Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve Walkthrough Trailer Breakdown

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is out now, and Bandai Namco Entertainment America's own walkthrough trailer is the clearest look yet at how the first mainline entry in seven years actually plays. The ten-minute video walks through the systems you will lean on from your first sortie: dogfighting, wingman orders, special weapons and the superweapons that close out the series' biggest missions. Here is everything the trailer confirms, broken down section by section.

01Inside Bandai Namco's Walkthrough Trailer

The walkthrough opens with your character joining a squad based on the aircraft carrier Endurance, flying for the Federation of Central Usea as it struggles to hold off the Republic of Sotoa. Rather than cutting between pre-rendered cinematics, the video is built entirely from captured gameplay, narrating each system as it appears on screen so new players can see exactly what a briefing, a loadout screen and a live engagement look like before launch day.

Bandai Namco Entertainment America's walkthrough trailer, originally published June 4, 2026 ahead of the October 1 launch.

That framing matters for a series returning after this long a break. The trailer treats the audience as new to Ace Combat as much as returning fans, which is why it spends its opening minutes on mission briefings before ever reaching a dogfight.

02Dogfights, Damage and the New Combat Model

Once airborne, the trailer shows full 360-degree flight freedom through dynamic weather, with high-G turns, chaff and flares used to shake missile locks rather than simply outrunning them. Enemy aircraft are called out visually as well as on radar, with contrails and cockpit glint used to spot bandits before they show up as blips. The biggest change the trailer highlights is a new damage model: previous entries largely restricted damage to a target's designated hit box, but Wings of Theve lets attacks register outside those boxes and allows destroyed targets to trigger chain-reaction destruction against anything nearby.

03Wingman Commands and Squad Tactics

Your wingmen are no longer background noise. The walkthrough demonstrates real-time orders you can issue mid-fight, splitting into a forward attack command that sends your squad after a marked target and a cover command that pulls them back to escort you instead. Mixing the two is shown as the difference between clearing a formation quickly and surviving a fight you are outnumbered in, and the trailer frames squad management as a core skill rather than a side system.

04Superweapons and the Series' Signature Set-Pieces

True to the franchise's history of oversized set-piece targets, the trailer dedicates a segment to superweapons described as "colossal weapons vastly larger than any fighter jet." These targets use the same exposed-damage and chain-reaction rules shown earlier, so picking apart external components before going for a weak point is shown as a deliberate tactic rather than just a visual flourish.

05Aircraft Roster, Upgrade Parts and MRP

The trailer's hangar section confirms a roster mixing real-world jets with original designs native to the fictional world of Strangereal, including aircraft like the F-22A Raptor, the Su-35S Flanker-E and the Mirage 2000-5 alongside Ace Combat's own original airframes. Aircraft are unlocked and upgraded using an in-game currency called MRP, and each plane can be fitted with upgrade parts and special weapons suited to the mission ahead rather than a single best loadout for the whole campaign. Picking the right airframe before a sortie is framed as a real decision rather than a cosmetic one, since the trailer shows interceptors, multirole jets and heavier strike aircraft handling very differently against the same target.

06The Cloudly Engine and a Tutorial Built for New Pilots

A separate developer diary from Bandai Namco goes further into the technology behind what the walkthrough trailer shows in motion. Series Brand Director Kazutoki Kono and the art team describe building an internal engine called "Cloudly," paired with a lighting system the studio calls "Lumen," specifically to render light-sensitive clouds and weather that change how a dogfight looks and plays from one mission to the next. Development Director Akira Yassui also addresses the series' reputation for being hard to approach, framing the new tutorial system as the team's attempt to make Wings of Theve welcoming to a first-time pilot without watering down what a 30-year-old arcade flight series is built on for veterans. Both points line up with what the walkthrough trailer actually shows: briefings that explain a system before it matters, and weather that is doing more than looking good in the background.

07Release Date, Platforms and Editions

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is developed by Bandai Namco Aces and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam. It launched on October 1, with Deluxe Edition buyers getting a short early access window ahead of the full release; the Deluxe Edition's pre-order bonuses included the playable F-14A and the Steam release of Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War. Full specifics on editions, system requirements and the campaign's length are on the official Ace Combat 8 site, and the full technical breakdown of the Cloudly engine is in Bandai Namco's developer diary.

08What Wings of Theve Changes for Newcomers

If you have never played an Ace Combat game before, the walkthrough trailer is designed to answer the obvious "where do I start" question. Missions open with a full strategic briefing, the game explains chaff, flares and lock-on ranges before expecting you to use them under pressure, and the hangar lets you preview a loadout's strengths against a specific mission's enemy types before you ever take off. None of that removes the series' difficulty, but it does mean the learning curve is explained inside the game rather than left for a wiki, which is worth knowing if the premise of flying a fighter jet through a civil war is the only thing pulling you in.