I like flying around in Grand Theft Auto V in a jet and in first person blowing stuff up and touring armouring around a rainy city in Aircar.
I’m wondering what else is out there. I was thinking about picking up Ace Combat 7. Would this be a good choice?
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 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.