Remember the first five minutes of Top Gun: Maverick where Tom Cruise dies in a tragic crash, but not before magically passing his pilot’s spirit and innate talent to the young hotshot who becomes the new Maverick? No? You’re telling me that I just made that up? Well, look: That might be true. But I want you to imagine, for a moment, a world in which Top Gun: Maverick was an anime, and ghost Cruise stuck around the rest of the movie whispering stick jockey wisdom in his unnamed protege’s ear.

Welcome to Ace Combat.

A ghost pilot living in my head in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve might stand out as odd if you don’t know that the flight series has built up a reputation over the years for being batshit crazy (complimentary). It has about as much in common with Microsoft Flight Simulator as Mad Max has in common with test driving a Toyota Corolla around the dealership parking lot.

I haven’t played Flight Sim in a while, but I don’t think it features an evil Shadow Squadron of pilots who play ominous music over the radio while they’re coming to kill you, or the option to load 120 missiles onto an F/A-18E Super Hornet. And last I checked, Flight Simulator was sorely lacking in missions that put you up against a giant “land battleship” with a railgun that can obliterate cities from hundreds of kilometers away. (A land battleship, if you’re curious, is a battleship, but it goes on land).

That’s just another day in Strangereal, the war-torn setting that Ace Combat has been playing in for decades now. The series faithful have been proselytizing for years that these aren’t just games about doing sick stuff in cool planes: they’re about doing sick stuff in cool planes after someone delivers the best motivational speech of all time containing the words “big blue sky.”

Also, the music goes crazy. To play Ace Combat for the first time is to come to an inevitable revelation: I didn’t know they went this hard.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so I know exactly how ‘hard’ we’re going,” series brand director Kazutoki Kono told me at a Wings of Theve preview event. “For someone who’s playing it for the first time, perhaps that doesn’t convey itself through watching other people playing it, which is why in one of the first trailers we went hard on the drama to hit the players and make them aware ‘Oh, wow, this game isn’t just about flying jets.'”

Danger zone

Wings of Theve plays much like 2019’s Ace Combat 7, which was my introduction to the series. I recognize many of the planes, unlockable upgrades and the surprisingly simple controls from that game, allowing me to skip the tutorial and blast through the first couple mission’s low stakes dogfights and appreciate all the small ways AC8 is different.

There’s a slightly weightier heft at the stick of slower planes, and when you hit mach speed, this game wants to be sure you feel it. “Sound design was a huge part of Ace Combat 8. That sensation you get, that oomph when you’re crossing the sound barrier, is something we pay a lot of attention to,” Kono said.

Outfitting your chosen plane with upgrades for missile accuracy or tighter turns is now slightly more involved, in a nice way: instead of uniform slots that parts fit into, each plane has a unique layout, some better geared towards enhancing mobility or weaponry. But the flight model and livery have changed little. That familiarity is no more disappointing than picking up the Super Shotgun in Doom. Ace Combat 8 is extremely confident that its jets feel great to fly and its simple tech tree progression between missions is good enough.

This is correct, because what matters is the missions themselves, which are endlessly blood-pumping (see above re: doing sick stuff in cool planes) or surprising—AC8 sets the tone early with an ambush during the rote end-of-mission landing minigame. The first time I got shot down I was trying to defend my allies from the land battleship, each railgun shot detonating in an explosion so fierce the wind rocked me off course.

I didn’t watch my minimap closely enough to see the shot coming that swallowed me up in a ball of orange fire.

This many games deep, a new Ace Combat gets to choose which staples to revisit, like the flying fortresses Wings of Theve asks you to shoot down. “Ace Combat 8 marking the 30th anniversary, we took this opportunity to look back and cherry pick the good elements that stood out and adapt them into this version,” Kono said.

“There’s an instance in Ace Combat 6, for example, where on your minimap you can see who has control of an airspace, and once airspace dominance is established over a certain landing pad, for example, only then will you be able to land on that airstrip. That’s an element we’ve brought into 8… we wanted any type of feature that empowers the player to make those decisions.”

The highlight of the missions I got to sample had me defending a remote outpost from bombing runs by local military splinter forces. I don’t want to ascribe too much influence to Top Gun: Maverick considering Ace Combat has been around since the mid-’90s, but the way Wings of Theve has focused on building up the personalities of your wingmen does feel colored by that film’s billion-dollar success. I haven’t seen a shirtless beach volleyball montage yet, but I’m not ruling it out.

What we do get is wunderkind Seversky, her pink-dyed hair a clue she’s walked straight off a J-Pop set and hopped into a cockpit. She cues the music as we scream over a snow-capped mountaintop to intercept the bombers bearing down on our allies. She’s the best pilot in the squad, the kind of cocky you can only be as a teenager, but she’s also a civvie who’s yet to pull the trigger on an enemy plane. The taciturn Coster, who watches her tail, has barely said a word until this mission, when he finds out one of the local pilots we’re trying to save used to play in his favorite band. We crank the music loud enough to hear it over the sonic boom as we hit mach three.

Is there even a point in me describing what I did during this mission? I flew into the clouds to intercept an inbound squadron from above; I nailed a bomber with a long-range missile just before it could drop its payload; I loop-de-looped through a dogfight with Shadow Squadron when they showed up thinking we’d be easy prey, because they didn’t know that I’m the Wings of Theve now, not the pilot who used to sit in this plane’s cockpit (and now somehow lives in my head). Even though I’d been overeager with my supply of special missiles and was down to the basics, flying upside-down after tapping the brakes for a high-speed flip kept them in my crosshairs long enough for a solid lock.

None of those words will light you up with the adrenaline of playing Ace Combat, but at least I can say I tried.

Cinéma Thevité

The most obvious upgrade from AC7 is in the cutscenes stitching missions together, which are presented in first-person, head bob and all, with some excellent Unreal Engine 5 character models. The commitment to first-person in the cutscenes works so well I was tempted to stick to cockpit view when I jumped into the action, even though I typically prefer a third-person camera. Whatever jump in budget it took was worth it—I barely felt like a character in Ace Combat 7, just an observer of the drama playing out around my feats in the cockpit. Here I have a real physical presence, though Ace Combat 8 could’ve really gone for it by letting us walk around the aircraft carrier and talk to the other pilots and crew. I would’ve appreciated having legs, even if the interaction options were limited.

Instead the game goes for an awkward half measure: you can move the camera around during cutscenes, though it often snaps control away. Glowing button prompts frequently pop up in the center of the screen to shake hands or whatever. We’re not far off from ‘Press F to Pay Respects’ here, but Call of Duty’s self-seriousness is crucially absent. Ace Combat is melodrama, and it knows it.

Grounded it is not, but humanizing touches still abound in the first few minutes, like Seversky kicking a football around the deck of an aircraft carrier while the squadron’s pontificating lead pilot Professor gets a wound from his last sortie checked over. A welcome new feature while on a mission lets me issue commands for them to target specific enemies or cover my back, making them feel a little bit more real.

There’s also more to do in the planning phase before a fight: you can spend the cash you earn from missions to buy multiples of the unlockable aircraft, then assign each member of your squadron to a different plane. In AC7 I was only deciding if I should set off in a bomber, an air-to-air-focus fighter, or a jack-of-all-trades multirole jet, but now I have three more pilots to outfit. That contributes to the feeling that they’re more than just voices chiming in to the radio play that unfolds as the backdrop to my aerial feats.

It seems like we’re going to get to spend a lot more time with this small cast, as opposed to the way AC7 jumped between squadrons and killed off pilots as quickly as it introduced them. There’s a risk Wings of Theve gets too attached, but given the series’ penchant for drama I’m not all that worried about any of their planes being outfitted with missile-proof plot armor. Harder to get a feel for is whether it has much of anything to say about the specific ways modern warfare is fucked up.

One of the first people you meet on the carrier Endurance is Di Di, who wears the uniform of the tech bro: black suit, white sneakers, smartphone always in hand. Di Di represents a high tech arms company that’s propping up our nation’s beleaguered military. At one point he uses an AI app to tweak the markings on my plane to make it look like we have a whole extra squadron, then posts it online while muttering “C’mon, go viral.”

Wings of Theve is setting itself up to comment on war in the era of AI and mass misinformation, though it may insist on avoiding any comparison to reality that goes beyond skin deep. At the very least I’m rooting for Di Di and his Anduril stand-in to turn out to be the villain; if he doesn’t, I’ll be deeply disappointed. Let me strap him to a missile and fire it into an AI data center in the final mission, and Wings of Theve might be game of the year.