Image: Bandai Namco

We are so back. Not that I was surprised that Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is a great game - the series has a phenomenal track record, with the only real misstep being AC: Assault Horizon, which was merely okay and blandly Americanized. But when I wasn't laid out by a migraine, I spent most of my weekend soaring through the great blue in this gloriously over-the-top melodramatic action game, which boasts both one of the biggest campaigns in the series and the most full-featured online side, too. I might not have completed the game and so can't give it a full, definitive review, but this is an easy recommendation.

First, for those wondering if Ace Combat is even worth looking at if they don't like flight sims, let me be clear: This is not a flight sim. Yes, the planes are lushly detailed, and it's full of military jargon, but this is an action game that has more in common with high-speed mech games like Armored Core than anything. This is to jets and modern warfare as Dynasty Warriors is to spears and Chinese history. It also has nothing to do with real-world warfare, being set in the sci-fi parallel world of Strangereal, where fictional nations settle most disputes with enormous air wars.

You don't need to understand lift or drag - you have a button that makes your jet go fast, one that makes it go slow, and if you hit both together, your jet pulls a physics-defying drift-turn through the skies. G-Forces exist only as a plot device for other characters to suffer from, as you are a god with machine oil for blood and aluminium bones, immune to such petty concerns. This is a game where you are often expected to face down 40+ fighters and 200+ ground targets (or maybe just a couple town-sized superweapons) in a single mission, and carry enough missiles to deal with them all. This game is downright silly, even before a ghost starts haunting you.

I was almost worried that AC8 would be less silly than previous games, when it revealed that its story would be told (unusually for the series) in first person, with occasional dialogue options and interactive prompts during its gorgeous, nigh-photorealistic in-game cutscenes. This fear evaporated after the prologue, as you find yourself literally haunted by the previous pilot to be assigned the morale-boosting title of 'Wings of Thieve', supposedly a legendary ace fighting to defend the skies above the titular capital city from a nomadic but extremely well-equipped nation of invaders. While your protagonist remains unvoiced, the spirit living in your head stands in for your internal monologue.

And it only gets sillier from there. Just a couple missions into the 31-stage campaign (which I'm nowhere near done with yet, and there's a NG+ mode to look forward to beyond that), you'll be fighting in the sky as your faction and the enemy attempt to drown out each other's airwaves with their personal mixtapes, a battle that inspires one allied squadron to rally, as the pilots are also the band that played the song. Not only is the soundtrack here every bit as good as previous AC games, but it's even more diegetic, with song and music being a key theme in the fiercely anti-war narrative. It's hammy, sure, but hits those emotional notes just right. Imagine Top Gun as directed by Hideo Kojima, and you're halfway there.

But none of this would matter if the moment-to-moment flying and shooting didn't feel right, and AC8 feels fantastic. The jets here are significantly weightier-feeling than in the previous game, which means they do take a slightly defter hand in flying, but it also makes for more comprehensible dogfights where you can track the trajectory and inertia of your enemies a lot easier, with only the most dangerous of enemy ace pilots being able to flip, drift, and turn on a dime like you can. You're still carrying 150-200 missiles per mission, too, and are often expected to shoot down 4+ enemies with a single button press, but the world here feels a little more tangible than it used to.

Not that this means it holds back on the superweapons. One of my favorite parts, around halfway into the campaign (and I've not flown much further than that), is a boss fight against a pair of giant super-bombers, each armed with anti-missile laser turrets, rear-firing missiles, and an endless supply of flying drone-bombs, requiring you to pump dozens of missiles and hundreds of bullets into their weak points until they finally come tumbling down, while bobbing and weaving around constant laser fire and bombs. It's genuinely intense stuff, requiring some real flying skill, while being utterly unrealistic.

The only reason I've not played further into the campaign already is that the multiplayer also has its hooks into me. As expected, it's basically a remake of Ace Combat Infinity, a now-defunct PS3 free-to-play spinoff. On the downside, this does mean battle passes, premium currency, and expensive cosmetics. On the plus side, the multiplayer is just more of the same, but (mostly) co-op, with two teams of players racing to score the highest across a bunch of remixed missions from previous games, some as an allied front, some on opposing sides. As you fly more missions, you get money, which lets you unlock more planes and weapons, just as in single-player, but this mode has its own progression.

You don't ever have to engage with the PvP side of the game and can opt to play entirely co-op missions, but the versus battles aren't shabby at all, and you won't have the enemy team gunning for you immediately. The goal is still mostly to fight the NPC swarms. Right off the bat, you're worth barely more than a roaming NPC plane and much harder to hit. You only become a juicy target once you've racked up a big enough kill-streak of your own, marking you as an Ace and giving the other team a big bonus if they knock you out, clearing your bounty and respawning you back into the fight. It's basically an arcade mode, devoid of story but still providing some spectacular big-battle dogfighting action.

The only real wrinkle for some is that Ace Combat 8, while absolutely gorgeous, is a system hog on higher graphical settings. It scales down well enough to play decently at 30fps on a Steam Deck, but even if you have a 5090, the highest graphics settings will make your machine sweat. There are a lot of options to tweak and tune, but don't expect to easily hit 120fps at max 4K settings on any computer currently known to man. It almost feels like it's an intentional move to future-proof the game, ensuring that it looks gorgeous even on hardware generations to come. If they come. But even at medium-high settings, this one's a looker, far beyond its predecessor.

One final mention goes to the unusual preorder bonus AC8 came with. A slightly enhanced port of PS2 classic Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. While nothing dramatic has been changed, the game runs at a locked 60fps and at pin-sharp modern resolutions, with a few graphics (such as HUD text) being cleared up and improved a little. It's still a great game, with a rare morality system - judging you on a scale from 'mercenary' to 'knight' - and has some interesting live-action FMV bits going on too.

While you can play this old gem fine through emulation, the small tweaks they've made here and there (including to the controls, as PlayStation controllers no longer have pressure-sensitive buttons) make this the best way to play AC Zero. The only wrinkle is that on PC, you can't install it separately from the game's hefty 140GB hard drive footprint, as reported by Automaton. Bandai Namco has said they'll look into options for splitting it into a separate install, but they can't promise anything. Still, for those who got in early and had faith in Team Aces, it's a rosy little glace cherry on top of a big ol' cake full of aeronautical action.

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is out now for £55/$70, although if you're reading this now, you've sadly missed out on the preorder window to get that Ace Combat Zero port - an unfortunate quirk of old licensing agreements, say Bandai Namco. But even without it, this one was worth the wait. Just hope it won't be another seven years until the next!