The great team at Bandai Namco allowed us a chance to go hands-on with the upcoming fighter pilot action game Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. This was new for us not having a ton of experience with the prior entries in the Ace Combat series, but this undeniably a gorgeously polished experience. You play as “Rex,” a fight pilot who assumes that mantle after the pilot he previously served as Jan “Rex” Cope passes away in a fiery crash. You are rescued by the navy of the Federation of the Central Usea. Even just fished out of the sea in a near-death experience they waste no time putting you back behind the stick of a fighter. First, they introduce you to the base mechanics and then start dropping you into harder missions.
The scale of the game feels impossibly open, the horizon an endless array of stratus and cumulonimbus clouds. The stick as it were, is harshly, realistically touchy. You have to take a nuanced and patient approach to adjusting your pitch or bearing right. A little too much, and you’re hurtling to the water far faster than you expect to be. Your radar is immensely helpful, and it allows for three separate toggles giving you a close-up sense of an any enemies you’re tracking, a mid-range look and then a long-range directional view. It seems a small detail, bit it is absolutely clutch in finding your target in an enormous AO. Once an opponent is within range, you can lock on your target and let forth a targeted missile. There’s something so wildly satisfying about pressing the fire button, seeing an enemy plane explode after you carefully found target lock.
Our biggest challenge in the demo time we had available was when you’re coming in hot and the enemy gets around you, cornering in time to catch up is really hard to do. We had more than a couple flights where one enemy got around us and it was too late to reach the objective by the time we came around. But flying a real fighter jet in our world would require immense skill. It is readily apparent that a similar level of dedication for honing flight skills in Ace Combat 8 will undoubtedly bring a comparable level of aerial mastery. Ace Combat comes out for PlayStation 5 and Xbox on October 2nd.