GoKawiilI'd just finished off several waves of fighter planes and attack helicopters headed for the last port still under the control of my desperate nation, keeping our feeble chances alive for one more day. I returned to our base, an aging aircraft carrier, to chat with the corporate bigwig who'd thrown in with our ragtag remainders. He pulled out his smartphone and showed me how he was manipulating photos to make it look like we had more fighter jets than the few we possessed, projecting strength through misinformation.
Strangereal is getting a dose of 2026's reality.
As the first Ace Combat game in seven years, and the first on this generation of consoles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has a lot of technical and story modernizations. At a preview in Los Angeles, California, I played several hours of the game across six different missions. Rest assured: It wholly embodies the franchise's particular flavor of tense aerial combat without the severe complexity of ultra-realistic flight simulators.
It's also undeniably set in the Ace Combat world of Strangereal, a fictional setting of vaguely European-styled nations embattled 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 in my time with the game, it's what the developers at Project Aces -- Bandai Namco's internal team behind the Ace Combat series -- pulled from our real-world 2026 that stuck with me.
Players can choose between one of three visual perspectives: traditional HUD from the pilot's seat under the canopy, a canopy-free HUD looking straight out from the plane's nose and a behind-the-jet view (seen here). Bandai Namco
It's integral to Project Aces' framing for Ace Combat 8, which focuses on relationships between pilots and people close to the player. The game opens up with an unnamed player character being rescued from the sea and taken aboard an aircraft carrier carrying the last military resistance of the Federation of Central Usea, or FCU, following its defeat by the Republic of Sotoa. Before long, 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 their place.
Taking on the mantle to preserve the myth is an old storytelling theme, but it takes on new life in Ace Combat 8. Project Aces wanted to bring the lens down from the skies to a more personal level, connecting players with the people they're flying alongside and protecting aboard the ship. But the breaks between missions, when players bond with these fictional characters, also show them shooting smartphone videos of the Wings of Theve that are sent far and wide as promotional footage. As intentionally surreal as Strangereal is -- an abstraction built to stage colossal wars and geopolitical upheaval -- it's still a little bizarre to see real-world smartphone propaganda used to win hearts and minds bleed into a franchise centered on fighter jet dogfights.
Standard missiles will lock on within 2,000 meters of a target, but they'll generally only hit if the player is flying behind the enemy. Banda Namco
As CNET's supervising editor of mobile coverage, it's surreal to see social media warfare make its way into a military sim. But when the media sat down with Ace Combat series brand director Kazutoki Kono at the preview and I asked him about the inclusion of smartphone propaganda, Kono said he sees it as an extension of the player's journey toward becoming an ace pilot.
"Obviously there's massive boss fights, different encounters, super challenging situations that you'll have to deal with in dogfight situations, perhaps other ace pilots that 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 nowadays. You could say that social media is just one among a wide range of challenges that needs to be overcome so the player feels that sense of growth."
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