Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown

Bandai Namco Studios spent years in the wilderness after Ace Combat: Assault Horizon tried to chase the Call of Duty crowd and face-planted. Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown is the correction — a full-throated return to what this series has always done well: fast, legible, gloriously excessive jet combat that treats real hardware with reverence and physics with a wink.

Set in Strangereal, the series’ long-running fictional Earth where superweapons are a fact of geopolitics, the campaign casts you as Trigger, a pilot pulled into a war between Osea and Erusea that’s really an argument about drone warfare. Across a lengthy campaign you’ll fly dozens of faithfully modeled aircraft — the F-22 Raptor, Su-57, F/A-18 and friends — through dogfights, ground assaults, and the series’ signature white-knuckle canyon runs.

The market positioning is unusual because the competition barely exists. DCS World and Microsoft Flight Simulator own the study-sim end of the spectrum; almost nobody serves players who want fighter jets without a 400-page manual. Ace Combat 7 has that lane nearly to itself, and the reception has been broadly positive, landing at 78 on Metacritic. Post-launch support has been generous — story DLC, experimental aircraft, and a Top Gun: Maverick collaboration that is exactly as shameless as it sounds. The Switch Deluxe Edition bundles the essentials for players arriving late.

This is a flagship product, and it’s built like one.

• Volumetric weather as a mechanic: Clouds aren’t scenery. Fly into them and missiles lose lock — but your wings ice up and your visibility collapses. It’s one of the smartest ideas the genre has produced in years.
• A deep aircraft tree: Dozens of licensed jets unlocked through a branching progression system, each customizable with parts and special weapons that meaningfully change how a mission plays.
• A lengthy Strangereal campaign: Dogfights, ground strikes, canyon runs, and superweapon set pieces, scored by an orchestral soundtrack that deserves its own review.
• Multiplayer and post-launch content: Team Deathmatch and Battle Royale modes, plus DLC story missions and the Top Gun: Maverick aircraft set.

The Clouds Are the Whole Argument

Every long-running series eventually needs one idea to justify a new entry. Ace Combat 7’s idea is weather, and it’s a genuinely good one. Clouds here are tactical terrain — a place to break missile lock, ambush a pursuer, or blunder into a thunderhead and get slapped by lightning that scrambles your HUD. Icing accumulates on your wings and dulls your handling. Visibility drops to nothing at exactly the moment you need it most.

What makes this work is that it cuts both ways. The cloud that hides you hides your target too. Veterans who spent previous games treating the sky as empty space suddenly have to read it like infantry reads a treeline. That’s not a graphics feature wearing a gameplay costume; it’s a real change to the decision loop, and every encounter it touches plays out differently because of it.

The Loop

The core rhythm is unchanged after decades, and that’s a compliment: acquire target, close, maneuver into the missile cone, fire, break, repeat — against escalating swarms of enemies while a radio drama plays out in your ears. Ace Combat 7 is built around this loop with remarkable feel: the flight model is designed to respond instantly while carrying believable weight. The high-G turn mechanic gives you a skill-expression lever without demanding you understand energy management. Special weapons — cluster bombs, long-range missiles, railgun-adjacent nonsense — give each airframe a personality.

The aircraft tree is smartly gated. Early missions in an F-104 are tuned to feel appropriately desperate; by the endgame you’re flying machines that trivialize problems that once terrified you. That’s progression done right — the power fantasy is earned, mission by mission.

Mission design is more uneven. The highs are extraordinary: a canyon run under radar in a storm, a mass drone engagement over a burning city, the series-traditional final gauntlet. The lows are a handful of missions built on score thresholds and timers that turn a flight game into a scavenger hunt, and difficulty spikes made harsher by sparse checkpointing. Failing deep into a long mission and restarting from the beginning is a design decision from an earlier era that nobody at Bandai Namco thought to revisit. It’s the game’s most legitimate frustration, and it’s entirely self-inflicted.

The Story Problem

Ace Combat plots have always been operatic — this is a universe where nations settle disputes with flying fortresses — but AC7’s telling is muddled. The narrative jumps between Trigger’s silent perspective, cutscenes following a civilian mechanic, and radio chatter carrying most of the actual plot. Individual scenes land; the connective tissue doesn’t. The campaign delivers moments that are hard to assemble into a coherent whole. Series diehards will fill the gaps with wiki reading. Newcomers will shrug and queue the next mission, because the next mission is the point.

Multiplayer is the thinnest pillar. Team Deathmatch and Battle Royale are mechanically sound — the dogfighting is too good for them not to be — but two modes and modest matchmaking make this a campaign game with a multiplayer garnish, not the reverse. It’s fine. It’s also clearly not where the budget went.

On PC, this game is striking where it counts. The volumetric clouds are dense, layered, and reactive to light, and a 2D-era arcade design of this scope is light on modern hardware. Aircraft models are near-fetishistic in their detail; sunlight moving across an F-22’s canopy during a high-G turn is the kind of image the photo mode exists for. Ground detail is softer — terrain textures are built to read as “viewed from 2,000 feet,” which is honest but noticeable during low-altitude runs.

The UI is classic Ace Combat: a dense but learnable HUD designed to communicate lock state, threat direction, and damage at a glance. It looks like avionics, not a menu system — the kind of interface you stop seeing and start reading. The orchestral soundtrack — choirs, strings, and the series’ signature main-theme leitmotifs — does heavy emotional lifting the cutscenes can’t manage alone.

One asterisk for completeness: the widely acclaimed VR missions are PlayStation-exclusive. Steam and Switch players don’t get them, and on PC in particular that absence stings — this is the genre VR was invented for.

Steam is the strongest option among the available platforms, with uncapped framerates and full resolution options, and the cloud rendering at maximum density. Controller is strongly recommended; mouse-and-keyboard flight works but fights the game’s analog soul. HOTAS support exists and is serviceable rather than sim-grade — this is an arcade game that tolerates a flight stick, not one built around it.

The Switch Deluxe Edition is a smarter proposition than it first appears. Yes, the visual downgrade is real — softer clouds, reduced draw distance, a resolution that gets muddy in dense weather — and it’s a competent port rather than a miraculous one. But it bundles the base game with the key DLC, and portable Ace Combat is a natural fit: missions are short, which suits a commute. The twin-stick controls are designed to translate cleanly. If you own capable PC hardware, buy it on Steam. If the Switch is your only option, this port doesn’t embarrass the game.

Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown does a hard thing for a legacy franchise: it found one new idea good enough to reorganize the whole experience around, without breaking what already worked. The clouds change how you fight. The jets are a joy to fly. The campaign, for all its narrative fog, delivers a dozen missions that stand with the series’ best. The flaws are real — checkpointing that wastes your time, a story that wastes its own ambition, multiplayer that exists mostly on the box — and they keep a strong machine from being a great one.

Years and multiple DLC drops later, it still holds its lane. If you have an appetite for arcade flight combat and can live with its flaws, this is a worthwhile buy — and on Steam, it has aged into the fullest version of itself.