he core appeal of any Ace Combat game lies in the moment when the beautiful clouds part, the sunlight glints off your perfectly rendered state-of-the-art fighter jet, and guitar-shredding music kicks into overdrive as your locked-on missiles speed away to obliterate an enemy plane. All of that is 100% present in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. What's new is the way it delivers its unexpectedly compelling story.

Set in the Earth-like alternative world of Strangereal, where every country is absolutely obsessed with fighter planes and giant superweapons, Ace Combat drafts you into the role of a fake ace pilot called the Wings of Theve – a propaganda invention to raise the morale of a besieged nation, similar to real-life rumours about Ukraine's Ghosts of Kyiv. You rapidly find yourself becoming an actual legendary pilot, soaring through the skies with your buddies and raining hell upon your oppressors as everybody cheers on the radio. Speaking of ghosts, you have one in your ear – your predecessor, whom nobody else can hear, a gravelly voice waxing lyrical about flying, war and whatever else is on his mind as you flit about.

Despite slavish devotion to the accurate depiction of military hardware, Ace Combat has always been more concerned with making flying fun than sticking to realism. Simplified, more intuitive controls and training scenarios are available to help ease beginners into the pilot's seat, while as a series veteran I was happier with the expert control scheme, which opens up more complex manoeuvres like missile-evading rolls and zero-G turns. Importantly, the simple act of flying around looks astounding; action replays unerringly choose the best camera angles to make you look like a true ace (instead of someone simply doing their best not to smash straight into the ground).

This is a game all about dogfighting, but there's a pleasing variety of mission types ranging from bombing runs and escorts to more convoluted scenarios such as taking out a giant, railgun-equipped "land battleship" rampaging through a city's streets, or hunting radar-invisible supersonic planes by trying to spot their tell-tale contrails. It's all thrilling stuff; the game is perfectly tuned to generate high-tension, blood-pumping moments as you twist, turn and weave through endless rains of missiles while an orchestra goes absolutely wild and a well-produced radio drama plays out over the open airwaves.

It can all get a little confusing in the heat of battle, especially in the first-person cockpit view (which I otherwise highly recommend). Deciphering what the game is telling you to aim for next amid the visual clutter can be a trial – a button to target priority mission objectives directly wouldn't have gone amiss. The clouds, too, can disorientate; I have never seen skies as gorgeous before, but you'll soon learn to read the atmosphere for its tactical considerations as much as for its beauty.

Gameplay innovations are more incremental than sweeping. You can issue commands to your wing-mates, as in much earlier games in the series, but new to AC8 is environmental destruction. Some buildings and vehicles crumble when damaged: falling debris or explosions can trigger devastating chain reactions and you are no longer forced to target weak points to do damage to larger vessels, though it usually remains more efficient. Your plane can also glance off surfaces, taking a bit of damage, which is a relief; in previous entries you would explode instantaneously if your wing so much as clipped a tree branch.

Larger, more impactful changes are reserved for how the game tells its story. AC7's cut-scenes were closer to motion comics than movies, which worked fine for mission briefings but less so for anything involving human emotion. Here, fully animated first-person segments meld with more traditional cinematic cut-scenes (and some really effective smash-cuts scenes) to really bring your wing-mates and the drama to life. Enemy incursions might occur during routine landings or refuelings, too, keeping you on your toes.

Ace Combat has always owed a debt to the movie Top Gun, and AC8 borrows liberally from the more recent sequel Top Gun: Maverick, with closeup pilot face-cam shots and a handful of story beats lifted straight from the film. Dialogue can be a bit clunky (again like Top Gun, or perhaps Metal Gear Solid); characters will occasionally pause midway through an otherwise natural-sounding conversation to deliver some convoluted plot exposition or an ideological clanger. But between the truly amazing shot framing and cinematography, emotive motion capture and voice acting, the series' trademark soaring music and a story that actually sticks the landing, I ended up oddly moved. This is not something you necessarily expect from an arcade flight combat sim.

Unfortunately I was unable to try the game's online multiplayer mode, Ace Combat Online, which was only available for a very short time during the review period. But even leaving that aside, AC8 is a triumph, a perfectly composed symphony of fire and steel that absolutely soars.