If you want realism, like a full sim, right now you can't be at Microsoft Flight Sim 2020
The 2024 version is coming out in a few months too
There's this great Boeing simulator but it keeps crashing.
For what you're describing, yes Ace Combat would be pretty close. It's not really a simulator, it's an arcade style shoot 'em up played in 3rd person using jets, along with a very anime-ish storyline. But it's all about being a badass ace just blowing shit up, and is fun as hell.
If you want an actual simulator, there's varying degrees of simulation you can get. DCS has combat oriented stuff but I don't know if it has actual missions to use the weapons. Arma 3 has a good flight sim built on top of the milsim, and it's just a sandbox so you can make your own missions with things to blow up in your jet. War Thunder is also extremely detailed in the flight sim if you play in the realism modes.
DCS has combat oriented stuff but I don’t know if it has actual missions to use the weapons.
DCS literally stands for Digital Combat Simulator, it's a combat sim all right, pretty much all missions are combat missions. The thing though is that it has a very high difficulty curve, and it's more of a thinking game than an action one, you spend minutes setting up ground attack shots and even dogfighting is more about thinking and energy retention and stuff instead of twitchy reflex stuff.
The free DCS module is actually a pretty good one to start with, but mind the difficulty curve. While Ace Combat is like "missile incoming, turn sharp to dodge", DCS is "boom - you're dead". At least in the campaign, set up the plane to drop flares constantly and stay above 4000.
It sounds like you want something a little more arcadey than realistic.
If I were you (and multiplayer sounded like a good time) I would legit consider something in the Battlefield series.
Arma 3 has a bunch of land sea and air vehicles and a lively modding community creating missions for you to play solo or multiplayer.
These probably aren't good by any means you're looking for, but I'll add them as curiosities.
Picowings -- a cute little flight simulator for the PICO-8 fantasy console.
The desktop version of Google Earth Pro has a built-in flight simulator with either F-16 or SR22, though I have yet to try it.
I'm going to throw Project Wingman into the hat. It's a lot like Ace Combat, but it's not AAA.
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