Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is technically out on Thursday, but as is commonplace now folks who pre-order the $90 deluxe edition get to hop into the cockpit a few days early. Anyone who pre-orders the $70 standard edition, meanwhile, gets a pretty sweet bonus: Ace Combat Zero, a 2006 entry in the series that has never been on PC before now. But how Bandai Namco has packaged Zero is now threatening to drag the new game's Steam review average down into Mixed territory.
Of the nearly 1,000 negative reviews as of this writing, there's a spread of complaints—performance, multiplayer connectivity, weightier flight physics, lacking HOTAS support—but one of the most common refrains is that the Zero bonus has been something of a bait-and-switch. As summarized by reviewer Akion:
"Before I bought the game the description said this about the Belkan War DLC Half the reason I got the game was because that is my all time fav. The integrity of this should matter to you.
"'*ACE COMBAT ZERO: THE BELKAN WAR is a standalone application separate from the ACE COMBAT 8: WINGS OF THEVE full game.'
"And now it says this:
"*ACE COMBAT ZERO: THE BELKAN WAR (Steam Version) is available as a DLC executable launched separately from the base game."
So why does this matter?
As another reviewer points out, "You need to install 140gb of data to play a 3gb 20 years old game." That's not an exaggeration: Ace Combat 8 is currently using up 140.24 gigs on my SSD, with the Zero DLC making up only 3.2GB of that total.
There's also a clear strain of dissatisfaction with the fact that on consoles, Zero comes along with its own achievements/trophies list, which is absent for the Steam version. Since it's tied to AC8, Zero also lacks separate cloud saves, something that would be pretty nice for playing it on the Steam Deck, where it should run very well given its age.
The lack of parity with the console version clearly has quite a few players annoyed, but the principle of the thing seems to be the biggest sticking point. The store page said Zero would be a separate app, and then it wasn't.
Some folks have countered that Bandai Namco couldn't release Zero as its own package due to the licensing terms of the planes featured in the game, seemingly based on this livestream featuring the developers on September 28 saying the licenses only permit giving the game away for free. But clearly it's possible to package the game separately on consoles even without selling it, and I'm skeptical it's impossible to find some kind of workaround on Steam. Hitman 3 still has a listing page, for example, despite not being purchasable by itself—it's listed as downloadable content for Hitman World of Assassination.
"Notice: At the request of the publisher, HITMAN 3 Access Pass: HITMAN 1 Complete First Season is unlisted on the Steam store and will not appear in search," reads a warning message at the top of the store page.
This criticism will soon show up in a smaller portion of Ace Combat 8's reviews as players who didn't bother to pre-order begin to filter into the reaction pool, but for now the pre-order bonus isn't quite the clean publicity win it otherwise could've been.
