Ace Combat 8 ​​brings dogfights into the age of disinformation

I had just completed several waves of fighter jets and attack helicopters heading towards the last port still under the control of my desperate nation, keeping our slim chances alive for one more day. I returned to our base, an aging aircraft carrier, to chat with the corporate bigwig who had brought our motley remains. He took out his smartphone and showed me how he manipulated photos to make it appear like we had more fighter jets than the few planes we have, thereby projecting our strength through disinformation.

Strangereal gets a dose of 2026 reality.

As the first Ace Combat game in seven years and the first on this generation of consoles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve features numerous technical and narrative modernizations. At a preview in Los Angeles, I played several hours of the game across six different missions. Rest assured: it fully embodies the franchise’s particular flavor of tense dogfighting without the harsh complexity of ultra-realistic flight simulators.

It’s also undeniably set in Strangereal’s Ace Combat world, a fictional setting of vaguely European-style nations under siege in generational wars fought with real-world planes… as well as massive flying wings and land battleships that wouldn’t look out of place in an anime. Yet for as long as I’ve been playing the game, this is what the developers at Project Aces – the in-house Bandai Namco team behind the Ace Combat series – have taken from OUR the real world 2026 that struck me.

This is integral to Project Aces’ framing for Ace Combat 8, which focuses on the relationships between pilots and people close to the player. The game opens with an unnamed player character rescued from the sea and taken aboard an aircraft carrier carrying the last military holdout of the Federation of Central Usea, or FCU, after its defeat by the Republic of Sotoa. Soon, the player takes on the role of the titular Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot whose identity is obscured so that when one is shot down, another takes his place.

Taking responsibility for preserving myth is an old storytelling theme, but it takes on new life in Ace Combat 8. Project Aces wanted to take Sky’s Goal to a more personal level, connecting players with the people they interact with and protect aboard the ship. But the breaks between missions, when players bond with these fictional characters, also show them filming smartphone videos of Wings of Theve that are sent around as promotional footage. As intentionally surreal as Strangereal is – an abstraction constructed to depict colossal wars and geopolitical upheaval – it’s still a little bizarre to see the real-life smartphone propaganda used to win hearts and minds blend into a franchise centered on fighter jet dogfights.

As editor-in-chief of CNET’s mobile coverage, it’s surreal to watch social media warfare find its way into a military simulation. But when the media met Kazutoki Kono, the brand director of the Ace Combat series, at the preview, and I asked him about the inclusion of smartphone propaganda, Kono said he saw it as an extension of the player’s journey to becoming an ace pilot.

“Obviously there are massive boss fights, different encounters, very difficult situations that you will have to face in dogfight situations, maybe other ace pilots who are your rivals,” Kono said. “But on a much larger scale, I think social media and misinformation is another challenge that teams have to overcome these days. You could say that social media is just one in a wide range of challenges that have to be overcome for the player to feel that sense of growth.”

This is a very specific choice considering the elements of our 2026 Project Aces reality that didn’t include, like drones, which are increasingly a part of modern warfare. I first spoke with Kono in December after Ace Combat 8 ​​was revealed at The Game Awards 2025. He shared that the unmanned aerial vehicle enemy drones included in Ace Combat 7 were not popular with fans; they wanted the experience of man-on-man dogfighting with radio chatter and human tension.

“There will always be that line of reality that we want to aim for. That being said, we still can’t opt ​​for that line at the expense of the player experience,” Kono said in December. “For us, player enjoyment will always be a priority as a game design philosophy.”

Play Ace Combat 8: Become the Wings of Legend

I was thinking about this push and pull between fact and fiction as I sat at my desk for the preview. Kono’s comments about avoiding real-world elements like the rise of UAV aircraft made me wonder how much Ace Combat 8 ​​would be geared toward preserving the air combat fantasy discussed in popular media like Top Gun, even as modern dog combat continues to gravitate toward drones and beyond-visual-range engagements.

Indeed, after my player character was rescued and met the crew, he was sent flying into the backseat behind present-day Wings of Theve, whose aviator sunglasses and charming smile bore an uncanny resemblance to Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s in Top Gun. In another nod to misinformation, the pilot, Cope, had his enemy casualty toll greatly exaggerated. When an enemy ace downs our plane, Cope’s untimely death clears the way for the player to take up his role, although he sticks around as a ghostly presence to guide you in the future. It’s a fun flavor of passing the torch that also provides context, as the player character is a classic wordless protagonist.

After this prologue, the first mission allows the player character to assume the role of the Wings of Theve as publicity to keep morale up. The second and third missions bring me together with my teammates – former community college scholar The Professor, taciturn Noise, and former stunt driver Tasha (whose colorful hair wouldn’t look out of place on a K-pop idol).

In the game, you can order them to focus their fire on targets, choose their own, or group on you. It’s a bit of flexibility to accommodate your playstyle, although I often lost track of what they were doing while I focused on my mission objectives. Most of all, I enjoyed the talk on the radio as they teased each other.

You can also equip them with different planes and missile or bomb loadouts to suit each mission, although I didn’t notice much difference when I split them between the A-10 Warthog ground attack planes and the Eurofighter Typhoon air superiority planes. (It’s possible I wasn’t paying enough attention.) After starting with the F/A-18C multirole fighter—which Kono told me in December was his favorite and which serves as the game’s “hero plane”—players can unlock more than 30 real and fictional aircraft, each with their own stats and payload options. This variety makes some better suited to aerial combat and others more effective against ground targets.

Unlocking is handled through a sort of tech tree, starting with the F/A-18C and extending not only to new aircraft, but also to perks including improved missile performance and larger bomb payloads. These can be equipped before missions, although each plane has a different perk capacity. With over 100 standard missiles and dozens of additional missile and bomb options, weaponry has always been the point where Ace Combat transitions from realistic aviation to arcade-style dogfighting. But it serves the fantasy of the heroic pilot well – and makes missed shots much less painful.

We jumped all over the place for the final segment of the preview. The fourth mission was a good mix of below and above targets, including ports full of military ships to bomb, protected by enemy fighter jets. But it was the ninth mission that stopped me in my tracks: taking on a land battleship that looked like the USS Iowa on tracks. My goal was to immobilize it while the Iron Leviathan’s cannons, hovering quadcopter escorts, and swarm of swirling defensive drones attempted to knock me out of the sky. They succeeded several times, and it took several attempts (and collapsed hotel buildings) to finally lock the beast in place.

The last mission we participated in, 11, saw my team take on massive flying-wing planes carrying parts of land battleships into enemy territory. Thanks to radar jamming, I had to track the aerial behemoths by their long contrails, then close my team in and rely on short-range missiles and gunfire to take them down. Flanked by fighter escorts, I screamed through the clouds in a visually stunning sequence, seeing for myself the game’s Cloudly technology that Kono had described to me in December.

That sense of breathtaking adventure among the clouds is one of the three fundamental pillars at the heart of Ace Combat 8’s design philosophy, Kono and other media told me at the preview. Every decision they made had to nourish or strengthen one of them.

“The first [pillar] is a photorealistic expression of the sky and gives the player the freedom to roam it as they see fit,” Kono said. “The second is also up to the player’s discretion, which enemies to engage with and the satisfaction of aerial combat in the sky. The third is this process of becoming an ace pilot in the world, so you go from rookie to hero in the world of Ace Combat. (Then he laughed, saying there might be a fourth pillar that they didn’t even realize existed, given how fans have been vocal about the franchise’s background music.)

Despite all the effort put into realism, from recreating the world’s most iconic fighter jet to simulating moisture droplets on the cockpit canopy, Ace Combat still delivers a powerful fantasy: that of an aerial fighter fighting for what’s right. Although I was caught off guard by Ace Combat 8’s decision to incorporate social media warfare, I was still fascinated to see my pilot’s legend grow – ideally through missiles and smooth flying rather than doctored smartphone videos.