Is Ace Combat 8 Worth It? Critics vs Players

Evidence-based review · scores read on 5 October 2026

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is worth buying for anyone who enjoys arcade flight combat: it holds an 87 Top Critic Average on OpenCritic, and Steam players are positive too, at 78.7% of 12,593 reviews. The catch is the PC launch, where crashes and limited flight stick support pulled the early Steam rating down before it started to recover.

This review is a synthesis, not a play test: AFK Journal Staff did not play the game. It is built on the OpenCritic and Metacritic aggregates, Steam's review data, full reviews from PC Gamer, Push Square, Destructoid and TheSixthAxis, Bandai Namco's own Steam notices and the Reddit review threads, combined with the public scoring formula explained below.

What do critics agree on?

The flying is the best the series has offered. Push Square says Wings of Theve "might be the best Ace Combat has ever felt", and GameSpot's 8/10 verdict on OpenCritic is that the series is "well and truly back to its best". TheSixthAxis notes a revised hitbox for the guns, which makes cannon kills far more reliable than in earlier games.

Weather is now part of the fight. PC Gamer describes clouds that offer cover from missile barrages at the cost of blinding and disorienting the pilot, and EmuGlx lists the cloud system among the game's strengths. Mission design gets credit too: PC Gamer highlights free-form score missions that keep air-to-ground planes useful, and Push Square never tired of the 30-mission campaign.

Presentation and sound are a step up. Push Square rates the sound design above the graphics and praises the heavy use of DualSense haptics on PS5. PC Gamer singles out the orchestral score and the enemy squadron's hunting song, which recurs through the campaign, while TheSixthAxis points to details such as water forming on the canopy inside clouds.

The wingmen carry the story. Destructoid calls the relationships between characters the strongest part of the narrative, Push Square says the game is most successful at placing you among characters you will care about, and PC Gamer found that Joker Flight, the player's squadron, grew on it quickly.

Where do critics split?

The story is the main dividing line. PC Gamer (92/100) says the two-hour finale stands head and shoulders above earlier Ace Combat endings, and Destructoid (9/10) praises the game's reflections on war. At the other end of the OpenCritic range, CGMagazine (8/10) calls the story "incoherent and impenetrable", CBR (8/10) says it gets bogged down by the prior lore it expects, and Push Square (8/10) found some plot points confusing among the many names and allegiances.

The new first-person cutscenes divide opinion as well. Push Square says they make you feel more involved, while Destructoid found the semi-interactive scenes, where you can look around but not move, an odd way to tell the story. TheSixthAxis adds the familiar caveat: missions carry some inherent repetition, and the game will not win over anyone the series never convinced.

Online play is the least tested part of the reviews. PC Gamer could not try multiplayer before publishing, TheSixthAxis had not fully explored it, and Push Square only sampled it, reporting long matchmaking waits on pre-launch servers. Digitec and EmuGlx flag the multiplayer microtransactions as an annoyance; our Ace Combat 8 online and Ace Pass explainer lists what is actually for sale.

What do Steam players say?

Players are less unanimous than critics, mainly because of the PC launch. On 5 October, 78.7% of 12,593 Steam reviews in all languages were positive (Mostly Positive), and English-language reviews were higher at 81.4% of 6,806 (Very Positive). That is a clear recovery from 30 September, when the Deluxe Edition's early access sat at 71.0% of 3,401, and the 4,000 most recent reviews are 83.7% positive. Steam filters off-topic review bombs out of its scores by default.

To see what the complaints are about, we read the 399 most recent negative English reviews and counted keywords, a rough measure since one review can raise several issues. About a third mention crashes (126) and a third the story or cutscenes (128); a quarter mention performance or stutter (98) and a quarter online play or matchmaking (98). Another 85 mention controls, flight sticks or the field of view, and 40 the Ace Combat Zero pre-order bonus. Negative reviewers had a median of 4.9 hours played when they posted, against 19.9 hours for the 400 most recent positive reviews.

Bandai Namco has acknowledged the main PC problems in its Steam news posts: a product notice about unexpected crashes on 29 September, a crash report thread asking players for error codes and PC specifications on 2 October, and a flight stick update on 30 September admitting that some configuration options from Ace Combat 7 are missing. On 2 October it also said it is evaluating a standalone Steam release of the Ace Combat Zero pre-order bonus. On Reddit, the r/Games review thread drew 1,007 upvotes and 539 comments.

How does Ace Combat 8 run on PC and PS5?

Console versions had the smoother ride in reviews. On PS5, TheSixthAxis describes a performance mode targeting 60fps and a graphics mode targeting 30fps, with frame-rate dips in the most chaotic battles on the base console. Push Square played in the frame-rate mode and found the image only occasionally soft, while Digitec reports stutters in the Fidelity mode.

On PC, PC Gamer's reviewer saw mostly stable performance at 1440p on a Radeon RX 6600, with hitching in first-person cutscenes, rare dips under 60fps and no field-of-view slider; its spec box lists the game as not Verified for Steam Deck. Crash reports began during the Deluxe early access, when Bandai Namco posted its first notice on 29 September, and GamingBolt reported Bandai Namco's suggested workarounds: updated graphics drivers, enough free storage and enough virtual memory. No crash-fix patch had been announced on the game's Steam news page when we checked on 5 October.

How we got to 8.5

Every AFK Journal review uses the same public formula: the critic score counts for 70% and the player score for 30%, with an adjustment of at most half a point for problems documented by at least two independent sources.

We considered a deduction for the PC crashes, which Bandai Namco itself and GamingBolt document. We did not apply one, because the problem is already in the player half of the score: it is the main reason Steam sits more than eight points below the critics. Deducting again would count the same issue twice. We will recheck the score at 30 days, or sooner if a stability patch moves the Steam figure enough to change the result by 0.3.

Should you buy Ace Combat 8?

• Series fans: yes. Critics broadly call it the most confident entry yet, and those scores rest mostly on the campaign, since several reviewers could barely test online play.
• Newcomers to flight games: yes. TheGamer calls it one of the strongest entry points for newcomers, Destructoid's reviewer had never played the series and came away impressed, and TheSixthAxis notes difficulty can be changed mission by mission.
• PC players with a flight stick or a crash-prone setup: wait for patches, or buy on console. Bandai Namco's own notices confirm both issues are still open.
• Players who never liked Ace Combat: skip it. Reviewers agree the formula has been refined, not reinvented.

The standard edition costs $69.99 on Steam in the US. Everything we have published on the game, from the launch-week Steam story to the online guide, is collected on our Ace Combat 8 hub, and the rest of the month's releases are in our list of upcoming games for October 2026.