Airheart – Tales of Broken Wings attempts to blend twin-stick shooter elements with the typical aspects of the rogue genre. All of this encapsulated within an ever-rising city in the clouds, Granaria. As is typical in rogue games, your quest revolves around trying, progressing, and continually improving your skill and tools until you succeed. Airheart’s stand out area ended up being an aspect away from the core gameplay, its in-depth crafting system.

Developer: Blindflug Studios

Publisher: Blindflug Studios

5 Hours Played // Review Copy Provided // $17.99

Coming into Airheart my Switch had been taking a small break from rogue games. I have so many that having a rest to explore other games was a great experience. Thus with bated breath, I was eager to jump into another rogue and stack it up against the rest. I wanted to clarify this because of the fact that the actual gameplay of Airheart wasn’t even what I will take forward from playing it. I really had little regard for the game I was playing, instead, every run was an excuse to get back to the crafting system. So essentially, this ‘review’ will be primarily focused on this aspect of the game. Admittedly, this may seem a little odd (It even does to me), but I don’t quite know what else to do!

Whenever I entered this world again, I was clamouring to get back to my crafting bench.

Lets get one thing straight. I used to be a hardcore Minecraft crafter, so I know a lot about crafting. I am the greatest at crafting, some would say I know more than anyone about it. So if you give me a game where there is crafting, I am gonna dive right into it. Airheart, in essence, revolves around finding resources and then using these resources to craft weapons and plane upgrades all in order to increase the heights you can reach in Granaria. Now you do have the option to directly buy plane parts, but that takes all the fun away! The crafting mechanic is really well made so it is a bit odd that you can completely ignore it and just buy the parts. They also are really expensive so the crafting system is clearly the way to go.

How does this system work I hear you ask? Let me divulge my extreme crafting knowledge on to you. Fundamentally, you use the resources you collected during runs to ‘guess’ new recipes to build core items which are then combined to build the guns and plane parts which build up the strength of your plane. Unfortunately, there is no way to track recipes once you make them at all. So, the crafting becomes a two-screen affair, I normally kept a guide up during the process just to make sure I wasn’t wasting money on incorrect crafts. So this crafting system, which is good ends up being a frustrating experience because it doesn’t account for your progress in unlocking recipes. It isn’t ‘fun’ to have to search every nook and cranny of your mind to remember if you need three or four pieces of metal to construct something. . .

Most of my enjoyment came in this area. The crafting system was pretty awesome.

This is such a shame because of the fact the variety of what you can craft is really good! The weapons all feel really different, albeit some are evidently worse than others. And there is a fair volume of plane parts to construct and mix up your planes aesthetics with. As I said, this upgrading and tinkering was the highlight of the game, so it is a shame that one small thing hindered my experience with it. Unlocking a recipe book after a certain number of parts crafted would easily solve this. At it stands though, the guessing game is strong. It gets my Master Crafter rating of ‘Could be better if it wasn’t convoluted’.

Stop talking about crafting and tell us about the rest of the game! Ok, calm yourself down first and then we will. That last section was exciting so take a breath before we carry on. I hope we can agree that controls are really important in games (DUH!). With a twin-stick shooter, being able to feel the controls are working with you is crucial. At times your accuracy is the sole reason for survival, so having to wrestle with the controls to stop screwing you over is a bummer. The aiming controls feel awful, I can’t even say specifically what it is, I can just say they ‘feel’ bad. It really is a struggle to enjoy an experience when you are not getting along with the way you interact with it. I wanted to try and enjoy the gameplay but I just couldn’t because of the damn controls.

It looks good, but the controls are awful. . .

The gameplay loop itself was alright, nothing special. Airheart struggles with difficulty in my opinion. The early levels feel too easy, and so going through them every single run is really dull and makes me not want to keep playing. I guess this was the way I felt whenever I did play Airheart, I never felt inclined to play it, there was never a ‘one more run’ mentality, which is so important in rogue games. It just didn’t click. As someone who was so excited to play it, I come away feeling really flat.

Imagine buying a pizza, and being excited to dive headfirst into its greasy glory and then realising there isn’t any cheese or sauce. As weird as this sounds that is what Airheart was to me. A letdown, especially considering the usage of the ‘Earhart’ like name. I expected an enthralling adventure and was delivered a fun crafting system with a dull minigame on top. The fact that the main portion of the game was never my focus says it all. Honestly, the crafting experience alone could have been a really fun game. Expanding and exploring this aspect could have been so cool, but that isn’t the product presented.

This is a nice apartment to be fair. I do like the art style.

Something as important as the story is barely explored. Barring some minor cutscenes and story points you just fly around catching fish and getting abused by pirates. Not my idea of a fun afternoon with no reason to do so it feels relatively empty. Why am I doing this? What is the point? I constantly had these thoughts going through my head, even when I was writing this!

I hope this explained enough to justify how I feel the way I do. Of course, this is just my opinion, you can love this game and that is ok! I didn’t really find myself enjoying my time though. Airheart isn’t a bad game, it just did nothing for me. I think this is the perfect game for a half heart! ‘Meh’ sums up my entire experience. . .

Another half heart from me! If you want to see a game I loved check out Kingdom Two Crowns! To keep the conversation going go follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.