he conveys adds a distinctly Shinto flair to his character.

Characterization aside, the story itself is great—series veterans will doubtlessly recognize longstanding tropes (starting from nothing, falling from grace, becoming a legend), but the twists and turns along the way coalesce into a third act so vast and dramatic in scale that I was left in disbelief. Wings of Theve’s narrative, mechanics, and music unite behind a two hour Macross-esque climax that stands head and shoulders above prior Ace Combat finales.

Wings of an Angel

Given how stunning Ace Combat 8 looks, I was pleased to see mostly stable performance at 1440p, only getting some occasional hitching during first-person cutscenes, framerates occasionally scraping under 60 when the screen was enveloped in a gargantuan fireball.

I also have minor gripes about the lack of an FOV slider, as Wings of Theve undoubtedly plays best from the cockpit view, and there are times where it can feel a bit like staring through a funnel. The only bug I encountered across two playthroughs was some light input ghosting on the sticks, which only occurred in the wake of a framerate dip, causing me to careen into a building. Thankfully, these issues are few and far between.

At the time of writing, there’s a moment from each and every mission that still lingers in my mind, with only a scant few being owed to scripted encounters. Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is an eye-watering, fist-pumping marriage of arcade action and cinematic flourish, and one of the best games I’ve played in years.