I was never really an Ace Combat fan. I knew the series existed, certainly, but it was just never really on my radar. The series started on the original PlayStation way back in 1995, and at that point I was an N64 gamer. By the time it branched out into the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 generation, I was almost entirely a PC gamer.
Then came Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, and the first of the series to make the leap to PC. The game released earlier this year on Steam and sat in my wishlist for months. Then it eventually went on sale over the summer and I hit the buy button.
Then I bought the season pass and all available DLC.
It took just the first tutorial mission for me to get me hooked. Everything about the game, from its full cinematic cutscenes to the pulse-pounding soundtrack to the intense aerial combat action was precisely what I wanted in a game. But more than that, Ace Combat 7 also harkens back to a type of game that you rarely see these days: one that’s focused on a single-player campaign with zero microtransactions.
If you’ve never played a recent Ace Combat game, don’t be fooled by how they look. Ace Combat 7 is less of a flight simulator and more like a flight action game. You have two control styles that will appeal to either players with zero flight-sim experience or players that remember their Microsoft Flight Simulator days, but the actual physics of the game aren’t really geared toward simulating reality. You can dive without fear of tearing your wings off and turn on your sides without fear of sliding into the ground– both of which you’d need to worry about if you were in a real plane.
What Ace Combat 7 does extremely well is making the player feel like a true ace pilot. You pull maneuvers that would normally turn a pilot inside-out and fire more missiles up other planes' tailpipes than any of the aircraft portrayed can actually hold.
Those aircraft, by the way, are all real jet fighters in service with various air forces around the world, although the world of Ace Combat is entirely fictional.
All of this tapped into the little boy inside that remembers watching Top Gun on repeat for hours on end. That likely would have been enough, but Ace Combat 7 went the extra mile with an engaging (if slightly convoluted) story split between four characters and a silent protagonist which all culminates in a memorable finale.
It’s this kind of story-telling that players crave. We see that every year with blockbuster hits like Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, and this year’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and yet developers keep shoveling cash into battle royale knockoffs and “games as a service” multiplayer titles.
On top of that, Ace Combat’s monetization is delightfully traditional. You pay $60 for the core game, and another $25 for the season pass (you can buy each DLC mission individually, but they’re all linked together as they’re own mini-campaign, so I don’t recommend it). Yes, there are a few DLC planes you can throw in there too, but most of them are ultra-powerful and entirely unnecessary to complete any of Ace Combat 7’s missions.
I played through the entire Ace Combat 7 campaign several times with different fighter jets, fully unlocking the game’s extensive equipment tree. Then, as the campaign DLC was slowly released in the fall, I played through each of those missions too. And every time, I couldn’t believe this was a game that didn’t ask me to pay for new skins (they’re unlocked through in-game challenges), didn’t ask for a monthly battle pass, and didn’t pit me against other players in some complicated always-online multiplayer tie-in.
It’s just you and the open skies.