Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve officially releases on October 1, but it’s available now on Steam for folks who’ve bought the game’s $90 “deluxe” edition. And despite the fact that reviews are saying the game is “the best Ace Combat has ever felt,” it’s currently sitting at Mixed reviews on Steam because of how Bandai Namco has handled one of the game’s pre-order bonuses.
If you pre-order Wings of Theve on any platform, you gain access to Ace Combat 0: The Belkan War, a port of a PS2-era Ace Combat classic lauded as one of the series’ best. But according to a report in Eurogamer, Bandai Namco apparently miscommunicated how the game would be deployed on PC. On console, The Belkan War is a standalone game. And on PC, according to angry Ace Combat 8 reviews, an early version of the game’s Steam store page read, “Ace Combat 0: The Belkan War is a standalone application separate from the Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve full game,” indicating it was going to be standalone there as well.
However, players are now finding that the game is being treated as DLC, meaning that it requires downloading Ace Combat 8 to launch. That’s a problem if you were hoping to take The Belkan War on the road with a Steam Deck, considering the full game takes up 150 gigs of storage. This is also hurting the achievement hunters who are upset that, because The Belkan War is attached to Ace Combat 8, it won’t have its own Steam achievements or activity tracker. The Steam page has been updated to reflect the DLC nature of The Belkan War, but players are pretty pissed and are sounding off in the reviews.
“I was shocked to find out that ACE COMBAT ZERO was actually a DLC executable that is dependent on ACE COMBAT 8 rather than an actual standalone app on steam. This means the way to access the 4GB ACE COMBAT ZERO game is to download and install ACE COMBAT 8 which is 140GB??,” read one review.
Another one says, “I’m grateful to finally get to play the official PC version of supposedly one of the best games in the series, but it’s incredibly disappointing to see how it has been implemented on Steam.”
There are also a lot of negative reviews tied to the actual performance of Ace Combat 8, citing memory leaks, frequent crashes, and its incompatibility with with third-party flight sticks.