Seven years and over six million sales later and we have the official announcement of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. Let’s have a look at this action packed “arcade” style take take on the air combat experience.
Announced at last
Even if you’re now a die-hard DCS milsim, by-the-book flyer, you may well have gotten your start on some of the gaming world’s more “arcade” style titles. The Ace Combat has been consistently one of the most popular and longest running examples of that type of game. With each aircraft loaded with potentially hundreds of missiles and and equal number of targets to shoot at, Ace Combat titles takes their air combat seriously with lots of beautiful details but in a big fun way.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is being developed by Project Aces, the team within Bandai Namco that has been responsible for the series up to now. The F/A-18 Super Hornet looks to be the “hero airplane” (every title has had one aircraft feature prominently in the trailers and artwork) and the trailer suggests that we’ll once again be doing battle with jet fighters, drones, supersized arsenal birds, and the like. You know, the average day in the Ace Combat universe.
The series is targeting a 2026 release date, though don’t be surprised if it slips into 2027 as the series has notoriously taken their time to get things right in the past – event delaying the launch of Ace Combat 7 to enable the composer to put the finishing touches on one of the music tracks.
We know very little else about the title except that it will be launching for PlayStation 5, XBox Series, and on PC. I’ll be reporting on this launch periodically so look for future articles.
Stormbirds 
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