ACE COMBAT 8 Beginner Guide: Flying, Dogfights and Common Mistakes

Bandai Namco publishes an official beginner’s guide to ACE COMBAT 8 on the game’s Japanese website, written for players who have never flown in the series. This page summarizes its advice in our own words and adds a few numbers from Steam. Button names follow the guide, which uses a PlayStation 5 controller; Steam supports DualShock and DualSense pads, and keyboard players can check the bindings in the game’s settings. For the two control types and the difficulty levels, see controls and difficulty.

Which settings should a beginner pick?

The guide is written for PILOT and VETERAN difficulty, and it points players who struggle with action games to ROOKIE (STORY), which keeps the focus on the story. Difficulty can be changed during a mission, so starting low costs nothing. For controls, STANDARD turns the plane with the left stick alone and is the easiest to pick up, while EXPERT rolls and pitches like a real fighter and suits acrobatic moves such as inverted flight, which STANDARD handles poorly. The guide itself is written for EXPERT.

How do you stop crashing?

Most early crashes are your own doing rather than the enemy’s. The guide’s checklist:

• Keep your speed up. Slow down too much and “STALLING” appears on screen. Accelerate with R2 to recover.
• Watch your altitude. Missions against ground targets pull you low, and city dogfights put buildings in the way. Check ALT often.
• Use the autopilot. If you lose track of which way is up, press L1 and R1 together and the plane levels itself.
• Trust the velocity vector. The small symbol in the middle of the screen shows where the aircraft is actually going. If no building or ground sits on it, you won’t hit anything, even in a tunnel.

To turn hard, the guide recommends rolling about 90 degrees and then pulling up, because aircraft pitch up much better than they yaw or push down. Yaw (L1 or R1) slides the nose slowly without banking, which is useful for lining up gun shots.

How do lock-on and missiles work?

Press Triangle to cycle targets. Air targets show as squares on the HUD and ground targets as hexagons. Close to about 2,000 meters and the missile seeker follows the target; when it overlaps the target box, the box turns red and the lock is complete. Circle fires. Standard missiles go out two at a time and reload after a short delay.

Two cues make missiles hit more often. First, fire from behind: a missile fired at an enemy crossing in front of you is easily shaken off, and one fired head-on can hit but leaves you exposed. Second, wait for SHOOT, which appears when your heading and the enemy’s are closely aligned. On the radar, targets worth more points are drawn in red, then orange, then white, so red and orange are the ones to chase for a better rank.

How do you win a dogfight?

When an enemy crosses in front of you, the guide warns against simply following the target arrow by the shortest path: you often can’t out-turn it, and it ends up behind you. Turn the other way first to open some distance, then come back around onto its tail. The high-G turn (L2 and R2 together) helps in that chase but bleeds speed and can put you into a stall, so switch back to normal turns when you slow down.

Once you’re behind an enemy, keep firing missiles and add the gun (Cross). The gun is the answer to agile fighters that keep dodging missiles and to tough, slow bombers that survive two missiles. On VETERAN difficulty and below, gun ammunition is unlimited.

What should you do when you’re targeted?

A lock-on turns the HUD red and sounds an alarm. Don’t panic: look at the radar in the lower left first, and if no missile is on it yet, you have time. When a missile is coming from behind or ahead, turn; a sharp pitch-up loop is the most reliable escape, and done well it puts you behind the attacker. If you can’t afford to break off, for example under a time limit, press L3 and R3 together to release chaff and flares, which break the missile’s lock. You carry only a few, but the guide says not to hoard them.

Clouds help too, with costs. Flying into one shakes missiles off, but enemies inside clouds are harder to lock, and staying in too long causes icing, which cuts visibility and turning and makes stalls more likely. Lightning can also knock out your radar.

How do you attack ground targets?

Ground targets don’t dodge, but anti-aircraft guns and missiles fire back accurately. The guide’s method is hit and away: come in as low as you safely can, attack, then climb and turn hard, changing course instead of flying straight. Where targets are clustered, make repeated passes, and only turn back once you’ve opened some distance, which makes the targets easier to catch. Kill anti-aircraft guns early, and when you have something to protect, treat SAM sites as the biggest threat. Special weapons such as bombs and multi-target missiles do in one pass what takes standard missiles and the gun several, so use them.

What mistakes do new pilots make?

The guide ends its mission section with a rookie Q&A. The six problems it answers:

1. Missiles chase you when you want to fly straight to the objective. Use chaff and flares rather than turning away.
2. You crash while chasing an enemy. Check altitude constantly, use the autopilot when disoriented, and hold Triangle to keep the camera on the enemy.
3. Narrow streets and tunnels feel impossible. Fly by the velocity vector and use small yaw inputs.
4. A missile didn’t destroy the ground target. Something was in the way: a target box drawn with a dashed outline is hidden behind an obstacle, and “MISSED” means the missile hit something else.
5. Your score is too low for RANK S. The rank depends on score, clear time and whether you restarted from a checkpoint, so shoot non-target enemies when you have spare time, especially red and orange ones.
6. You can’t decide what to unlock. The strongest aircraft sit on the right of the Aircraft Tree; push one branch toward them instead of unlocking everything evenly, and don’t sit on unspent MRP.

Where can you practice?

Training mode has flight training for both control types, basic and advanced dogfight drills and a tutorial for each family of special weapon. It is the only place to practice flying without enemies chasing you, and the guide calls it essential if you want to switch from STANDARD to EXPERT. Each task pays 1,000 to 3,000 MRP. On November 1, only 39.9% of Steam players had the achievement for clearing a single training mission, so many skip it.

When you’re ready for the campaign, our Missions 1-10 walkthrough lists the aircraft and weapons the official guide recommends for each mission. More guides are on the ACE COMBAT 8 hub.