Gamescom appointments usually start with some kind of briefing. A developer or representative introduces the game, explains what part of the build you’re about to play, points out a few new mechanics, and occasionally warns you about something particularly easy to miss during a short session. My Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve appointment at Bandai Namco’s business booth was considerably more efficient: I was handed a controller and more or less left to figure things out.
In hindsight, I find that particularly funny because Ace Combat 8 itself is certainly not short on briefings. Before sending you into combat, the game fills the screen with maps, tactical movements, animated diagrams, targets, friendly forces and enough military information to make you feel that somebody genuinely expects you to remember all of it. I wouldn’t even call the briefing excessively long; there is simply a lot happening in it, and you’ll be able to see the whole thing in a gameplay video further below.
This was my third appointment with Bandai Namco during Gamescom 2026, after getting hands-on with Gundam Rogue Orbit and Dragon Ball Xenoverse 3. Those three games could hardly be more different, but Ace Combat was the one that unexpectedly dug up some very old gaming memories.
My Pilot’s License Expired a Long Time Ago
I can’t really call myself a flight-sim enthusiast. My desk isn’t surrounded by HOTAS hardware, pedals, control panels and enough switches to frighten my wife trying to dust it. These days my gaming habits lean much more toward RPGs, MMOs and whatever strange indie game has managed to grab my attention, but aircraft games were once a much bigger part of my life.
One of the games I played extensively in my early teens was NovaLogic’s F-22 Lightning II from 1996, followed by F-22 Raptor. At the time, those felt like very serious military air-combat games to me. You had radar, missiles, mission briefings and aircraft systems to understand, and teenage me certainly treated the whole thing with appropriate seriousness. There were plenty of other games afterwards, but somewhere along the way I began spending more time reading, RPGs increasingly took over my gaming hours, and my LARP hobby pushed me even further into worlds driven by characters and stories rather than radar locks and missile ranges.
That means Ace Combat fans should probably treat what follows accordingly. I’m not coming to Ace Combat 8 after thousands of hours with the previous games, nor am I going to dissect tiny differences in flight models that an experienced player might immediately notice. Think of this more as the impression of somebody wandering back onto an airfield after a very long absence.
Thankfully, Ace Combat 8 made that return remarkably easy.
Three Decades of Ace Combat
The series itself has been flying for more than thirty years, beginning with Air Combat on the original PlayStation in 1995. Ace Combat 8 is the first new mainline installment since Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, and while the visual presentation has moved considerably closer to photorealism, the fundamental identity of the series remains deliberately accessible.
Bandai Namco describes Ace Combat as a “flight shooting” game rather than a hardcore simulator, which is probably the most useful distinction to make before talking about how it actually feels. The aircraft, landscapes and weather may look increasingly convincing, but this is not a game asking you to spend fifteen minutes preparing an engine before you can leave the runway. It wants to recreate the fantasy and spectacle of modern aerial combat without requiring an actual pilot’s training.
For someone returning to the genre after decades away, that balance worked in its favor.
Ace Combat 8 once again takes place in the fictional world often referred to by fans as Strangereal. This time, the Federation of Central Usea has been overwhelmed by an invasion from the Republic of Sotoa, leaving much of the country occupied and its military forces scattered. One of those surviving forces operates from the aircraft carrier Endurance, and this is where the player’s unusual role begins.
The protagonist inherits the identity of the “Wings of Theve,” a supposedly legendary ace associated with the FCU capital. The catch is that this heroic figure was largely manufactured as a symbol of hope. With the country collapsing, however, somebody now needs to step into that legend and make it real. Ace Combat has always enjoyed balancing military drama with increasingly theatrical circumstances, and this setup seems perfectly comfortable continuing that tradition. Ace Combat 8 also places more emphasis on life outside the cockpit. Between missions, first-person sequences aboard the carrier allow the player to interact with squad members and experience parts of the story from the pilot’s own perspective. None of that was really part of my Gamescom experience, though. My version of military onboarding remained considerably simpler: controller in hands, aircraft in sky, try not to embarrass yourself.
Returning to the Cockpit
The first thing that surprised me was how little embarrassment actually followed. I expected to spend the opening minutes fighting the controller and rediscovering which direction my aircraft was pointing, but Ace Combat 8 felt immediately approachable. Within a few minutes I was banking toward targets, acquiring missile locks, switching weapons and generally behaving like somebody who had at least seen a fighter jet before.
There is always the possibility that Bandai Namco prepared the Gamescom build with newcomers in mind, so I wouldn’t use a short exhibition session to make sweeping statements about the game’s difficulty. What I can say is that the controls never became an obstacle between me and the action. There was enough momentum and resistance in turns to stop the aircraft from feeling like a free-moving camera, while corrections still happened quickly enough that one bad approach didn’t leave me fighting the controls for the next minute (without once converting the aircraft into ground equipment).
This is also where the distinction between Ace Combat and a dedicated simulator becomes important. Playing with a controller necessarily compresses an enormous amount of aircraft control into two sticks, triggers and a handful of buttons. Someone using proper flight hardware will naturally notice smaller nuances that simply cannot be reproduced through a gamepad. Yet Ace Combat isn’t really trying to compete with that experience. Its job is to convince you that you’re flying a high-performance combat aircraft while keeping the actual interaction fast and readable.
From my rather rusty perspective, it succeeds.
Selling the Illusion
The visuals carry a large part of that illusion. Ace Combat 8 uses Unreal Engine 5 alongside Bandai Namco’s own technology, with particular attention paid to terrain, weather and layered cloud formations. The clouds deserve more than a technical footnote because they genuinely change the visual character of a fight. Entering a dense layer can swallow the landscape beneath you, flatten visibility and briefly reduce the world to the aircraft and whatever information remains on the HUD. Break through again and the battlefield suddenly opens beneath you.
Combined with contrails, missile smoke, explosions and aircraft repeatedly crossing your field of view, the result is extremely cinematic. Ace Combat has always occupied an interesting middle ground where aircraft are recognizable and military language is taken seriously, but the actual action is willing to embrace spectacle. Ace Combat 8 pushes the realism of the presentation much further without sacrificing that arcade streak underneath. That’s probably the balance I enjoyed most during the demo. My hands were doing something immediately understandable with a controller, while my eyes were being sold a much more convincing version of the event. You don’t need a room full of simulation hardware to feel fast, and you don’t need to understand every instrument in a modern fighter cockpit to appreciate the moment when you punch through a cloud bank and immediately begin lining up another target.
Everyone Has Something to Say
There was one part of my session that genuinely irritated me, though: squad chatter.
Radio communication is obviously essential to the experience, and its been these since Ace 1. Targets are being called out, tactical information is being relayed and the battle needs voices around you to feel like a coordinated operation rather than one aircraft fighting an entire war alone. Ace Combat 8 also wants its squad members to feel like actual characters, and the increased focus on relationships aboard the Endurance naturally carries into combat.
The problem, at least during my first session, was separating useful information from everything else being said. Tactical calls, character remarks, jokes and insults kept overlapping while I was already watching radar, tracking targets and trying not to discover the ground at high speed. Perhaps experienced Ace Combat players develop a mental filter for this immediately, but my rusty brain certainly hadn’t. At one point I genuinely wanted to grab the radio and ask everyone to shut up for a minute and concentrate on the mission.
I’m hesitant to turn that into a major criticism after such a short session. Once you recognize the squad members by voice and understand their personalities, the same chatter may become part of what gives the campaign its identity. Audio settings may also change how prominently different communication types are mixed. During my Gamescom flight, however, it crossed the line from atmospheric into distracting more than once.
Ace Combat on the Show Floor
Bandai Namco also gave Ace Combat 8 a substantial presence in the public area of Gamescom. Among the usual displays was a large stand featuring a life-size section of a fighter aircraft, which worked particularly well for a series built around selling the fantasy of sitting inside one of these machines. It was considerably more memorable than another line of monitors with logos hanging above them.
My photographic record from the booth is unfortunately less complete. While taking a few pictures inside, a representative quickly approached and asked me to delete them. I could probably have stopped and argued about the exact boundaries of my NDA and whether the photographs technically fell under it, but Gamescom is not really the place where I want to spend appointment time debating contractual wording over a picture of a booth. I deleted them and continued with the session.
Beyond My Gamescom Mission
My hands-on time focused on the campaign, so the multiplayer side remains something I can only describe rather than judge. Ace Combat 8 expands its online component with cross-platform play and an Air Base designed as a social lobby for up to 100 players. From there, pilots can enter several cooperative and competitive activities.
Among them is Co-Op Warfare, which places two 4-player teams into battles involving NPC forces and objectives rather than limiting multiplayer to a straightforward team-versus-team dogfight. Co-Op Assault similarly has teams competing for score while attacking mission targets. On paper, both sound like logical extensions of the large-scale battles Ace Combat already creates in single-player, but I didn’t play either mode at Gamescom, so I’ll leave conclusions about them until there are actual matches to judge.
The same limitation applies to much of the campaign structure. My session gave me a feel for flying, combat presentation and the rhythm of one mission, but not enough to judge how the squad relationships develop, how much variety later operations introduce, or whether the first-person carrier sequences meaningfully change the pacing between sorties. A short trade-show build is useful for answering some questions and completely useless for others.
What it did answer was the most basic one: would I actually enjoy flying this?
Back in the Air
Yes! Ace Combat 8 didn’t suddenly transform me back into the teenager who spent countless evenings with F-22, and I’m certainly not about to reorganize my desk around a full simulation rig. What it did manage was something simpler. After a very long absence from this kind of game, I could pick up a controller, understand what it wanted from me and start enjoying the chase almost immediately.
The combination of accessible handling and increasingly realistic presentation works remarkably well. There is clearly an arcade foundation underneath the aircraft, but that doesn’t undermine the experience when the skies, weather and visual effects are doing such a convincing job around it. If anything, that mixture is probably the reason someone like me can return after decades away and still feel at home within minutes. I walked away wanting another flight. For a hands-on session with almost no introduction beyond being handed a controller, that seems like a pretty successful briefing after all.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve releases on October 2, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam.
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