SOEDESCO sent us a code for Airoheart about a week or so ago. The game was developed by Pixel Heart Studio and is their grand opus dedicated to classic action-RPGs like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (which it borrowed heavily from, but in a respectful way). Anyway, Airoheart is a classic top-down RPG that feels familiar with its gameplay design and nostalgic about what it does for the story. Does it all come together and live up to the classic games it adores and emulates? That is up for debate in this review.
Let’s get it going.
Gameplay that makes you feel like a kid again
Or, if you’re too young to remember these when they originally came out, makes you feel like you can play them on Nintendo’s online SNES gaming store. The story behind Airoheart goes as such, you play the main character who must traverse dungeons, enemies, and other odds, to find his brother who wants to unleash evil upon the land of Engard.
The story is barebones basic for an RPG, where you play the up-and-coming hero that must grow as a warrior to take down evil before it takes down the land and its people. It’s what every great adventure story was made of back in the 80s/90s. While the charm of the story feels a bit held down by the need for nostalgia, it is effective in grabbing your attention. You care about the land, you care about Airoheart, and while it doesn’t sell you too hard on the story, it does set up and ignite the gameplay that is coming with it. This type of story structure was a dime-a-dozen back in the day, but typically it was a good way to go when creating an action-RPG or a turn-based RPG (looking at your, Phantasy Star – before you were online). There is a lot to like about the story.
What hurts the overall story a bit is how it is delivered. There are some gameplay elements that work against how the story plays out. For example, the map you look at to navigate the world of Engard is basic at best. It doesn’t have many details between goals, and it seems a bit lifeless when it comes to figuring out where you need to go next. I know that seems like a petty complaint but having some reassurance or some direction of where to go after achieving ‘Goal A’ would help in keeping the flow of the game going. Again, it might be petty, but the map works against you in a way, especially at the beginning, if you need to know where to head off toward the first dungeon. There were times when I found myself wandering aimlessly and just happened upon things. I know the devs want to go back to the old-school gameplay elements that we all grew up with, but they must throw a bone toward players and give them a little direction to keep them motivated. In the first part of this game, the first two hours specifically, I nearly called it off completely. I felt like I was just walking in the dark at the beginning of the game. Thankfully, I kept it going and found myself liking the game more and more as it went on. But gameplay elements, such as the map, just get in the way of the story and hinder it. You never want to stop taking your players through the story and leaving them in the woods alone. No one wants to feel lost when they play a game unless the game is called Skyrim. Even then, you want some direction.
If you future developers need to know something about game development, please know that you always want to avoid stopping and starting a story through the experience. You always want to push your players forward and get them from goal to goal. It is what makes a game’s story memorable. The overall story is solid, but the stop-and-go action due to some gameplay design that seemed off was preventing progression and consistent fun.
Once you do get on track with the story, the gameplay does begin to click on all cylinders.
Click-click
The gameplay gets rolling after the second hour. Once you conquer the first dungeon, get a sense of the story from the game, and are verbally given direction by other characters in the next step, the game gets rolling in the right direction. For example, snagging the sword allowed me to get through the first dungeon. Snagging the shield provided me with a way to defend myself. Once I learned what the currency (beads) was and how it worked, I began to grind the game to upgrade equipment (after I found some material to make the equipment). Once I had more upgraded equipment and upgraded health (you find big green hearts – three equals out to upgraded health), I started to take chances that equaled more items that propelled my journey. When runes started coming into play, and a shady salesman who provided off-brand runes, the world started to get bigger and more accessible. And then something miraculous happened, I was brought back to my 80s/90s feelings that loved an action-RPG structure.
Now, gushiness aside, the game still had a few things that needed improvement along the way. The biggest of the bunch was the lower enemies which felt too repetitive and cheap at times. While the world of Airoheart has a decent variety of enemies as you progress in the journey, they just don’t get there fast enough, which does create some sense of boredom. While you’re upgrading, collecting, and improving your character in the game, there is so much of a grind with repeatedly killing the same creatures constantly before you can access the next new batch. I think the first few hours I didn’t think I would get out of the wood creatures. When I expanded my journey further west (and northeast), I did eventually find new things to fight, but getting access to those areas took some grind. Is the fight worth the reward? I think so but doing that grind repeatedly can be a bit much. The game is certainly going to ask you for some patience.
Flipping that coin, the biggest plus in the gameplay design is how balanced the fighting and puzzles seem to be when you get into a dungeon. The folks at Pixel Heart Studio did a good job of bringing enough monsters into the dungeon and requiring the player to think a bit about how to move through the dungeon. Every time I made it to a dungeon, I felt like I had achieved something because I knew the entertainment value of this game was about to go up. For example, there was a dungeon where you must turn on and off blocks. The blocks were cleverly placed on bridges and acted beautifully as roadblocks to force you into other rooms to defeat enemies. Sometimes getting to the blocks was obvious, sometimes it required moving items in a room, and sometimes you just had to blow holes in the wall with bombs. Regardless, the balance to keep you cognitively active beyond just hack-n-slash was a reminder of how much these devs enjoyed classic dungeon designs. The balance between fighting and puzzles truly made the dungeons a fun experience, as did the unique and massive bosses that awaited you at the end. Classics classics.
Overall, once you get going in the game, start opening up the land after a good deal of grind, and find items that push the story forward, the game really does have some good legs on it to stand. There were times I truly enjoyed the adventure and loved going head-to-head with baddies in dungeons. What Airohearte has in legs, it tends to lack in arms.
Gameplay elements that need more time to bake
While I enjoyed the story, adored the dungeons, and felt lukewarm about the progression between groups of enemies/lands, I did have a few problems with the actual gameplay mechanics. First, the ability to turn quickly and fight is incredibly cumbersome. While I appreciate the unpredictability of enemies flying at you or crawling towards you, it always felt like I was pointing in the wrong direction and couldn’t whip Airoheart around fast enough to counter-attack or simply attack. For example, at the beginning of the game, you will unleash flies from plants you execute via a sword. Those flies are annoying as hell and do equal enemy damage to you quickly as if they’re giant plant monsters coming at you. I can’t tell you how many times I died to those damn flies, as it was more times than I should have. Moving Airoheart into a fighting or defensive position is like walking through the mud at times. It just doesn’t feel accurate or fast enough. That was a consistent gripe I had throughout the review process. It was manageable, but it was also annoying as hell.
The second big issue I have is how the dialogue is distributed in the game. I’m not sure in my entire 20+ years of reviewing games that I have ever complained about this as a problem, but, wow, it’s a problem. When you go talk to a character of interest, not just a standard NPC, some of the characters give you pieces of dialogue, and some give you the entire written dialogue. The latter is expected, but the former is hitting results in smashing the talk button multiple times and restarting a conversation to get more information from the character of interest. It took me hours before I noticed this issue and I wondered how much of the story I was missing because of it. This is just a simple complaint in hindsight, but its impact is massive. This needs to be corrected.
The last big issue I had with the game is how the HUD lacked direction and details. This is especially true when you encounter blacksmiths and shady salespeople, where you’re trying to find the information needed to figure out what you must grind to obtain whatever it is they’re offering to you. The blacksmith was especially confusing because it provided a severe lack of detail and direction on what material I needed to find and where it might be in Engard. The old classics always gave hints that would make sense as you progress and produce an ‘aha!’ moment when you finally understood. It just seems rushed in this area, which wasn’t right because these items of interest are there to create motivation for you to keep grinding and exploring. It’s not visually pleasing because of the lack of details. I want puzzles in my game, but I don’t want these types of puzzles. There was literally a sword that had a ‘?’ for what it needed to be created. What in the world? Give me some detailed hope, game.
I think Airoheart needed a bit more baking in the development oven with some aspects, as all the above were reoccurring issues during gameplay.
Verdict
There is a lot to like about Pixel Heart Studio’s Airoheart when it comes to harkening back to classic games that made us smile. It has some solid dungeon crawling, a big world to explore, and a fun story that truly does give a sweet kiss to the golden age of action-adventure RPGs. It just needed a bit more cleaning and tightening in some areas before it was released. I think the game can improve with patching, but as it stands now, it still feels like it needs a bit more finish to shine.
