Every genre under the sun gets a massive reboot, but the twin-stick shooter remains a niche. There’s the occasional great title like Helldivers or Nuclear Throne, and the edgelord edginess of something like Hatred, but there’s not really a breakout twin stick shooter. Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings continues that trend. It’s a solid game and nothing’s really wrong with it, but it’s for fans only.
Airheart
Developer: Blindflug
Price: $17.99
Platforms: PS4 and PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
It’s a dieselpunk tale of chasing down fish to make a little money while hunting for that big old skywhale payday. No, really. You see, everyone lives on floating rock islands in the sky and, obviously, you can’t hop an Uber between flying Rock islands. Accordingly, the world is full of planes flying around. To make money, fliers collect sky fish (not joking) for their fish oil (seriously). A huge skywhale can be a big payday and, to be clear, I am being literal, in that it’s a big whale that flies around the sky.
Airheart’s gameplay loop is very simple: Launch from your base and wander around collecting fish for oil–which turns into money–while avoiding hazards like rocks and trees. There are sky pirates, so you’ll want to avoid them, but if you shoot them down, you can gather up scrap and salvage which you can use to upgrade your plane. Once you’ve got all you want or are getting dangerously damaged, head back to base to buy upgrades or make things, then head out to do it again.
As far as I could tell, the only plot is the main character’s urge to harpoon a skywhale (not that spending your life chasing a whale has ever turned out poorly). Otherwise, it’s the grind to gather components and scrap and money to make or buy plane upgrades.
Oh, sure, there are pirates, but they are fairly easy to shoot down or avoid. There are also civilian craft you can shoot, which means the police come after you, but I found the police can be easily avoided. The upside is you’re not really punished for mistakenly shooting something you shouldn’t, and there’s no lingering punishment for shooting down civilians. Grand Theft Aeroplane, this ain’t. The downside is wandering around shooting the hell out of everything is more likely to get you stuff than trying to play it as intended.
Even death isn’t too bad. If you lose all your health, your plane starts crashing and you try to crash onto your base island. You may lose some of your plane upgrades or wind up flying the n00b plane again, but otherwise there’s not a lot of penalties.
The big hook is apparently the crafting and upgrades, but the crafting is pretty opaque. I found myself jamming ingredients together and mashing the button. Sometimes I’d learn a new recipe. Sometimes I’d just lose the money I spent crafting. Either way, it was easier to buy pre-made weapons and plane upgrades and just plow ahead. It also wound up being cheaper and didn’t leave me broke all the time. It feels like there should be more to it, but as far as I can tell, you craft and upgrade for the love of crafting and upgrading, or you just shrug and buy what you need.
The music is nice and it’s a lovely game to look at, but there’s not a whole lot pushing you forward. The controls also feel awkward and take considerable getting used to. Airheart is one of those games that isn’t bad, but is probably for fans of the genre only. It’s not the kind of thing you’ll enjoy if you need some sense of forward progress or don’t enjoy grinding materials to lose in esoteric crafting.
The Final Word
Airheart is worth checking out for twin-stick shooter fans that need a new fix, but otherwise, skip this flight.
MonsterVine Rating: 2.5 out of 5 – Mediocre
