You know how you sometimes get politely yelled at for years to check out a game/book/film/whatever and just never do? That was me with Ace Combat; and so I came at this review with minimal prior knowledge of, and zero prior experience with the series.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve’s 30-mission campaign thrilled and delighted me from start to finish, but also had me feeling pretty uncomfortable right from the jump. It’s one of the strangest experiences I’ve had with a video game in many years.
I’ll do my best to tread lightly upon spoiler territory here, but it’s the wildly intense disconnect between Ace Combat as a product and the narrative which Wings of Theve tells that’s really the crux of why I find the game so disquietly fascinating.
As the campaign kicks off, you’re introduced to the titular Wings of Theve; a deliberately Tom-Cruise-as-Maverick ‘ace-of-aces’ who your faceless (but frustratingly male-coded), first-person protagonist is assigned as copilot to. You’re shot down in the opening mission, and he dies, but not before divulging to you that the Wings of Theve legend is nothing more than a propaganda effort and that he’s no more an ace pilot than you or anyone else on the squad.
And so the title is then thrust upon you in order to not let the illusion of it all die. Your nation is deeply on the back foot in this war and this deliberate manipulation of reality is painted as being about the last beacon of hope that the people have to hold on to. Your three new squadmates then inform you bluntly that it is now their job to keep you alive and looking good.
As a narrative conceit to make the player the centre of all attention who is propped up as the hero regardless of their actual skill level, it’s a damned clever one. As a properly explored theme however, it grows progressively further at odds with Wings of Theve’s positioning as an entertainment product – that being as a fun way to experience the thrills of flying, and killing things with, an abundance of real-world military aircraft licensed as the intellectual property of such companies as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin; the corporate logos of which get thrown up on screen before Wings of Theve’s own title card is.
Obviously I’m well aware that licensing is just as much a part of any shooter or other such military game as it is here, and there’s just as much of an argument to be made for how uncomfortable it is in those cases too. Maybe this being my first foray into shooty plane game just makes it hit differently than playing my 400th real-world action game does, I don’t know. I just couldn’t help but find it mildly off-putting up front and then egregiously absurd when viewed in conjunction with the narrative reveals in its finale.
But I still found the game to be really damned fun.
Playing from cockpit view; tearing through a thick cloud in pursuit of an enemy MiG as your canopy gets soaked with moisture while klaxons begin to bellow from the DualSense speaker warning that your engines are facing an icing risk. Then bursting up through the canopy to a blinding blue sky, getting a missile lock, and blowing the other fighter to bits. It’s a thrill so mesmerisingly visceral that I didn’t really want the credits to ever roll on the thing.
In a mechanical sense, the campaign itself is impeccably well paced. A steadily built-to difficulty spike tends to be followed immediately by a mission where you’re asked to simply blow up as much enemy military hardware as you can within a time limit, with minimal threats or pressure. Your aforementioned three supporting squadmates are actually somewhat useful, and your on-the-fly command of them along with continued attention to where your squadron is needed on the battlefield is critical to success (and to avoiding a lot of the frustration I found before I fully realised this).
As characters they’re an almost laughably cliched bunch, comprising a stoic black American man, a pink-haired Eurasian girl, and a soft-haired Leon S. Kennedy stand-in. They’re all chatty but not annoyingly so, and I gotta admit to really enjoying the banging funk-rock tunes Not Leon plays over your shared PA system through some missions. Their existence as ever-present voices in your ear is made hilariously dissonant when you realize that most of the aircraft you can fly are dual-cockpit, and each member of the foursome just has a second person sitting with them who is completely mute and never commented upon.
There’s a branching unlocks tree where new planes, special weapons specific to them, and widely assignable upgrade parts can be purchased using currency earned through mission victories. A single run of the campaign on standard difficulty will be nowhere near enough to earn everything, especially if you desire to issue to your squadmates multiple copies of the same plane as each unlocked fighter adds only *one* copy to your hangar, (though additional copies can be purchased at drastically decreased cost). Multiplayer has its own system of unlocks and upgrades which sits completely isolated from it all, though in truth, even if I’d had the chance to test multiplayer pre-release, the instant I opened it up and saw three currency systems and countless skins and decals for purchase I was put right off anyway.
So I found Wings of Theve’s characters laughable, its themes and storyline near-nauseatingly at odds with its fetishisation of licensed real-world military hardware, and its multiplayer showing to be an instant nope.
Yet I had such an absolute blast with it that I’m now devouring the PlayStation 2’s Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, a barebones port of which comes included as a preorder bonus, and am already exploring which entry in the long-standing franchise I should try next.
Do I wish that Wings of Theve had simply featured a lineup of entirely fictional fighter aircraft? Absolutely. The fact that the game isn’t set on planet Earth and does feature several planes which the developers simply made up makes the whole situation even weirder. Wings of Theve also brought me so much pure joy and satisfaction from start to finish, however, that it’s got me joining the rabble that champions the franchise.
Reviewed on PS5 | Review copy supplied by publisher
Great
- Absolutely stunning to look at
- Extraordinarily immersive
- Bangin’ soundtrack
- A perfectly good entry point to newcomers
Not great
- The more holistically you try to view it, the worse it hurts your brain
