Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has become the series’ highest-rated game in 25 years, placing it just one point behind the franchise’s critical high-water mark.

The new installment currently holds an 88 Metacritic score on PlayStation 5 and an 89 average on OpenCritic. Depending on subsequent reviews and the platform being measured, its Metacritic average has fluctuated between 87 and 88. Either result makes it the best-reviewed Ace Combat game since 2001’s Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, which received an 89.

That places Wings of Theve ahead of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, and 2019’s Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown. Critics have particularly praised its exhilarating aerial combat, extensive campaign, dramatic missions, orchestral soundtrack, and ability to deliver a convincing sensation of flight without abandoning the accessibility and spectacle of an arcade shooter.

The response has translated into a record PC launch. Ace Combat 8 reached 52,694 concurrent Steam players on October 3, making it comfortably the franchise’s biggest Steam debut. 

Building Better Clouds

One of Ace Combat 8’s most important technical achievements is Cloudly, a proprietary cloud engine created internally by Q-Games and Project Aces to replace the third-party middleware used for earlier installments.

The technology works alongside Unreal Engine 5 rather than replacing it. UE5 and Lumen handle much of the game’s rendering, dynamic illumination, and reflections, while Cloudly specializes in building the enormous, heavily layered cloud formations required for aerial combat.

Those clouds are not simply attractive backgrounds. Project Aces wanted them to improve how players perceive velocity, altitude, direction, and changing weather conditions. Moving through a largely empty sky can make even an extremely fast aircraft feel strangely stationary, but piercing individual layers of clouds provides immediate visual feedback about speed.
Cloud placement can also carry practical information.

Variations in density and altitude help players understand their position without continuously relying on instruments, while storms, reduced visibility, contrails, and gaps in the cloud cover create tactical opportunities during combat.

The battlefields themselves are constructed at a true 1:1 scale and can cover approximately 10,000 square kilometers. Earlier Ace Combat games exaggerated the scale of certain objects and locations to ensure they remained readable from the air. Wings of Theve instead uses realistic proportions across aircraft, hangars, carriers, and environments, producing first-person views that more closely resemble real aerial footage.

Aircraft models have received a similarly dramatic upgrade. They use 4K textures instead of the 1K assets found in Ace Combat 7, while their polygon counts are approximately six times higher. Project Aces also captured more than 1,000 HDRI photographs and 3D scans per team while documenting real hangars and other aviation environments.

Highly Detailed Aircraft

Reproducing modern military aircraft created a very different challenge. Fighter jets contain sensitive and classified technology, meaning Project Aces could not simply find all the necessary reference material through public documentation.

The team instead developed prototypes using available photographs and technical information before submitting those models to the relevant manufacturers. Engineers and representatives would then identify inaccurate, outdated, or incorrectly interpreted details.

That process occasionally produced an unusual problem: some corrections were based on information that was not publicly available. Developers reportedly found themselves wondering whether they were actually permitted to know certain details, much less reproduce them inside a commercially released game.

Project Aces continued refining the aircraft through close discussions with their manufacturers, whose input extended beyond the models themselves to the descriptions accompanying each jet. Producer Manabu Shimomoto said the people responsible for building these aircraft displayed considerable personal enthusiasm for ensuring they were represented accurately.

The audio team pursued the same authenticity. Developers visited military bases and spent hours standing beneath Okinawa’s summer heat with shotgun microphones pointed toward the sky, waiting for aircraft to pass overhead. They also visited a museum centered around a real aircraft carrier, taking measurements, capturing reference photography, and performing photogrammetry scans to reproduce the vessel at full scale.

Franchise Director Kazutoki Kono even flew in a real jet for the first time after approximately 30 years of creating Ace Combat games. Bandai Namco placed him inside a MiG-21 as part of the launch campaign, finally allowing the longtime developer to experience the G-forces, confined cockpit, and aerial perspective his games have spent decades attempting to communicate.

Ace Combat 8’s reception would be impressive in any year, but it arrives during an unusually competitive period for critically acclaimed games. Recent releases Star Wars: Galactic Racer and Gears of War: E-Day have also just been released and are equally impressive for their respective franchises.

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