After seven long years, Bandai Namco has finally cleared Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve for takeoff and judging from the reviews, it’s a worthy successor to Ace Combat 7, thrilling critics with high-flying dogfighting action and, perhaps for the first time, with great storytelling, too. Rather than relegate the action solely to the skies, the developers have designed a new narrative experience for Wings of Theve, creating interactive, first-person sequences that fully immerse the player in the story of Joker Flight, the game’s central team of fighter pilots. While some reviewers say this new storytelling technique can stall the action a little bit, when the action gets going, they say, it goes.
Here’s some of what critics are saying:
Wings of Theve‘s gameplay partners well with its narrative. Structurally, the game keeps the majority of its story personal, focusing on Joker Flight’s travails. The flight is a well-realized crew, both as a group and as individuals.
Wings of Theve might be the best Ace Combat has ever felt. It’s honed the action to a fine edge; it feels wonderfully smooth to play, and improved presentation just makes everything pop all the more. Even though your actions in the game rarely shift from dogfights and dropping bombs, I never once got tired of the campaign, which manages to keep things varied across 30 missions.
While plenty of the game’s story still takes place in the skies, a larger portion revolves around the player and your crew’s reactions before, after, and during missions from [the game’s new first-person perspective for story sequences]. There’s far, far more cutscenes than previous entries in the series, and you really get to know Tasha, Coster, Daxter and more as you progress through the story – and, of course, it makes all of the key story moments with them land all the stronger when you’ve had so much time to grow to love them.
Every map in Ace Combat 8 is a vast sandbox of skies, seas, and various terrain in a wide collection of day/night and weather conditions. And the craft you experience it from are just as detailed if not more so for being a focal point nearly all the time. There are around 30 aircraft in this game and they serve distinct roles that make having a wide variety a must for effective mission completion, but they’re also beautifully detailed inside and out in a way that made me always want to keep the camera first-person in the cockpit even when the game is easier to play in third-person.
In an unexpected turn, the clouds are the best thing about Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. Bandai Namco Aces built its own cloud engine, called Cloudly, to replace the third-party tool behind Ace Combat 7‘s skies, and it stacks the sky in layers that look and behave differently depending on how high you’re flying. They’re gorgeous to look at, but the bigger surprise is how much they change the course of a fight. Dive into a cloud bank with a missile on your tail, and there’s a good chance you’ll shake it, while an enemy hiding inside one shrinks your lock-on range and can break your lock entirely, which turns firing blind into a quick way to waste a missile.
Between the truly amazing shot framing and cinematography, emotive motion capture and voice acting, the series’ trademark soaring music and a story that actually sticks the landing, I ended up oddly moved. This is not something you necessarily expect from an arcade flight combat sim.
Some light criticism can be levelled at earlier pacing of the cutscenes, which sometimes feel at odds with the kinetic nature of the pre- and post-mission briefs, not to mention the trite way in which the game introduces interactivity by making use of momentary QTE button prompts. These pop up at numerous times and often for the sake of simply reaffirming an action your character is expected to make based on the context, be it a movement or a handshake.
It’s all so corny, and somehow endearingly earnest, that I can’t help but admire the ambition from the developer, even if the various twists and turns of the plot lost their impact by the time I rolled credits. If you’re an existing Ace Combat fan, I think you’re probably going to have a pretty fun time with the narrative, even if it grew a little stale come the end for me personally. Thankfully, an even more fantastic time with the flight and combat mechanics is very much on the cards, so if you’re not interested in the story, there’s still plenty of fun to be had.
