Ace Combat 8 Launch: Critics Score It 8 to 9 Out of 10, Steam Has 2,176 Negative Reviews. Why the Gap

Critics gave Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve between 8 and 9 out of 10, while Steam buyers have left it 2,176 negative reviews out of 8,932. We went through a sample of 800 of those negative reviews in English, and two thirds of them mention a technical problem: crashes, performance, controls or a memory leak. Advance access began on 29 September and the full launch landed on 1 and 2 October, so the numbers will keep moving. Here is what is known now.

Two different receptions of the same game

Reviewers agree. GameSpot scored it 8/10, IGN 9/10 and PC Gamer 92/100 (according to review roundups), and the PC version sits at 86 on Metacritic. GameSpot's Richard Wakeling finished the campaign on PC in 18 hours and added four hours of multiplayer, and he titled his review in a way that says the game's absurdity works in its favour.

Players on Steam rate it "Mostly Positive": this morning 6,756 positive and 2,176 negative reviews, about 76 percent. A few days earlier outlets reported 78 percent across 3,654 reviews, so the score is sliding as more people play. Steam sells it in Poland for 299 zł, and US retailers list it at $69.99.

What the people who finished it praise

GameSpot's review is the most detailed one we could open in full. The author praises the clouds, which affect play in this entry: you judge altitude by their density, and flying into one can break a missile lock. The jets feel heavier than in Ace Combat 7, and breaking the sound barrier with its vapour cone is satisfying every time, in his words. The soundtrack gets the highest marks, and the Aircraft Tree and pre-mission loadout of weapons and parts give real choices, because each jet has its own upgrade capacity.

What the war is about

As usual in the series, the story is set in the fictional world of Strangereal. The Republic of Sotoa invades the Federation of Central Usea, occupies most of the country and scatters its military. To keep morale alive the FCU leans on propaganda, and its symbol is a legendary pilot, the Wings of Theve, said to have shot down dozens of enemies. The legend is made up, and the player starts as that pilot's successor: the original dies early, the callsign passes to a new pilot, and the dead pilot narrates the war from inside their head. The story follows one squadron, including Tasha Severskaya, a pink-haired civilian who is the team's best pilot but has not yet pulled the trigger, and her wingman William Coster. Cutscenes now include first-person moments where you press a button to salute or shake hands.

The flaws the review names differ from those on Steam. Thirty missions is a few too many, in the author's view, and some are filler that slows the pacing. The propaganda-legend thread, clearly modelled on the Ghost of Kyiv, serves as decoration, and the comment on social media boils down to networks being bad in the enemy's hands and good in the heroes'. Multiplayer has 100-player lobbies, Co-op Assault and Co-op Warfare modes and a paid Ace Pass. The reviewer notes he only got a short session before launch and cannot say whether the store sells an advantage.

What players complain about

We pulled 800 negative English-language reviews from Steam, written between 29 September and 3 October, and counted what they write about. We counted by keyword, so one review can fall into several rows, and the sample covers only English-speaking players. The pattern is clear anyway: 540 of 800, or 67.5 percent, mention at least one of the six technical problems in the table.

The last row stands out. The game requires hardware ray tracing, so a wave of complaints about that requirement was to be expected, yet only one review in fifty mentions it. What angers people is that the game crashes and runs unevenly on cards that formally meet the requirements. Reviewers write about crashes on 8 GB and 16 GB cards, and Kotaku describes memory leaks and incompatibility with third-party flight sticks. The median playtime of the negative reviewers is 6.5 hours, and 311 of the 800 played more than ten hours, so these are not people who dropped out after a quarter of an hour.

Requirements and the Ace Combat Zero problem

Steam lists the minimum as Windows 11, an Intel Core i7-10700K or Ryzen 5 3600X, 16 GB of RAM and a GeForce RTX 2060 with 6 GB or a Radeon RX 6600 XT with 8 GB. Recommended is a Core i7-12700K or Ryzen 5 5600X, 32 GB of RAM and an RTX 3070 or RX 6800. The game requires an SSD and a card with hardware ray tracing, and it takes up 150 GB.

The second matter is Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War, a pre-order bonus. The store page described it as a separate application, and it turned out to be a DLC executable that only runs with Ace Combat 8 installed. Anyone who wants to play a four-gigabyte game must download 150 GB, which all but rules the bonus out on Steam Deck. Zero also has no achievements of its own. In the material we read we found no response from Bandai Namco to this criticism and no announced patch.

A series record all the same

Ace Combat 8 peaked at 48,687 concurrent players on Steam. Ace Combat 7 reached 13,758 in February 2019, so the new entry is up more than 250 percent. It is Bandai Namco's third-biggest Steam launch behind Armored Core VI (156,171) and Digimon Story: Time Stranger (84,458). The game sells well while buyers express their displeasure in reviews, which leaves the developers a clear target: fix the PC version before the Steam score drops further. We wrote about how Steam reacts to a faulty launch with The Left Behind, which started with 13 percent positive, and with the three waves of Slay the Spire 2 review bombing. Ace Combat 8 is on the better end of that scale, since despite its troubles it holds about three quarters.

We have not played Ace Combat 8, so we leave the verdict on the game to GameSpot, IGN and PC Gamer, and judge the launch ourselves. The campaign described in the reviews sounds like the best the series has offered since the seventh game. We did not check the console versions, and every problem described here concerns PC. In our view, if you play on PC with an 8 GB VRAM card or weaker, it is better to wait for the first patches.

Owners of newer cards with 12 GB or more have a better chance of a pleasant run today, although the sample also has complaints from 16 GB cards, so there is no guarantee. Anyone who flies with a stick should check before buying whether their model is recognised, because controls are the third most frequent complaint in the negative reviews.

The biggest question is for Bandai Namco. Ace Combat 7 won the series its goodwill back, and the eighth risks losing it on PC through a port that, at 150 GB and with hard requirements, forgives no mistakes. The first big patch and a decision on Zero will show whether the publisher takes Steam seriously. We will return to this once the Steam score settles after the first week.