You should really get Ace Combat 7 while it's 80% off on Steam, because AC8 might be one of the year's best games

Have you heard the good word?

Sorry, good words. Two of them, to be precise: Ace Combat.

I know I'm not the only recent convert to this long-running series; after the announcement of Ace Combat 8 last December, I saw a wave of chatter across social media reiterating that what the uninformed might expect to be rather disposable, After Burner-esque arcadey dogfighting games are actually sick as hell. I played my first Ace Combat this year—2019's AC7: Skies Unknown—before heading to a preview event for Ace Combat 8, and I can confirm that these games are, in fact, cooking with jet fuel.

AC8 is out in October, but I encourage you not to wait for it, because Ace Combat 7 is on sale on Steam right now for 80% off, and is absolutely worth playing if you have even a shred of interest in aerial warfare.

While the planes are all intricately modeled and the game's interface has a sort of militaristic seriousness to it, the tone of Ace Combat is gloriously melodramatic. "What begins as 15 minutes of shooting at radar towers and the odd enemy fighter quickly descends into boss fights against impossible constructions, battles with drone swarms, and navigational setpieces straight from a Universal Studios ride," PC Gamer reviewer Phil Iwaniuk wrote back in 2019. While Phil wasn't completely taken with Ace Combat's anime instincts, I was—I loved the over-the-top cutscenes in this game, which usually involve narrators talking about reaching for that big blue sky or mourning the political strife of their wartorn country.

They're also really pretty.

It's frequently silly and over-the-top, but there's also some pretty deft narrative work being done considering the game's primary focus is locking onto enemy planes and pressing the missile button. The story jumps between three different threads that eventually converge, characters meeting hours and hours into the campaign. It doesn't hurt that those intersecting moments tend to be monumental, playable moments—launching an assault on an enormous space elevator, or dogfighting with the best pilot who's ever lived, or facing off against a next-gen drone that movies unlike any of the aircraft you've encountered up to that point.

Ace Combat 7's missions consistently do a great job of throwing unexpected twists at you, or objectives that amp up the intensity and urgency of what's ultimately a pretty limited set of actions: do a barrel roll, get a missile lock, fire, repeat. You also get to tinker with the planes a bit between missions, but aside from picking a jet that's better for dogfighting or one that's better for bombing runs depending on the mission, there's not a ton of nuance there. There is a lot of gawping at the cool planes in the hangar, though, which I also recommend.

Thanks to how varied the missions are, I don't think there's much risk of being Ace Combat'd out by playing this game just a few weeks before AC8. If anything, I think AC7's melodrama will get you in the mood for more. It's a perfect breezy summer game to fit in this month, before September's wall-to-wall schedule of upcoming games.

AC7's current Steam deal ends in the next 22 hours of this writing, and is $15 (£12) including a Top Gun Maverick DLC tie-in with a bunch of cool planes—though heads up that using them early in the campaign will trivialize some of the challenge. You can get a Steam key even cheaper elsewhere, though: Fanatical has the base game on sale for just $8.69 (86% off) for the next 11 days.

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