Amelia Eat-Your-Heart-Out

For many gamers, they consider a rogue-like to consist of something like a dungeon crawl, with many layers and weapons to choose from, while usually expecting a bullet hell type of attack from many monsters to be the usual affair. However, AIRHEART is taking a different approach to this idea of an action rogue-like by taking it out off the ground, and into the sky. This time, you pilot a plane with increasing layers or levels of the atmosphere as the way to tell how far you are.

Check out my stream of AIRHEART – Tales of Broken Wings embedded below:

Normally you might expect darker colors, meaner monsters, etc. from a rogue-like but here it’s all about color, exploration and adventure in the skies. There hasn’t been a lot of crossover of people who love flying simulators and people who love rogue-likes but this seems to a be sweet spot in between. No more focus on the monsters, or the grim visage of the next boss, but instead we have ethereal bright and well lit areas to move around in and fly around. The music for most of the time is great and plays well to the area of exploration in the sky, but when it comes time to actually engage someone else in air combat, there seems to be no change to get you in the mood.

The combat usually consists of just the triggers with a main and sub weapon. But, moving and shooting with the twin stick style is no easy task considering how fast the plane has to move all the time, there isn’t any kind of slow down or stop to take a shot which increases the difficulty dramatically when compared to a normal dungeon crawl type of rogue-like. There are many weapons to choose from that you can craft from your home base using differing levels of material that you can find from just exploring the different levels. Even with cool weapons, the combat suffers greatly from no action music, and the constant movement of the plane. You can adjust for it in time, but it’s a big learning curve, and takes away from the enjoyment of the fun.

AIRHEART can’t really seem to decide on what kind of game it is. It has a decent crafting system from materials you get while exploring but also from killing enemy planes. It has great exploration music, but nothing for combat, so it seems to stress that you need to kill to survive. This is especially true in later levels, but makes it much easier to just sit back and enjoy the design which is kinda hard when you are constantly moving, and with the zoomed out frame, it’s hard to make things out especially when they hide items or enemies in the trees. Overall, it’s a nice simple game to tune out and play, and it’s an admittedly a cool take on the rogue-like genre, but its not polished enough to really keep your interest going later on.