Preview Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve - Gamerant's verdict after 6 hours of gameplay

After six hours spent playing Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, the Gamerant journalist saw one thing become clear: the series has never seemed so aware of what it is, with such a strong will to push its own boundaries. Aboard the Endurance, this aircraft carrier with its aging strangeness, the narrative and technical nerve center, briefings, aircraft customization and debriefings in the style of a military documentary follow one another in a staging that is surprisingly intimate for a high-altitude dogfighting game. Well, as you'll have understood, it starts off well!

The main shock comes from the sky itself. The volumetric clouds are no longer simple decorative elements, but genuine gameplay elements: entering a storm mass makes the controller vibrate, blurs the HUD and forces you to fly on instruments; finding a ray of sunshine when exiting a cumulonimbus delivers a very real sense of relief. The reflections on the fuselage, the density of air traffic, the readability of combat missile trails are more legible, spectacular, without extinguishing the tension.

Controller in hand, Ace Combat 8 remains a sharp arcade game, but one that also raises the demands, the journalist tells us. The new contextual maneuvers - ultra-tight evasions, pursuit breaks, smart countermeasures - are learned very quickly, but require reading the enemy's trajectory very well and demand a reduced window of execution. We find that accessibility characteristic of the series, but the handling is deep enough to reward purists in the fine optimization of payload and avionics upgrades.

But what struck Gamerant the most was the importance given to pacing. Some missions stretch out time, mixing low-altitude flight over a highly detailed urban area with secondary objectives that invite risk-taking. The other option is to design missions as genuine aerial puzzles, seeking the perfect angle to pierce through a SAM curtain without emptying your stock of decoys. Carried by a more nuanced radio staging, which feels ready to approach the myth of "Wings of Theve" from an almost melancholic angle, Ace Combat 8 is already positioning itself as a pivotal installment, at the crossroads of spectacle and light simulation.