Ace Combat 8 Is Getting Review Bombed on Steam

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve launched today to an 88 on OpenCritic with a 98% recommendation rate from critics. On Steam it's sitting at Mixed. Not because the game is bad. Because Bandai Namco fumbled a pre-order bonus and now a genuinely great game is paying for it at launch.

Here's what happened. Bandai Namco offered Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War as a pre-order bonus. The PC store page gave people the impression it would be a standalone application, something you'd own separately and could launch on its own. It's not. On PC, it's permanently tied to Ace Combat 8. You don't own Ace Combat Zero. You own a bundle, and if you ever lose access to Ace Combat 8, Zero goes with it. On console, it's standalone. Same bonus, different treatment depending on your platform.

Bandai Namco's explanation is that the fighter jet licenses tied to Ace Combat Zero have expired, and the only way they could legally distribute it on PC right now is as part of a bundle. They apologized and said they're looking into solutions. Players aren't satisfied, and honestly, that's fair. The store page should have been accurate from day one. If the licensing situation made a standalone release impossible on PC, that needed to be communicated clearly before people handed over their money, not after the reviews started rolling in.

The frustrating part is that this is completely self-inflicted. Bandai Namco Aces built what sounds like a great arcade flight game. Critics love it. The series has a passionate fanbase that's been waiting years for a new entry. This launch should have been a clean win. Instead, the Mixed rating is the first thing new buyers see, and most of them aren't going to dig into the community discussions to find out the reviews are about a licensing dispute rather than the game itself.

Review-bombing is a blunt instrument and it does collateral damage to the developers who actually made the thing. But when a publisher misrepresents what a customer is buying, the backlash is predictable. Bandai Namco set this up themselves. Hopefully they find a real fix for the Zero situation sooner rather than later, because Wings of Theve deserves better than a Mixed tag following it around based on a pre-launch communication failure.