Arcade-Style Flight Combat Is Coming Oct 2, Following Star Fox on Switch 2
Spending every day this past week playing Star Fox on Switch 2 has done an unexpectedly effective job of reminding me what I miss about arcade-style flight combat when it’s designed with real rhythm. There’s a particular satisfaction in launching into a mission, chasing a stronger score, and then realizing—often around the middle of the run—that the game has already nudged you toward repeating the whole thing. I didn’t even recognize that pattern when I was playing Star Fox 64 as a kid, but it still hooks me now. On Switch 2, Star Fox can feel brief if you only care about seeing the ending once and moving on, yet the longer I spend with it, the clearer it becomes how addictive this genre can be once you understand what it’s asking you to do.
That feeling naturally pulls me back toward Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, which I got to preview more than a month before Star Fox launched. At the time, I walked away thinking I’d played one of the most exciting arcade flight combat games I’d touched in years. Now that Star Fox has put me back into the same mindset, Ace Combat 8, releasing on October 2, 2026, feels like the next obvious entry to keep on your radar. If you enjoy the way Star Fox plays, it’s hard not to at least watch Ace Combat 8 closely. One catch: if you only own Switch 2, you won’t be able to play it at launch. It’s planned for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. Still, Ace Combat 7 later made its way to Switch, so there’s a reasonable chance the next numbered game follows a similar path.
Star Fox on Nintendo Switch 2 may be the best way to revisit the classic story, but it’s a narrative we’ve heard before—so the real draw is what the gameplay asks you to keep doing, not the plot twists you haven’t already seen.
Ace Combat 8 Is the Next Logical Target After Star Fox
The reason Star Fox on Switch 2 lands is that it understands the value of the repeated attempt. The campaign can be finished quickly if your only goal is to clear it and jump to something else, but Star Fox has never really been built around that approach. Instead, it’s centered on running each mission again and again—experimenting with alternate routes, pushing for higher scores, and collecting medals that reward those improvements. And only after you’ve watched the credits do you fully feel that the “real” game is starting to open up.
Guess the games from the emojis.
Gamoji
Guess the game from the emojis.
This is also why Ace Combat 8 is such an easy recommendation for me to make. It isn’t a rail shooter, and it isn’t trying to copy Star Fox by swapping in fighter jets as a one-to-one replacement. Instead, it taps into the same kind of satisfaction. Put simply: if Star Fox is an apple, Ace Combat 8 is an orange. You launch into a mission, survive the chaos, land on a score you already suspect could be improved, and then hear that familiar inner voice telling you to run it back immediately.
I felt that impulse repeatedly during my Ace Combat 8 preview in May. I worked through seven story missions, and after finishing a few of them, I still had time to replay what I’d already seen—so I did. The funny part is that I didn’t truly need to. I was also worn out from staring at a bright screen in a dark room for hours, but the drive to keep going was overpowering. I wasn’t chasing a requirement; I was having a blast and didn’t want the session to end.
So, if Star Fox is an apple, Ace Combat 8 is an orange.
That’s probably the clearest thread connecting the two. Both games understand that replayability doesn’t have to be a giant checklist filled with boxes to tick. Sometimes, the “second attempt” happens because the act of playing feels rewarding enough that you choose to come back for a second, third, fourth, and even tenth run. Star Fox achieves this through branching paths, medal objectives, Challenge Mode, and Battle Mode. Ace Combat 8 does it through scoring, a lot of unlockable content, and story missions that feel dangerous and cinematic—missions that genuinely seem worth perfecting.
The mission variety I saw in Ace Combat 8 is a major part of that. One mission put me in the mindset of trying to rescue a city from Godzilla—except the “monster” threat was replaced by a huge land battleship smashing through everything in its way. Another mission asked me to locate targets by analyzing jet trails in the sky rather than leaning on radar the way I normally would. These are exactly the kinds of concepts that make repeating missions feel less like repetition and more like discovery, especially once the game opens up and lets you choose missions on your own.
And that’s where Ace Combat 8 may hit especially well for players coming straight off Star Fox. If Switch 2’s Star Fox reminded you how much fun it is to learn a mission through repeated runs—rather than merely clearing it and moving on—then Ace Combat 8 is essentially an arcade flight combat game built around that same core satisfaction. Finishing a mission is only step one. The deeper hook is understanding it better, surviving it with greater consistency, and improving your performance run after run.
Arcade Combat 8: Keeping the Repeat-Run Habit Alive
The broader point I’m trying to make is that Star Fox on Switch 2 has put me in a specific mood, and Ace Combat 8 is the only upcoming game I can think of that seems positioned to keep me there. I already liked Wings of Theve when I previewed it, but I like the idea of it even more now that Star Fox has reminded me how satisfying it is to replay a mission simply because you know you can do better. That might sound minor, but it isn’t. Some games turn replaying into chores, while Star Fox and Ace Combat 8 treat replaying as the point—using it in the most natural, satisfying way possible.
Both games understand that replayability doesn’t always need to be about a massive checklist.
From what I experienced, Ace Combat 8 fits comfortably into that second category. It has the speed, the spectacle, the scoring system, the mission variety, and the kind of pressure that makes you feel like a successful run could have slipped away at any moment. So if Star Fox on Switch 2 has you wanting more arcade flight combat, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve is the next title you should start paying attention to. It won’t include an Arwing, Fox McCloud, or the Nintendo 64 classic’s iconic branching paths, but it still has the same talent for making “one more run” feel like the best idea you could possibly have.
