Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings (PS4)

Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings is a game about gradually climbing to higher and higher layers of the sky, the player collecting resources along the way that can be used to improve their aircraft. Originally, the upgrading element was tied to a Rogue-like form of progression exclusively, the player at risk of losing pieces of their plane or their entire save file if they aren’t able to return to their hangar safely after an excursion. While this can be seen as part of the game’s intended design, the developers of Airheart did something quite surprising and commendable. Taking into account fan feedback, Blindflug Studios adjusted the game to have two difficulty modes, one focused on less punishing progress where your losses on death are far less debilitating and one that retains the original Rogue-like permadeath and item loss elements. Flexibility and accessibility, especially when it comes to a post-release update, are certainly nice to see, even though upon playing the game the impact of the Rogue-like punishments might have seemed more intimidating to prospective buyers than they actually feel in practice.

 

Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings follows a girl named Amelia who makes a living catching skyfish in the floating islands high above the planet’s surface. Her humble workshop and profession don’t exactly earn her the best of livings though, so remembering her dead father’s tales of a skywhale at the highest part of the stratosphere, she begins the quest to fly higher and higher to snag a creature sure to bring her fame and riches. Naturally, the reason no one has ever seen this legendary creature is that the higher you go in the sky, the more dangerous it gets, pirates, security droids, and other flying foes making each layer more dangerous to fly through.

Each layer of the sky is viewed from a top-down perspective, there being no need to worry about the Z-axis as you pilot your skyfishing plane around the stratosphere. There are many actions you should take along the way other than just finding the launching point that will take you higher in the sky, most of these going towards making your plane capable enough to handle the more dangerous opposition waiting for you. Catching fish is the simplest task and involves just flying into them to earn currency, although the largest fish must be harpooned and dragged along with you whenever you return back to your hangar. Scrap can also be acquired, but this requires directly challenging the sky pirates who will fight back. These can come in many forms, from tiny little planes who barely put up a fight, turrets that sit in place and send streams of bullets at anyone they detect, large crafts covered in multiple weapons and shielding, and the bosses who must be defeated before you can move on. The bosses often have tons of backup and feature plenty of weapons, the player unable to beat them if they approach them carelessly, although sometimes you might have backup from police forces… provided you don’t agitate them by killing innocent skyfishers to steal their hauls.

 

Succeeding in reaching the highest layer of the sky is seemingly possible with your starting setup, mainly because much of the game is based around effectively avoiding attacks, landing shots of your own, and finding the means to heal up in an area if you are unable to keep up with the action. If you can get a feel for your plane’s speed and weapon options, that will provide a much greater benefit than simply trying to work up towards the best equipment on offer. However, you certainly shouldn’t try to make the starting craft work because it is fairly weak and fragile, but when you return to your workshop, you won’t necessarily have to build your way to the top before you achieve victory in the game’s story. The scrap you gain from destroying other aircraft goes towards a crafting system that is meant to help you acquire weapons and plane parts sooner than you would if you simply rely on buying items from the store with the cash you earn from grabbing fish, but there is so little guidance to the crafting system and an incredibly tedious experimentation process to see what goes together that it really feels like you’d either need a crafting guide to make it work for you or you’ll just abandon it entirely for the more easily understood and straightforward store. Here, you can purchase parts for you plane that will make it more agile, more durable, or give it new powers. There are abilities like a speed boost or bullet shield you can activate as well as passive ones like an enemy radar or protection from ramming damage, and while it may take some time to find one that suits your play style, these can be quite beneficial once you’ve found the ability that clicks with you.

Your main consideration when upgrading your plane should be its weapons though. While you can find temporary powerful weapons while flying the skies such as a flamethrower or missile launcher, the two weapons you have on your craft are important and certainly where you’ll want to focus most of your upgrading efforts. These vary in their strength and bullet output, some more akin to sniper shots while others are more machine gun like, so carrying a backup weapon that is different in its pros and cons from your main one is recommended but seemingly not too important. While there are slower and stronger weapon options, a good machine gun’s high speed can mean it makes up for its lower strength, and when it comes down to it, the enemies in Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings don’t exactly ask for much strategy beyond avoiding them with one stick and aiming your shots at them with the other.

 

Sustained fire will take down pretty much anything eventually and only the bosses really have multiple attack types to worry about, although some layers of the sky at least pack in the enemies tightly enough that you can’t just use the otherwise effective dodge and fire tactic. Some enemies, the larger ones and turrets mainly, have shielding and multiple weapons on them that can be pulled off with your harpoon. The harpoon isn’t considered one of your weapons and it has other uses like attaching small planes to you so you can keep them from escaping, but despite the extra layer it adds to combat by yanking parts off larger enemies, it never feels like it’s working perfectly. Some things it doesn’t latch onto for unclear reasons, the aiming of its seems off even after you’ve gotten used to the slightly strange flight controls, and actually pulling hard enough to remove something can feel inconsistent. It does at least add an extra layer to combat that would otherwise involve far too much simple straightforward shooting though.

 

The simplicity of the combat is why the Rogue-like elements don’t feel like they would have hurt the game too much, and with many layers of the sky packing different ways to find health even if you are getting overwhelmed, your path to the top doesn’t feel like it’s likely to end in a permanent death. If you push your luck you might, but the game offers you a way out of a bind by letting you head back to your hangar in the sky city of Granaria any time, this being the way you’d turn in your salvage and fish hauls and get upgrades for the next run. Heading back to Granaria isn’t instant though, your plane turning down and flying towards the city in a brief bit of gameplay where you need to dodge the floating islands of the layers lower than where you were when your descent started. Damage on the way down is possible, but the only concern is if you actually run out of health here or during regular play, the plane much harder to control during its descent if you ran out of life. Depending on your difficulty, the crashing descent can have some negative results. Normal mode you only lose parts if you miss the city entirely, but in the Rogue-like mode you lose parts even if you mitigate your crash by landing successfully, the game instead punishing you for a complete miss by completely wiping the save file. So long as you don’t overextend yourself though you can always be in full control of these descents and not have to worry about losing anything, especially since the descent is fairly easy to do successfully. However, it does have one downside.

 

Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings doesn’t do too much to shift up its core design despite efforts to introduce more interesting bosses and stronger enemies at the higher layers. Unfortunately, any trip back to the hangar means you’ll have to climb back up through every layer of the sky all over again. While bosses will remain destroyed, there will be enemies along the way and the process is only really sped up by ignoring fights when you can. The different layers of the sky are sorted into segments that seemingly tie to the seasons, the ascent going from spring to fall to winter, but needing to go back through it all again to return to where you left off doesn’t add much to the experience beyond taking longer to complete the game. This was especially felt as I played because the game crashed twice, the first time even corrupting the save file in the process. A game about gradual progress and repeating areas by necessity certainly can’t afford moments where you lose stuff outside of your control, but even in play uninterrupted by such errors, Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings feels like it’s stretching itself thin, the enjoyability of the combat, resource acquisition, and discovering new layers of the sky lessened by its repetition, especially since the layers of the sky rarely feel all that different outside of the enemies inhabiting them.

THE VERDICT: The premise of Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings is a promising one, but it’s the execution that keeps it from achieving great heights. Upgrading your plane to suit your play methods helps you engage with the resource gathering, but the combat, while decent at times, isn’t too imaginative outside of boss fights or the large ships laden with stuff you’d use your harpoon on instead of your upgrades. The crafting system and needing to fly back to where you left off after heading back to the hangar feel like they could have been done better, and whether you pick the normal or Rogue-like mode, you’ll find that the game seems to add complications to a play style that doesn’t benefit from such alterations. It’s still got enough action and discovery to it that Airheart can entertain, but its attempts at greater depth aren’t supported properly by the actual gameplay direction.

 

And so, I give Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. Adding in the Normal mode may have been a response to people reticent to pick up a punishing Rogue-like, but really the Normal option feels the better fit for a game that doesn’t benefit too much from permadeath or item loss. The aerial shooter aspects of Airheart are all done decently even if they could use more enemy variety, some bosses or areas packed with enemies able to establish intense battles where you want to survive and collect the spoils of the fight without having to dive back down to home base. However, an unclear crafting system means you’re likely better off focusing on fish collection to get those helpful upgrades instead. The player being able to go far on what works for them instead of just having the best equipment possible does give the game an edge, especially since it feels like you’re earning your victories rather than just blasting them apart with endgame weaponry. Those moments of success despite your limitations may be more enjoyable because you know you’re actively avoiding the options that make the game stretch itself a little thin though, and if things aren’t working out with your current setup, the descent and climb back up do factor back in and will drag the experience down a little. There’s still fun to be had in overcoming the odds, but those odds should have been built on the back of challenging foes more often rather than making much of the game feel like you’re trying to find ways to avoid repetition.

 

Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings’s good moments come from the interesting concept of gradually upgrading your aircraft to explore more of the hostile world in the sky, but even after adding in a mode that allows the player to better experience that angle, it still feels like the game is emphasizing the wrong thing. Rather than being about playing through the same areas more often, Airheart should have focused on heading into more new areas, the moments of newness being where the game excels but the moments of repetition feeling like an unnecessary attempt to wring more out of the simple and almost effective design.