Have you heard the good word?

Sorry, good words. Two of them, to be precise: Ace Combat.

I know I'm not the only recent convert to this long-running series; after the announcement of Ace Combat 8 last December, I saw a wave of chatter across social media reiterating that what the uninformed might expect to be rather disposable, After Burner-esque arcadey dogfighting games are actually sick as hell. I played my first Ace Combat this year—2019's AC7: Skies Unknown—before heading to a preview event for Ace Combat 8, and I can confirm that these games are, in fact, cooking with jet fuel.

AC8 is out in October, but I encourage you not to wait for it, because Ace Combat 7 is on sale on Steam right now for 80% off, and is absolutely worth playing if you have even a shred of interest in aerial warfare.

While the planes are all intricately modeled and the game's interface has a sort of militaristic seriousness to it, the tone of Ace Combat is gloriously melodramatic. "What begins as 15 minutes of shooting at radar towers and the odd enemy fighter quickly descends into boss fights against impossible constructions, battles with drone swarms, and navigational setpieces straight from a Universal Studios ride," PC Gamer reviewer Phil Iwaniuk wrote back in 2019. While Phil wasn't completely taken with Ace Combat's anime instincts, I was—I loved the over-the-top cutscenes in this game, which usually involve narrators talking about reaching for that big blue sky or mourning the political strife of their wartorn country.

They're also really pretty.

It's frequently silly and over-the-top, but there's also some pretty deft narrative work being done considering the game's primary focus is locking onto enemy planes and pressing the missile button. The story jumps between three different threads that eventually converge, characters meeting hours and hours into the campaign. It doesn't hurt that those intersecting moments tend to be monumental, playable moments—launching an assault on an enormous space elevator, or dogfighting with the best pilot who's ever lived, or facing off against a next-gen drone that movies unlike any of the aircraft you've encountered up to that point.

Ace Combat 7's missions consistently do a great job of throwing unexpected twists at you, or objectives that amp up the intensity and urgency of what's ultimately a pretty limited set of actions: do a barrel roll, get a missile lock, fire, repeat. You also get to tinker with the planes a bit between missions, but aside from picking a jet that's better for dogfighting or one that's better for bombing runs depending on the mission, there's not a ton of nuance there. There is a lot of gawping at the cool planes in the hangar, though, which I also recommend.

Thanks to how varied the missions are, I don't think there's much risk of being Ace Combat'd out by playing this game just a few weeks before AC8. If anything, I think AC7's melodrama will get you in the mood for more. It's a perfect breezy summer game to fit in this month, before September's wall-to-wall schedule of upcoming games.

AC7's current Steam deal ends in the next 22 hours of this writing, and is $15 (£12) including a Top Gun Maverick DLC tie-in with a bunch of cool planes—though heads up that using them early in the campaign will trivialize some of the challenge. You can get a Steam key even cheaper elsewhere, though: Fanatical has the base game on sale for just $8.69 (86% off) for the next 11 days.

"Face the unknown," reads the lone message of a new Helldivers 2 trailer published today.

Helldivers 2's next major update is coming August 12. The teaser is light on details, but it's certainly illustrative of what Super Earth will be up against. We see a helldiving teddy bear being consumed by the void—a tear in space that's currently eating up big chunks of the galaxy. The bear is ripped apart limb by limb by some psychic presence before the teddy reappears on a jungle planet. In the reflection of its eye, we see a tall, rounded biped alien reach to pick it up, then cut to release date.

All signs point to a new Illuminate threat. The third Helldivers 2 faction, colloquially known as the squids, have been quiet throughout 2026. Not since last year's invasion of Super Earth have the squids been a legitimate threat to democracy. While we were busy exterminating bugs in caves and taking the fight to Cyberstan, the Illuminate were shoring up their forces. Now, they're back with a new vanguard.

It's been a few months since I clocked in for helldiving duty, so I was surprised to find the lower quadrant of the galactic war map—the area where Illuminate fighting tends to go down—currently looks all kinds of messed up:

Several entire planets have been swallowed up by the void, and next, they're coming for our teddy bears. Some believe the teaser is suggesting Super Earth itself will once again be a battleground, though the bear could symbolize the human colonies of outer rim planets.

If you don't mind the possible spoiler for next week's update, many are convinced the figure in the teaser is one of the Cultists, a new faction of Illuminate with powerful magic abilities.

Anything new for the squids is exciting, because despite how far the faction has come since their surprise introduction in 2024, they've always been the army with the least variety. The addition of Leviathan ships, Stingray jets, and Fleshmobs has helped a lot, but they could really use some enemies that send a chill down a diver's spine.

Not so coincidentally, August 12 also marks the arrival of the Warhammer 40,000 crossover warbond, which includes three weapons and two armor sets from the Warhammer universe. No price announced on that one yet, but expect it to be more expensive than a standard $10 warbond.

Take-Two Interactive, publisher of Grand Theft Auto 6, will hold its Q1 FY2027 results call on Friday, August 7, and I don't mean to sound alarmist or over-excited but I think something might be happening. Allow me to explain.

Part of my job involves listening in to quarterly investor calls, in case anything interesting is revealed about current or upcoming projects—you never know when a CEO is going to accidentally leak a release target or confirm The Witcher 4. So naturally, it behooves me to know when these calls are happening.

US-based publishers generally hold their calls late in the afternoon in the Eastern time zone, typically 4 or 4:30 pm, and Take-Two is no exception: Results drop at 4, get on the phone at 4:30, and that's your day done. But this upcoming investors call is scheduled for 8 am ET—that's 8.5 hours earlier this T2's usual call time.

The obvious question is, why? Take-Two head of global corporate communications Alan Lewis tells me it's "just scheduling." It may well be "just scheduling," but with the biggest videogame in years now just a few months away from its scheduled release—Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch, for consoles, on November 19—oddities like this naturally draw extra scrutiny.

Of course, if there is a big secret GTA 6 announcement inbound, Take-Two wouldn't tell me about it, but I persevere nonetheless. So in the event that we are in for GTA news, I see two possibilities.

One, a delay: GTA 6 marketing was meant to kick into gear this summer, but here we are in August—just three months from launch—and we've had nary a peep. Weird, right? This week's investors call is the last with any meaningful space between it and GTA 6 day, so if Take-Two is hitting the brakes and wants to mollify investors with an urgency, this is the time to do it.

Possibility two: Early August is mid-summer, which means we're still well within that promised marketing window. Rolling into an investors call with the biggest game trailer to come along in years would be a baller move, and set the company up to absolutely bulldoze the holiday quarter. Which it's going to do anyway, assuming taht first possibility isn't correct, but sometimes it's fun to let 'em know you're coming.

Neither of those theories explain why Take-Two is holding its investors call at 8 am, but consider this: I dug through T2's quarterly earnings calendar all the way back to the start of 2020, and do you know how often it's held investor calls on a Friday? Never! So there you go, right?

For the record, I think a Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer drop is far more likely than a delay, but a last-minute postponement doesn't strike me as beyond the realm of possibility either. Yes, there's also the chance that this is indeed "just scheduling," I suppose, but that's not very exciting—nor does it answer the underlying question of why?

Whatever the reason, we'll be watching, and we'll let you know what happens when—if—it happens.