Ace Combat 8’s Stellar Multiplayer Reveals the Terrors of Live-Service Games

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is one of the best games I’ve played this year. Its 25-hour single-player campaign, featuring 30 thrilling missions, is worth the price of admission alone. That’s before factoring in Ace Combat Online, a robust live-service multiplayer component that could keep fans flying for years to come.

Due to the nature of online servers, I wasn’t able to play much Ace Combat Online ahead of Ace Combat 8’s review embargo. I only had access to the mode for a few hours, where I moved through a blitz of rotating playlists with press and creators, rather than the wider player population who’s playing now — not substantial enough to pass much judgment. Now that Ace Combat Online is live (at least for the diehards who preordered the base game), I have a much better feel for its multiplayer, and it comes with some real highs and lows. The moment-to-moment action is tense and exciting, but you’ll need to wade through a lot of menus and live-service headaches to appreciate it.

When you first pop into Ace Combat Online, the experience can be immediately overwhelming. After creating a character, you’re dropped into a Destiny-like social hub lined with other players and vendors. Loading into a mission, checking challenges, editing planes, buying new gear, managing your squad — everything is split between various NPCs. It takes a bit of time to figure out where every feature you need lives.

That should be alleviated by a menu that gives you quick access to some of those features, but Ace Combat Online’s menus are inexplicably convoluted. Let’s say that you want to edit one of your aircraft. First, you click on “Hangar.” Then “Online Aircraft Set.” You’re then whisked away to your loadouts. Choose one, and you’ll drop into another menu with eight different edit options. Want to put an emblem on your plane? Hit “Select Emblem” to end up in another eight-option menu to pick where you want to place one, before finally getting to the screen that lets you select an emblem. Bandai Namco seems to know how much of a pain this can be, because it gives players the ability to hold a button to return to the lobby while in a menu rather than individually backing out of all of those menu layers.

Everything is similarly arduous, begging for quality-of-life improvements. Challenges, for instance, are split into four different categories. There’s no way to claim rewards from all of them at once, so you need to pop into each menu to get your rewards. Even something as simple as getting into a match takes one more step than it should. Click on “Mission,” hit “Select Mode,” pick a mode, then back out a menu layer to hit “Sortie.” Ace Combat Online could use some serious streamlining to help players squad up and get to the action much faster.

But once you’re set up and flying, it’s one of the best multiplayer experiences you’ll have this year. I’ve loved my early matches, and not just because they give me a new way to test my skills online. Online rounds are full of good vibes, as you soar through the scenic skies listening to one of the songs from the game’s fantastic soundtrack. It hardly matters if I win or lose; I’m just happy to cruise.

Image: Bandai Namco Aces/Bandai Namco Entertainemnt via Polygon

I’ve had a chance to play most of the available modes so far, and there are some clear highlights in the bunch. Co-Op Assault essentially tosses your squad into a single-player mission where you need to destroy as many enemy weapons as you can and fend off invaders while racking up a high final ranking. It’s a great race against the clock that rewards quick thinking and clean coordination as you divide and conquer. Co-op Warfare is a more intense riff on that, which adds an enemy squad to the battlefield. I’ve spent most of my time in these two modes so far, as it’s where I feel like I can best contribute to a team even if I’m not the most skilled player in the skies.

I’m less impressed by the game’s deathmatch modes so far, but only because they feel too short. You only get a few minutes to take down enemy planes, and that doesn’t leave much time for good cat and mouse chases. It feels like half my time in a round is spent simply sailing towards the enemy team. By the time I get there, the match feels like it’s half over. Thankfully, Ace Combat Online is going to operate as a live-service game, which gives me hope that Bandai Namco will issue smart tweaks over time.

Image: Bandai Namco Aces/Bandai Namco Entertainemnt via Polygon

That live-service element can be a gift and a curse, as Ace Combat Online is ruthless about microtransactions. It features a free season pass, dubbed the Ace Pass, which doles out rewards over 100 levels. But there’s also a paid premium pass that gives you even more rewards. (Both will be active for around two months, and it’s currently unclear how exactly seasonal resets will work.) To get that, you’ll need to buy 1,000 Ace Coins, which will run you $10. Oh, and you can also buy a Premium Pass Plus for 2,500 Ace Coins to get even more perks. You can’t buy a clean stack of 2,500 Ace Coins, of course. There’s a $20 bundle that will give you 2,300, and the next tier up is a $30 option that gives you 3,500. Diabolical!

There’s plenty more that you can spend Ace Coins on. You can buy decals, clothing for your pilot, and skins for your plane skins. There are rewards earned by gathering free currencies, thankfully, but the silliest stuff all seems to be paid so far. None of this is all too shocking, considering that Ace Combat Online is following Fortnite’s playbook pretty closely. The difference is that Fortnite is a free-to-play game; Ace Combat 8 costs $70. It feels like paying a hefty price to enter an amusement park, and then getting charged for every ride inside.

I’ve largely been able to ignore the live-service element so far, buying planes and customization items with the chunk of change I’ve made from matches, but it does leave a sour taste in my mouth. It’s a shame that, nowadays, it feels like you have to make a deal with the devil to get a robust multiplayer suite. The more involved the mode, the heavier the microtransactions. On the flipside, online modes that aren’t subsidized by battle passes can often feel like an afterthought. This year’s Star Fox, for instance, avoids live-service traps altogether. The tradeoff is that it’s an anemic mode with barely much to do, even after its latest free update. Maybe I’m too nostalgic for the glory days of Halo 2, but I wish developers could return to a middle ground where a premium game’s multiplayer component gave you everything you could want out of the box.

Even with that annoyance lingering in my mind, I’ve still been able to enjoy my early hours with Ace Combat Online. The aerial operations are both involved enough to test my skills, and short enough to let me enjoy them as a casual delight. A little quality of life tweaking to streamline the menus will go a long way towards making it a go-to game in my multiplayer rotation. Just don’t expect me to spend an extra dime in a game that costs $70.