ACE COMBAT™ 7: SKIES UNKNOWN - Experience Intense Aerial Combat

Overview

ACE COMBAT™ 7: SKIES UNKNOWN is a mission-based flight shooter in which you fly fighter jets modeled on real aircraft and destroy assigned targets. The setting is not our Earth but the series' long-running fictional world, where you fly as a nameless pilot caught in a full-scale war between the Osean Federation and the Kingdom of Erusea.

The loop is consistent: read the briefing, pick an aircraft and a special weapon, launch, and destroy your objectives before the timer runs out.

A single mission usually wraps up in roughly 15 to 30 minutes, so you can settle in for a long session or fly just one sortie. The campaign runs about twenty missions and rotates through ground strikes, interceptions, escorts, and low-altitude canyon runs.

It is not a game of continuous dogfighting from start to finish, and knowing that up front keeps expectations aligned.

How It Flies — This Is Not a Simulator

The flight model is deliberately not the faithful-to-reality kind. Fuel management and complex avionics stay in the background; everything is tuned around the satisfaction of pointing your nose at a target and staying on it.

Missile evasion is handled through intuitive maneuvering rather than careful flare and chaff management.

Two control schemes are available. Normal turns the aircraft in whatever direction you push the stick, and most newcomers can get behind an enemy within minutes.

Expert asks you to roll first and then pull, the way a real aircraft behaves. Expert gives you far more freedom in a fight, but you will fly into the ground repeatedly while learning it.

Everything is designed around a gamepad, so a flight stick is not required.

Features and Systems

Aircraft are not unlocked all at once. Points earned from mission ratings and kills are spent on a branching tree that splits into fighters, attackers, and multirole aircraft, and the branch you push first shapes your early game.

The same points buy aircraft parts that tune maneuverability, missile tracking, and airframe durability toward your own flying style.

Beyond the standard missiles every aircraft carries, each plane can equip a special weapon: high-tracking air-to-air missiles, multi-target missiles that engage several contacts at once, or long-range air-to-ground munitions. The same mission plays very differently depending on whether you clear the sky first or rush the ground targets and leave.

Mission timers extend with each kill, so when you stall out, the loadout screen is usually the right place to look before blaming your aim.

The standout technical feature is weather. Fly into a thunderhead and visibility collapses, radar and missile tracking degrade, and ice builds on the airframe until handling dulls.

It is not just spectacle — clouds are a usable tool for breaking a lock. Sandstorm and heavy-rain missions turn simply finding the enemy into the challenge.

System Requirements

The requirements published on Steam are as follows.

The official notes state that the minimum tier targets 1080p/60fps at Low settings and the recommended tier targets 1080p/60fps at High, with the caveat that framerate may drop in graphics-intensive scenes.

Two things follow from that. First, the bar is modest even for a 2019 title: a GTX 1060 3GB is expected to deliver High, not Ultra, at 1080p.

Any current mid-range GPU should have comfortable headroom at that resolution. Second, the load is uneven.

Passing through cloud layers, large mixed formations of friendly and enemy aircraft, and urban ground-attack missions all cost visibly more than a quiet patrol. Tune your settings against a busy, cloudy mission rather than an easy one.

8 GB of RAM meets the recommendation, but 16 GB is safer if you keep a browser or streaming software open. The 50 GB install is not small for a flight game.

An SSD is not listed as required, but it noticeably shortens mission load times. As a DirectX 11 title, it needs no DirectX 12-specific tuning.

Review Trends

The game has held a strong reputation over a long period, working both as an entry point for newcomers and as a sequel for existing fans.

Positive reviews consistently praise the feel of flight itself and the presentation. Twisting the airframe around to settle behind a target is satisfying on its own, and the radio chatter and the way the soundtrack swells at mission climaxes are frequently singled out as carefully built.

The weather and cloud rendering is regularly cited as a clear step up from earlier entries.

Critical reviews cluster just as clearly: the storytelling style and the cutscenes divide opinion, a few missions combine steep difficulty with unclear objective guidance, and the multiplayer population is not what it was at launch. Some players also find the early hours thin, since the aircraft tree limits your options until it opens up.

For the current review status, check the ratings panel on this page or the Steam store listing.

Getting Started

Fly two or three missions on Normal controls, experience both air and ground objectives, and only then try Expert. Expert rewires the whole control scheme, so switching after you understand the game's structure makes it far less likely you give up on it.

If you are unsure where to spend points, push the multirole branch first. Those aircraft handle both air and ground work well enough that misreading a mission is not fatal.

Dedicated attackers make ground missions dramatically easier but suffer badly once escort fighters engage you. Put early parts into maneuverability and durability; missile tracking can wait.

When a mission stops you cold, the problem is usually the loadout, not your skill. If the timer is beating you, change your special weapon to match the target type before anything else.

Multiplayer

Online play offers both a free-for-all format and team battles, and the aircraft and parts you build in the campaign carry over, so single-player progress doubles as match preparation. That said, this is an older title, and queue times vary by region and time of day.

If multiplayer is your main reason to buy, check current player activity beforehand. Treating the campaign as the product and multiplayer as a bonus is the safer expectation.

Who It's For

• Players who want to fly a fighter jet enjoyably without learning procedures. The learning curve is gentle and the first thirty minutes already deliver.
• Anyone who wants a game divisible into single sittings. Mission structure means you make progress without long blocks of free time.
• Players who value presentation. The moments where music and radio chatter land together are a real strength.
• Gamepad-only players. Nothing here assumes a flight stick.
• Anyone gaming at 1080p on roughly GTX 1060 3GB hardware or better.

Caveats and Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you want a true flight simulator. If you are looking for accurate flight characteristics, takeoff and landing procedures, and real avionics and radar operation, this is a different genre entirely.

Missile evasion is a maneuvering technique here, not a systems-management task. That is a design philosophy, not a matter of polish, so settle it before buying.

The storytelling divides people. The live-action-styled cutscenes and narration between missions land well for some players and not at all for others.

If narrative pacing matters to you, consider in advance whether you can tolerate that style.

Do not buy it primarily for multiplayer. As noted above, the online scene is not what it was at launch.

If competitive population size is your priority, a newer multiplayer title will serve you better.

Motion sensitivity is worth taking seriously. You spend the game rotating the camera at high speed.

Camera and view options help somewhat, but if you know you are prone to motion sickness, start with short sessions.

Clear 50 GB before you install. On a small laptop SSD, that is enough to force choices about what else stays installed.

Check the store listing yourself. Included content, edition differences, and whether add-on content is bundled all change over time, and product listings occasionally disagree with reality.

Match the title text against the listed contents before you buy.

Summary

Developed by Bandai Namco Studios and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, the game released on January 31, 2019 and supports multiple languages including English, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.

In one line: this is not a simulator of aircraft but one of the most complete action games ever built around them. If that distinction sits well with you, the modest hardware requirements make it an easy title to pick up even now.