Airheart

Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings, the latest project from Blindflung, is an intriguing twin-stick shooter/roguelike combo that sees players build their own custom planes and soar towards the heavens. The top-down shooter has spent the last two years in Early Access but now has spread its wings and arrived on PC and PS4 with other console releases set to follow, and we've jumped into the cockpit in order to check it out.

Despite offering two contrasting gameplay styles (one being story-driven survival and the other twin-stick shooter), Airhearts follows as a sequel to one of Blindflung's previous projects, Cloud Chasers. You play as Amelia Airheart (get it? the July 24 release even coincides with Amelia Earheart's birthday), a young pilot who dreams of one day pushing beyond the clouds and reaching the very limits of the sky. Amelia resides on the floating world of Granaria, a world that has been overrun by vicious sky pirates who comb the land for precious sky fish.

Airheart plays like a top-down twin stick shooter and your goal is to soar as high as possible, harvesting fish and barrels and avoiding incoming gunfire. Somewhere within each floor is a platform that will push you to the next level and each floor goes up in difficulty with more valuable loot and pickups the further you go. Grinding to level up your plane is a large aspect of the experience, as stronger components mean that you'll be able to survive longer on higher floors, while destruction means that you'll have to start over. Collected coins can be spent purchasing parts such as new wings, engines, and weapons, and on top of that, there's a total of six planes that you can build by purchasing parts which can be mixed and matched as you wish. Each component has the potential to bolster your plane's stats by improving things like its agility, fire rate, and hit points, so it's worth scouring the skies for better gear.

There's a total of 40 weapons which you can mount to your plane, which can also be found in the open as temporary pickups. These are often hidden within glowing golden bushes or among the wreckages of your foes, and can really give you the upper hand during tricky situations. Among our favourites were sticky mines, a destructive mini-nuke, and a wide sweeping shotgun blast, all of which helped us in the dance of constantly moving and firing. It's tricky since you're constantly moving but using the right stick to aim, but the earlier floors make for a nice training ground.

Crafting is also a big element here too and you can hammer together pretty much any of the parts seen within the store at your workbench. Crafting can also be used to produce other resources like ammunition for your weapons and is as simple as selecting the right materials from your inventory and pressing the square button to mesh them together. Alongside the primary and secondary weapons on your vessel, you're also equipped with a harpoon, which is a prominent tool when salvaging scrap as it can harvest the wreckage of enemy planes.

If you sustain too much damage your plane will bleed thick black smoke and begin to hurtle back down to the ground below, and here you must land on the launch strip below. Failure to do so will lead to an immediate game over and a loss of all your current progress - a little punishing, we know, but it makes Airheart feel much more dangerous than other similarly styled twin-stick shooters. This constant air of danger will ensure that you're always cautious when out fishing and you'll always be thinking whether a tactical retreat may be required.

Airheart features procedural generation too, much like other roguelikes, but it doesn't feel as pronounced as it does in genre kingpins such as The Binding of Isaac and Rogue Legacy. With the enemies appearing as flying foes such as drones, blimps, and fighter jets, however, there isn't a whole lot of variety and encounters can begin to feel old fast especially when grinding for parts. An area of procedural generation that Airheart does do particularly well though is with its fishing, as the population of sky fish will change depending on how much you have gathered. With the population dwindling you're pushed to explore other levels to earn your keep, and it's great to see that your actions have weight.

As you continue your pursuit to the cloud's apex you'll catch glimpses of the many sky floors beneath you, underscoring how far you've come on your journey. The sense of scale here feels magnificent and we loved the title's cheery palette that offered contrast between the moody blue of the clouds to the fiery orange glow of the tree leaves below. The visuals do feel like the would suit mobile better than consoles though, as they do lack polish and little flourishes like cutscenes are absent here, meaning players are instead left with still images that aren't helped by the uninspired voice acting, further accentuating its budget feel.

Airheart's novel concept and stunning sense of scale pulled us in from the get-go and we loved how we were let loose to assemble our own custom planes. Permadeath here can feel awfully punishing though, and we felt that there wasn't as much variety in the procedural generation compared to what we've seen other roguelikes. Airheart may not soar above the rest but it still makes for a satisfying roguelike-twin stick shooter combo that (like its level design) can be appreciated on a number of levels.