Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
I had just finished off several waves of fighter planes and attack helicopters heading to the last port still under my desperate nation’s control, keeping our slim chances alive for another day. I returned to our base, an old aircraft carrier, to chat with a company dignitary who had come with our scattered remains. He pulled out his smartphone and showed me how he was manipulating photos to make it look like we had more fighter planes than the few we did, demonstrating strength through misinformation.
Strangereal gets a dose of 2026 reality.
As the first Ace Combat game in seven years, and the first in this generation of consoles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has plenty of technical and story updates. At a preview in Los Angeles, California, I played several hours of the game across six different missions. Rest assured: it perfectly captures the franchise’s special flavor of tense air combat without the extreme complexity of hyper-realistic flight simulators.
It’s also undeniably set in the world of Ace Combat in Strangereal, a fantasy setting of vaguely European-themed nations fighting generational wars with real-world planes… as well as massive flying wings and land battleships that wouldn’t look out of place in an anime. However, in my time with the game, this is what the developers at Project Aces – the in-house Bandai Namco team behind the Ace Combat series – pulled from our The real world of 2026 stuck in my mind.
Players can choose between one of three visual viewpoints: a traditional HUD from the pilot’s seat under the canopy, a canopy-free HUD looking directly from the front of the plane and a view behind the plane (seen here).
It is an integral part of Ace Combat 8’s Project Aces framework, which focuses on the relationships between pilots and people close to the player. The game begins with an unnamed player character being rescued from the sea and transported aboard an aircraft carrier carrying the last military resistance to the Central Utilization Union, or FCU, after its defeat at the hands of the Sotoa Republic. Before long, the player takes on the role of Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot whose identity is so mysterious that when one is shot down, another takes his place.
Donning the mantle to preserve the legend is an old storytelling theme, but it takes on new life in Ace Combat 8. Project Aces wanted to take the lens from the sky to a more personal level, connecting players to the people they fly alongside and protect on the ship. But the breaks between missions, when players come into contact with these fictional characters, also show them filming smartphone videos for Wings of Theve that are widely sent out as promotional footage. Although Strangereal is intentionally surreal – an idea designed to unleash massive wars and geopolitical upheaval – it’s still a bit strange to see real-world smartphone propaganda used to win hearts and minds bleed into a franchise centered around fighter jet battles.
Standard missiles will be installed at a distance of 2000 meters from the target, but will generally not hit unless the player is flying behind the enemy.
As the editor supervising mobile coverage at CNET, it’s surreal to see social media warfare make its way into a military simulation. But when the media sat down with Ace Combat series brand manager Kazutoki Kono at the preview and asked him about including smartphone advertising, Kono said he saw it as an extension of the player’s journey toward becoming a skilled pilot.
“Obviously there are huge boss battles, different encounters, very difficult situations that you’ll have to deal with in dogfight situations, and probably other accomplished pilots who are your rivals,” Kono said. “But on a much larger scale, I think social media and misinformation is another challenge that teams have to overcome nowadays. You could say that social media is just one of a wide range of challenges that need to be overcome in order for a player to feel that sense of growth.”
It’s a very specific choice given the elements of our real-life 2026 project that Project Aces did not include – such as drones, which are becoming an increasing part of modern warfare. I Talk to Kono for the first time Back in December after Ace Combat 8 was revealed at the 2025 Game Awards. It was stated that the drone enemies included in Ace Combat 7 were not liked by fans; They wanted to experience intense man-on-man combat with radio chatter and human tension.
“There will always be a line of reality that we want to aim for,” Kono said in December. “However, we still cannot go to that line at the expense of the player experience. The player having fun will always be a priority for us as a game design philosophy.”
The cockpit HUD display option is the pure simulation view, but is more limited than the other two options.
Play Ace Combat 8: Become the Wings of Legend
I was thinking about this push and pull between reality and fantasy as I sat at my viewing station. Kono’s comments about avoiding real-world elements like boarding drones made me wonder how much Ace Combat 8 is geared toward maintaining the dog-fighting fantasy sparked by popular media like the movie Top Gun, even as modern air combat continues to veer toward drones and beyond-visual-range engagements.
In fact, after the two player characters were rescued and reunited with the crew, he was sent into the air in the backseat behind the current Wings of Theve, whose sunglasses and charming smile looked like those of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun. In another sign of misinformation, Airman Cobb’s record of enemy kills has been greatly exaggerated. When an enemy shoots down our plane, Cope’s untimely death clears the way for the player to take up his mantle – though he remains there as a ghostly presence to guide you forward. It’s a fun flavor of passing the torch that also provides context, as the player character is the classic wordless protagonist.
The Professor is one of the main character’s three pilots.
After that introduction, in the first mission, the player character takes on the mantle of Wings of Theve as a propaganda move to maintain morale. The second and third missions reunite me with my teammates – former community college academic The Professor, taciturn Noise, and former stunt pilot Tasha (whose colorful hair wouldn’t look out of place on a K-pop star).
In-game, you can command them to focus fire on targets, choose their targets, or attack you. It’s a lot of flexibility to suit your playstyle, though I often lost track of what they were doing while I focused on my mission objectives. Mostly, I enjoyed the radio chatter as they teased each other.
You can also equip it with different aircraft, missiles or bombs tailored to each mission, though I didn’t notice much difference when I split it between the A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft and the Eurofighter Typhoon air superiority aircraft. (I probably didn’t care enough.) After starting out in the F/A-18C multirole fighter — which Kono told me in December is his favorite and serves as the game’s “hero aircraft” — players can unlock more than 30 real and fictional aircraft, each with its own stats and payload options. This diversity makes some more suitable for air battles and others more effective against ground targets.
Players will start with the F/A-18C, but can spend points earned completing missions to unlock more than 30 other aircraft.
Unlocking is handled through a technology tree of sorts, starting with the F/A-18C and branching out not only to new aircraft but also to perks, including improved missile performance and larger bomb payloads. They can be equipped before missions, although each aircraft has a different additional ability. With over 100 standard missiles and dozens of additional missile and bomb options, weapons have always been where Ace Combat transitions from realistic flying to arcade-style air combat. But it serves the pilot’s heroic fantasy well — and makes missed shots much less painful.
We’ve moved on to the final part of the preview. The fourth mission was a good mix of down and up targets, featuring harbors full of naval bombing vessels protected by enemy fighter planes. But it was the ninth mission that stopped me in my tracks: encountering a land warship that looked like a land warship USS Iowa To treat it. My goal was to immobilize it while the Juggernaut’s railguns, escort quadcopters, and defensive drone swarm tried to knock me out of the sky. They succeeded several times, and it took several attempts (and collapsing hotel buildings) to finally pin the monster in place.
The massive ground warship has three railgun turrets that can shoot down the player from any distance.
Our last mission, the eleventh mission, had my team handling huge planes with flying wings transporting parts of ground warships into enemy territory. Thanks to radar jamming, I had to track the skyborne Titans with their long jets, then close my squad in and rely on short-range missiles and gunfire to take them down. Guarded by fighters, I screamed through the clouds in a visually stunning sequence, and saw first-hand the game’s Cloudly technique that Kono described to me back in December.
Some targets, such as the Portage flying wing enemies (pictured), have multiple targets that must be hit before the entire craft goes down.
That sense of breathless adventure among the clouds is one of the three cornerstones at the heart of Ace Combat 8’s design philosophy, Kono and other media told me at the preview. Every decision they made needed to nourish or strengthen someone.
“The first (pillar) is a realistic expression of the sky and gives the player the freedom to fly through it the way he sees fit. The second is also at the player’s discretion, which enemies to deal with and which air battles to satisfy in the sky. The third is this process of becoming an accomplished pilot in the world, going from novice to champion in the world of Ace Combat,” Kono said. (He then laughed that there might be a fourth pillar they didn’t realize existed, given how much fans care about the franchise’s background music.)
Despite all the efforts devoted to realism, from recreating the world’s most iconic fighter planes to simulating cloud moisture drops on the cockpit canopy, Ace Combat still delivers a powerful fantasy: a sky-borne gunfighter fighting for what’s right. While I was surprised by Ace Combat 8’s decision to incorporate social media warfare, I was still engaged in watching my pilot’s legend grow – ideally through missiles and slick flying rather than manipulated smartphone videos.
