ACE COMBAT 8 Early Access Starts Three Days Before Launch

You can get airborne in ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE three days before the full release. It’s the new entry in a 30-year-old air combat series where you fly a fighter and shoot down enemies with missiles and other weapons. The series has shipped more than 21 million copies worldwide. Early Access is open to buyers of the Deluxe Edition, among others, and runs for the three days leading up to launch. The full game arrives October 2 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam.

In ACE COMBAT ONLINE, 100 players share a lobby at an airport hub and sortie from there. In Co-Op Warfare, two teams of four shoot it out, with NPC squads mixed in. Co-Op Assault sends you and your allies out on cooperative missions, and a 4-vs-4 team deathmatch and an 8-player free-for-all join the lineup for a limited time. Crossplay is supported.

In the campaign, you fly a series of story missions as REX. REX inherits the callsign Wings of Theve from the late Jan Cope. The developer calls its first-person story scenes an innovation for the series. Cloudly, an in-house cloud and weather rendering technology, has aircraft slipping into clouds and back out again across roughly 10,000 km² of airspace. There are also commands for giving orders to your wingmen.

Bandai Namco Entertainment says it won’t sell randomized rewards or consumables in the game. Aircraft, cosmetic items, and items to upgrade aircraft will be sold.

Recommended PC specs: an RTX 3070 or RX 6800 graphics card, 32GB of RAM, and 125GB of SSD space.

With the story scenes in first person, REX’s story looks set to play out right in front of you.

Language: English
Players: Single-player / Online co-op / Online PvP / Cross-platform multiplayer
Age rating: ESRB T
As of September 29, 2026