Ace Combat 8: seven years of waiting and, for the first time, an online lobby

The Steam unlock is tonight. By the time you read this, it may already have happened.

So no score today: we are looking at what Bandai Namco has built and what to watch.

Where this entry sits

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is the eighteenth game in the franchise and the ninth in the numbered series. The previous one, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, is from 2019.

Seven years. For a series that in the 2000s shipped an entry every couple of years.

It is also an anniversary title: the franchise is thirty. Developed by Bandai Namco Aces, under the PROJECT ACES team, the people behind the entries you love and the ones you have decided to forget.

Out on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series. 69.99 euros on Steam.

What is announced on the campaign side

Standard Ace Combat vocabulary, which is reassuring: you climb into the cockpit, you string together dogfights, you eliminate threats, and you earn your wings mission by mission.

The studio leads with two visual claims.

The clouds. Dynamic multi-layered cloudscapes. If you played Ace Combat 7, you know that is not purely a prettiness question: clouds there broke locks, disrupted missiles and damaged the airframe. Bringing them back as a marketing line gives hope that they remain a gameplay element rather than wallpaper.

The first-person scenes. The studio announces sequences outside the cockpit, in first person, to tell the pilot's story. Between missions you bond with your squadron.

That is the part that intrigues me most, and also the riskiest. Ace Combat has always told its stories over the radio: voices, callsigns, and an enemy you end up knowing without ever seeing them. It is one of the most effective narrative devices in video games, precisely because it leaves everything to the imagination while you fly.

Replacing part of that with faces and cutscenes is a gamble. We will see whether it pays.

The real new thing: ACE COMBAT ONLINE

Here is the point I want to flag, because it changes the nature of the series.

The studio announces the most expansive multiplayer experience in franchise history, and above all the series' first online lobby. In practice: an air base you walk around with a custom avatar, where you cross paths with other pilots, before sortieing.

There are several modes, including co-op, and cross-platform play.

Why that matters: Ace Combat has always been a solo series with multiplayer attached. A shared air base is a persistent social space, and a persistent social space calls for an economy, progression, cosmetics, a content calendar. That is not a criticism, it is an observation. The question that decides this entry's longevity is not the quality of its campaign, it is what is inside that base.

The three things I am watching

The weight of the aircraft. It is the only thing that genuinely matters in an Ace Combat. The series has always rested on a very particular feel, neither simulation nor pure arcade, where a tight turn costs speed and you sense the mass. Seven years, a probable new engine, a new console generation: that is the variable that can swing everything.

The PC version. Ace Combat 7 had a decent but not exemplary PC launch, and the studio traditionally works for consoles first. At seventy euros, the graphics options, mouse and keyboard support, and multiplayer stability will be examined closely.

The length of the solo campaign. If the online lobby is the headline, there is a well-known risk: that solo becomes the multiplayer tutorial. That would be a mistake for this series in particular, half of whose reputation rests on missions people remember twenty years later.

There is something slightly moving about seeing this series come back. It is one of the last that will happily let you fly a jet fighter without asking you to read a three-hundred-page manual, and the genre has all but vanished between austere military simulation and online warfare.

If Wings of Theve recovers what its best entries knew how to do, namely an enormous sky, a talkative radio and an enemy whose name you learn before you see their face, we will return to it with a score.

Did you launch it tonight? Come and say whether the clouds still do anything, we are waiting on the InsertCoins Discord.