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\u2019m shoved back into a cockpit. But not as a pilot. Instead, as the navigator to Jan \u201cRex\u201d Cope, the Wings of Theve, Usea\u2019s legendary ace pilot.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019s more important than whether or not any single pilot is a legend.<\/p>\n
My mission with Cope goes well right up until it doesn\u2019t. When the actually-legendary Shadow 22 shows up hunting for us, Cope decides to run. Cope\u2019s good, despite his lack of kills. He\u2019s very, very good. But he\u2019s not good enough. As our plane sinks into the sea, I grab his dog tags. \u201cStart swimming, soldier,\u201d he urges me, from beyond the grave. \u201cMake it home alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I do. The Endurance needs a new Wings of Theve, and I\u2019m it, complete with Cope\u2019s actual callsign, \u201cRex.\u201d My goal isn\u2019t to shoot down enemy pilots or complete missions. Not really. It\u2019s to be a symbol, a blank canvas upon which a propaganda machine might paint whatever story they like. It\u2019s to come back alive so that story can continue. \u201cI am become a name,\u201d said Tennyson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
To be clear, none of this is a spoiler. It all happens in Ace Combat 8\u2019s first mission, and if you\u2019ve seen the reveal trailer, you\u2019ve 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\u2019s story was very much inspired by what\u2019s happening in the real world.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn past Ace Combats, we think about, \u2018Okay, 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?\u2019 And we’ll start reverse engineering the beats that would be required to reach that. And ultimately in the current landscape we thought about, \u2018Well, how will the player feel when they become this ace pilot and hero in this world?\u2019 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, \u2018Okay, well, are these false wings or are they real?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s something that the story interrogates in the missions I play. When I take on the role of the Wings of Theve, I\u2019m quickly forced into scenarios where I can\u2019t just run. I have to take out enemy fighters. Tasha, a member of your squadron and former circus pilot who\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
But the story has an emotional core, too. You\u2019ll spend time with the other pilots in your squadron \u2013 called Joker Flight \u2013 during briefings and chat before missions or while you\u2019re 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 \u201cvoice of God [who] narrates you through the story\u201d matters because it helped build a connection with my fellow pilots in the missions I played. It doesn\u2019t hurt that all of these sequences are utterly stunning. Ace Combat has always been something of a technical marvel, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a stretch to say that Ace Combat 8 is one of the best-looking video games I\u2019ve ever seen, whether you\u2019re in the cockpit or have your boots planted on the Endurance’s deck.<\/p>\n
I got to play several missions set across the early parts of Ace Combat\u2019s campaign, and if you\u2019ve 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 \u201ccontainers\u201d 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: \u201cThe 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.\u201d <\/p>\n
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\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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). \u201cOkay,\u201d I thought, stupidly. \u201cI\u2019ll use the F\/A-18F, load that bad boy up with air-to-surface missiles and take him out, and I\u2019ll take some anti-aircraft missiles as insurance.\u201d <\/p>\n
That was a really bad plan. After getting thoroughly worked because I couldn\u2019t 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\u2019re like me and just looking to get to the action). What\u2019s 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\u2019s on you and your squadron to stop something that feels unbeatable. <\/p>\n
It probably shouldn\u2019t 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. \u201cIt’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, \u2018Hey, play this line of dialogue,\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019d be jammed and flying through cloud cover. We\u2019d have to keep an eye out for their contrails and spot them ourselves.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cJust looking pretty is not going to be enough in terms of the visual expression,\u201d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\nAce Combat 8: Wings of Theve – June 2026 Screenshots<\/h3>\n