I'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, 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 ultrarealistic 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.

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.

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 Kazutoki Kono, the Ace Combat series brand director, 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."

It's a very specific choice considering which elements of our 2026 reality Project Aces didn't include -- such as drones, which have become more and more a part of modern warfare. I first spoke with Kono back in December after Ace Combat 8 was revealed at the Game Awards 2025. He shared that the unmanned aerial vehicle drone enemies included in Ace Combat 7 were disliked by fans; they wanted the man-on-man dogfight experience with radio chatter and human tension.

"There is always going to be this reality line that we're going to want to aim for. That being said, we still can't go for that line at the expense of the player experience," Kono said in December. "For the player to have fun is always going to be a priority for us as a game design philosophy."

Playing Ace Combat 8: Becoming the wings of legend

I was thinking about this push and pull between reality and fiction as I sat down at my station for the preview. Kono's comments about eschewing real-world elements such as the rise of UAV aircraft made me wonder how much of Ace Combat 8 would be geared toward preserving the dogfighting fantasy evoked in popular media such as Top Gun, even as modern air combat continues to veer toward drones and beyond-visual-range engagements.

Indeed, after my player character was rescued and met the crew, he was sent into the air in the backseat behind the current Wings of Theve, whose aviator sunglasses and charming smile looked uncannily like those of Pete "Maverick" Mitchell in Top Gun. In another nod to misinformation, the pilot, Cope, has had his record of enemy kills greatly exaggerated. When an enemy ace shot our plane down, Cope's untimely death paves the way for the player to take his mantle -- though he sticks around as a ghostly presence to guide you going forward. It's a fun bit of torch-passing flavor that also provides context, as the player character is a classic wordless protagonist.

After that prologue, the first mission has the player character taking on the mantle of the Wings of Theve as a publicity move to keep morale up. The second and third missions bring me together with my squadmates -- former community college academic The Professor, taciturn Noise and former stunt pilot Tasha (whose colorful hair wouldn't look out of place on a K-pop idol).

In-game, you can command them to focus fire on targets, choose their own or form up on you. It's a nice bit of flexibility to suit your play style, though I often lost track of what they were doing while I focused on my mission objectives. Mostly, I enjoyed the radio chatter as they ribbed one another.

You can also kit them out with different aircraft and missile or bomb loadouts tailored to each mission, though I didn't notice much of a difference when I split them between A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft and Eurofighter Typhoon air-superiority jets. (It's possible I wasn't paying close enough attention.) After starting out in the F/A-18E multirole fighter -- which Kono told me in December is his favorite and serves as the game's "hero aircraft"-- players can unlock more than 30 real and fictional aircraft, each with its own stats and payload options. That variety makes some better suited for dogfights and others more effective against ground targets.

Unlocking is handled through a tech tree of sorts, starting with the F/A-18E and branching out not just to new aircraft but also to perks, including improved missile performance and larger bomb payloads. These can be equipped before missions, though each jet has a different perk capacity. With more than 100 standard missiles and dozens of additional missile and bomb options, armaments have always been where Ace Combat shifts from realistic aviation to arcade-style air combat. But it serves the heroic-pilot fantasy well -- and makes missed shots a lot less painful.

We jumped around for the last segment of the preview. The fourth mission was a good blend of targets below and above, featuring harbors full of naval vessels to bomb, protected by enemy fighter jets. But it was the ninth mission that stopped me in my tracks: taking on a land battleship that looked like the USS Iowa on treads. My objective was to immobilize it while the iron leviathan's guns, hovering quadcopter escorts and swirling defensive drone swarm tried to blast me out of the sky. They succeeded a few times, and it took several retries (and collapsed hotel buildings) to finally lock the beast in place.

The last mission we got to play, the 11th, had my squad taking on massive flying-wing aircraft transporting land battleship parts into enemy territory. Thanks to radar jamming, I had to track the skyborne behemoths by their long contrails, then bring my squad in close and rely on short-range missiles and gunfire to take them down. Flanked by fighter escorts, I screamed through the clouds in a visually breathtaking sequence, seeing firsthand the game's Cloudly tech that Kono had described to me back in December.

This feeling of breathless adventure among the clouds is one of the three core pillars at the heart of Ace Combat 8's design philosophy, Kono told me and other media at the preview. Every decision they made needed to feed or strengthen one of them.

"The first [pillar] is photorealistic expression of the sky and giving the player the freedom to soar through it how they see fit," Kono said. "The second is also at the player's discretion, which enemies to engage with and the satisfaction of dogfights in the sky. The third is this process of becoming an ace pilot in the world, so you go from rookie to hero in the world of Ace Combat." (Then he laughed, saying that there might be a fourth pillar they hadn't even realized existed, given how vocal fans have been about the franchise's background music.)

For all the effort devoted to realism, from recreating the world's most iconic fighter aircraft to simulating cloud moisture droplets on the cockpit canopy, Ace Combat still delivers a powerful fantasy: that of a skyborne gunfighter fighting for what's right. While I was caught off guard by Ace Combat 8's decision to incorporate social media warfare, I was still swept up in watching my pilot's legend grow -- ideally through missiles and slick flying rather than doctored smartphone videos.