Gaijin Entertainment’s VR combat flight sim delivers the cockpit fantasy that PlayStation VR2 owners have been waiting for — if they can survive the learning curve to get there.
This is the closest many of us will get to strapping into a warbird without joining an air force.
Disclosure: I was given a complimentary review key to facilitate this review. Receiving it did not impact my assessment.I’ll be honest with you: the first twenty minutes of Aces of Thunder were some of the most humiliating I’ve experienced in a video game. I stalled on takeoff. Twice. I blacked out pulling a turn I had no business attempting. I accidentally cut my own engine by fumbling the throttle on the Sense controller. And when I finally did get airborne and spotted an enemy fighter, I was so busy craning my neck to track it through the canopy that I flew directly into the ground. It was a disaster. It was also, without question, one of the most exhilarating things I’ve ever done in VR. Because somewhere between the embarrassment and the impact craters, Aces of Thunder had already convinced my brain that I wasn’t holding a controller in my living room — I was sitting in the cockpit of a Spitfire over the English Channel, and the stakes were real. That illusion, that bone-deep sense of presence, is what makes this game special. It’s also what makes everything around it — the rough edges, the baffling omissions, the sink-or-swim attitude toward new players — so frustrating.
War Thunder’s DNA, VR’s Soul
Let’s get the lineage out of the way first. Aces of Thunder comes from Gaijin Entertainment, the studio behind the long-running military vehicle behemoth War Thunder. And yes, this is very clearly built on the same foundation: the flight models, the damage physics, the way a bullet through your engine block makes the whole aircraft shudder and cough before going eerily silent — all of it carries the authenticity that Gaijin has spent over a decade refining. But where War Thunder is an enormous, sprawling free-to-play ecosystem with hundreds of vehicles and a progression grind that could outlast most marriages, Aces of Thunder strips all of that away. There are 24 aircraft in the base game — four from World War I and twenty from World War II — and every single one of them is available from the moment you launch. No tech trees. No unlock gates. No premium currency. You pick a plane, and fly. After years of the live-service treadmill, there’s something almost radically old-fashioned about that simplicity, and I mean that as a sincere compliment.
The roster reads like a who’s who of aviation history: the P-51 Mustang, the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the A6M3 Zero, the Fw 190, the Soviet Il-2, the Yak-9T — and for Great War enthusiasts, the Fokker Dr.I (the Red Baron’s signature triplane) and the SPAD S.XIII. Each one is meticulously recreated inside and out, and switching between them reveals just how differently these machines behave. The WWI biplanes feel delicate and twitchy, sensitive to the slightest input, while the heavier WWII fighters demand more deliberate energy management. Understanding those differences — learning when to push the throttle and when to respect the physics — is the beating heart of the game.
Inside the Cockpit: Immersion and Presence
This is where Aces of Thunder earns its keep, and it’s where the PSVR2 truly shines. The cockpits are staggeringly detailed. Every dial, every gauge, every lever is modeled with what I can only describe as museum-grade precision, and they’re all labeled with helpful text when you lean in to look — tracked by head movement, though regrettably not by the PSVR2’s eye tracking, which feels like a missed opportunity. There are scratches on the metal, imperfections in the glass, and wear marks on the controls that make these aircraft feel used, lived-in, and real. You can walk around the hangar between missions, getting up close with the planes, and if you have even a passing interest in aviation history, you’ll lose time just inspecting the machines.
Gaijin made a bold design decision that defines the entire experience: there is no HUD. No floating markers, no third-person camera, no chase view, no gamified overlays of any kind. Your only reference points are the instruments in front of you, a map on your lap that you have to physically lean forward to read, and your own eyes scanning the sky. Identifying enemy aircraft means learning their silhouettes, their markings, their wing profiles — or, in a pinch, using an era-appropriate magnifying glass. It’s a commitment to historical authenticity that borders on uncompromising, and it creates a tension that no arcade flight game can match. When you spot a dark speck against the clouds and have to decide in seconds whether it’s friendly or hostile, the stakes feel tangibly real.
The sense of scale is breathtaking. An enemy plane spiraling out of the sky right beside you, trailing smoke and fire, close enough that you instinctively flinch and bank to avoid the wreckage. Contrails streaking across the horizon as formations clash above you. The sickeningly beautiful view of the earth rushing up as you eject and your plane detonates below. These are moments that flat-screen gaming simply cannot replicate, and they happen with surprising regularity. Performance on the PS5 is smooth and stable — Gaijin clearly prioritized framerate over visual fidelity, which is exactly the right call for VR — though flying at low altitudes reveals softer textures, simpler ground models, and occasional LOD pop-in that reminds you of the hardware’s limitations. A fair trade for the buttery performance where it matters most: in the air.
The Fight: Multiplayer and Single-Player
Multiplayer is the spine of Aces of Thunder, and it’s where the game’s design philosophy really clicks. Matches are scenario-driven: beach landings, bomber escorts, defensive interceptions. Teams are locked to specific nations per map, which reinforces the identification skills you’ve been developing and prevents the chaos of random mixed factions. Each match gives you four aircraft lives — lose a plane, pick another from your nation’s lineup; lose all four, and you’re done. This creates a strategic layer that most VR flight games completely ignore. Burn through your best fighters in the opening minutes, and you might find yourself desperately defending your bombers with whatever’s left in the hangar. Custom battles expand things further, allowing altered rulesets, long-form matches, and ahistorical scenarios for experimentation. AI opponents can fill empty slots, which helps with the currently thin player counts — though finding well-populated lobbies can be hit or miss, especially on PlayStation.
The single-player offering is more substantial than I expected, though still fairly lean. There are 14 standalone missions and nine War Stories that loosely trace the highlights of World War II, from the White Cliffs of Dover to Iwo Jima. They’re not connected by any real narrative thread, and some end abruptly or can be completed with minimal input, but they serve well as training grounds for learning different aircraft and scenarios. The real gem for solo players is the Mission Editor — a surprisingly robust tool that lets you build custom scenarios from scratch, choosing maps, aircraft, objectives, and conditions. It’s a throwback to the classic DOS-era flight sims, and for players who want to hone their skills without jumping into multiplayer, it provides genuine longevity. Free flight mode rounds out the package, offering the simple pleasure of picking a plane and exploring the game’s 15 maps across Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific at your own pace.
Turbulence: Where It Falls Short
Aces of Thunder’s biggest problem is something nearly every reviewer has flagged, and I’m going to add my voice to the chorus: the tutorials are woefully inadequate. For a game that expects its players to manually manage throttle, pitch, yaw, and roll while simultaneously navigating detailed cockpit instruments, taking off, and identifying targets by silhouette alone, the onboarding amounts to little more than a brief training flight that teaches you the very basics and then leaves you to figure the rest out through trial, error, and frequent fiery death. The game’s official FAQ page — posted a week after launch — suggests that Gaijin is aware of the gap, but at launch, there’s a real risk of losing players who would love the game if only someone had bothered to explain it to them.
The control situation on PSVR2 is a known friction point. The Sense controllers offer the most immersive cockpit interaction — physically grabbing the throttle, reaching for switches — but the small analog sticks make precision flight tricky, and it’s alarmingly easy to accidentally yaw when you mean to throttle (or vice versa) and send yourself into an unrecoverable spin. Some cockpit levers and switches don’t respond consistently, either. Switching to the DualSense gives you much better aircraft control, but you lose the tactile cockpit experience, and there’s an odd design wrinkle where VR hands remain on-screen (sometimes blocking the map) and the Sense controllers are still required for menu navigation even when you’re flying with the DualSense. It’s clunky. The ideal solution is a HOTAS joystick setup, which the game fully supports and which transforms the experience into something approaching revelatory — but asking a casual buyer to invest in specialized peripherals on top of the headset and the game itself is a tall order.
A few smaller issues bear mentioning. There’s no hit feedback beyond visual and audio cues, which makes it hard to tell if your shots are connecting during a chaotic dogfight. Friendly fire is active and identifying allies at distance is genuinely difficult, leading to occasional team kills that feel unfair rather than challenging. The audio design is excellent — engines roar with distinct character per aircraft, machine guns thump with satisfying weight, and the spatial audio through the PSVR2’s built-in headphones sells the 3D space convincingly — but there’s no radio chatter, no wingman communication, and no ambient voice work, which leaves the experience feeling slightly sterile in the moments between engagements. And while motion sickness is inherently personal, I’d be remiss not to mention that aggressive maneuvering at low altitude can be seriously uncomfortable for sensitive players. Comfort options exist, but Aces of Thunder is not a game that goes easy on your vestibular system.
The Verdict: Earned Wings
Here’s what it comes down to: Aces of Thunder is the VR combat flight sim that PSVR2 owners have been waiting for. After the disappointments of Ace Combat 7’s limited VR mode on the original PSVR and Project Wingman’s compromised port, this is the first game on the platform that truly delivers on the promise of strapping a headset on and feeling like a World War II fighter pilot. The cockpit detail is extraordinary. The flight models are authentic and rewarding. The multiplayer design is smart and strategic. And those moments — the ones where an enemy fighter screams past your canopy close enough to make you duck, or where you thread through flak over a beach landing with your engine sputtering and your hands shaking — those moments are among the most visceral I’ve experienced in any VR game.
It’s held back by a steep, poorly guided learning curve, a control scheme that hasn’t found its ideal form on PlayStation hardware without a HOTAS, and a single-player offering that’s functional but slim. The player population is still finding its feet, and a few quality-of-life gaps — better tutorials, hit indicators, radio chatter — would go a long way toward making the experience less alienating for newcomers. Gaijin has already been patching actively since launch, adding a Team Deathmatch mode, fixing control-binding issues, and restoring TrackIR support on PC, so there’s clear momentum and commitment to improvement.
But even in its current state, with all its rough edges, Aces of Thunder does something that very few games manage: it makes you feel something real. Not just excitement or frustration, but genuine awe — at the machines, at the scale, at the terrifying beauty of aerial combat seen through your own eyes. For anyone with a PSVR2 and even a passing interest in aviation, this is essential. Just be prepared to crash a few times before you learn to fly.
Aces of Thunder is the definitive VR combat flight sim on PSVR2, delivering unmatched cockpit immersion and authentic aerial warfare, held back by a punishing onboarding experience and control quirks that demand patience — or a HOTAS.
