By Amr (@siegarettes)

• Airheart
  
• Developer- Blindflug Studios AG
  
• Publisher- Blindflug Studios AG
  
• PC, Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One

I started Airheart captivated by its beautiful world.  A land set in the clouds, rendered in painterly style, populated with appealing mechanical designs. The story seemed intriguing too, setting up a journey through the clouds to the top layer, with revelations waiting for me. Instead I was surprised to find that Airheart was almost free of direction. Ascending cloud layers and upgrading my machine provided an implicit direction, but after the tutorial it was largely free of objectives or guidance. So I wandered the clouds, fishing, fighting bandits, and scrounging up enough money to try and push higher each time.

For a while this provided a pleasant grind. Flying about the clouds and catching fish almost put in the same mindset as thatgamecompany’s Flow. There was a similar relaxed vibe, and a back and forth between the layers that recalled the same changes in intensity. That all changed after the first plane crash.

Airheart makes it clear that foolhardy risks will not be tolerated. Push yourself too far and fail to retreat fast enough from a fight and you’ll be sent on a spiral downwards through the cloud layers, where you’ll have to dodge obstacles as you attempt to crash land on your home base. Fail to make it home and you’ll lose EVERYTHING and start the progression all over. Even if you do make it home each part of your aircraft still has a chance to be lost, which means a major hit to your progress. Each upgrade can take a half to full hour to grind currency for, meaning you can effectively be reset on failure.

And while Airheart uses this rougelike style of punishment it doesn’t have the variety or progression of one. Roguelikes can make each run feel like their own self-contained arc, but Airheart makes each of them explicitly into a session for accumulating resources. Survival at later stages is futile without upgrades grinded out through several sessions. Each cloud layer is also static. There’s a simple fish population system that encourages you not to overfish any one layer, but aside from that layouts don’t change and there’s no sense that your actions affect an area. There will always be pirates, and you’ll find the same gun emplacements and exits on each layer every time.

So Airheart takes the most punishing aspects of roguelikes without any of the strengths that makes them worthwhile. It turns a relaxing, slow progression, into an aggravating, stressful chore. All the small positives I enjoyed–the short bursts of machine gunfire and dogfighting, the way you can use the grappling hook to shorten your turns or slam enemies into obstacles–into liabilities that can wipe out your hard work. Instead of engaging with what makes Airheart enjoyable, the severe punishments of the game push you to play conservatively and avoid excitement.

It’s a shame. There’s so much I liked about Airheart. But after going through several sessions of grinding to come back to operational levels, my curiosity about what was at the top of clouds was destroyed. It was better to stay grounded and find somewhere else to explore.