Aaero (PS4)

Rhythm games pull their music from plenty of sources. Many will borrow pop hits of the time and some recognizable oldies for their backing tracks, some will go for something classical or associated with the specific instrument the game is structured around like a guitar or keyboard, and it’s not much of a surprise when you see a game like Dance Dance Revolution relying on electronic dance music for its soundtrack. Aaero using EDM alone wouldn’t have made it stand out much, but by specifically devoting itself to the dubstep subgenre, Aaero ends up providing a surprisingly visceral and heart-pounding rhythm game experience.

Aaero’s action involves the player flying a small spaceship-like craft through levels filled with enemies, barriers, and most importantly, ribbons of light. Players will use both control sticks to play Aaero, one devoted to flying and the other to shooting. Shooting segments are often rather relaxed, slipping into segments of the song where the beat is the main focus instead of the more complex and layered parts where the song really shows off its identity. Little flying enemies will head towards the player’s craft in groups here, and to take them down you need to aim a cursor with one control stick to lock onto as many as you can as the other focuses on movement. The enemies wait a bit as they arrive before they attack, and if you’re following the rhythm of the music, you’ll notice you have a good grace period to not only set up your lock-on targeting, but you can time it to release it in line with the beat. If you fire in time with the song, the shots will fly to their targets quickly and either eliminate the small foes instantly or deal gradual damage to the larger enemies. However, if your timing is off, the shots will take a bit of time to reach their targets, leaving you unable to shoot again until the hits finally land. It will still deal the same amount of damage, so you can prioritize killing an enemy or shooting down their attacks instead of going for smooth, high-scoring group clears. However, enemies aren’t really the main draw of Aaero in the end, these small segments a good way to keep the player active and following the song’s tempo between the more involved ribbon riding.

Aaero stages are defined by the moments when the light ribbons start to appear. These long lines of white light are a guiding path for your ship as it flies through the levels automatically. When these appear, it is the player’s goal to ride the lines as accurately as possible, most of your points earned by sticking to these ever-shifting lines as best you can and racking up a multiplier for it. While getting hurt by enemies or crashing into barriers can deal damage that will eventually lead to a level fail, missing light lines only harms your score, but your score is directly tied to earning new levels and higher difficulties through a star system. Therefore, paying close attention to how the line moves as you come towards it is key to success. Pressing the control stick to the edges of its circular housing, you ride around the edges of the areas you’ll be flying through, not all of them sticking to a cylindrical shape but your movement around the outer circle of the sometimes invisible ring remaining consistent in design. The reliable placement of the ribbons around the edges of these implied barriers means you’ll never be caught completely off guard by their design, but there are often points where the dubstep begins to go hard, and thus, these ribbon riding moments can be surprisingly intense.

These ribbons you ride really match the music well, swirling around the edges of its movement area with satisfying swiftness to match the songs. When the EDM starts to really embrace things like base drops and the crackling sounds only techno music can really tap into, these ribbons can take on some rather surprising forms. The jagged back and forth of a record scratch’s ribbon easily evokes the real action with how you need to fly to imitate it, and things like hard quick bursts of sound have the line break up repeatedly to imitate the almost percussive rhythm. Rapidly wobbling notes require you to match that wave-like unsteadiness, rises and drops ask you to glide your ship through the actual movements of the music, and the line makes no sacrifices in asking you to very quickly swirl around your ship to match the wild pitch-shifting and rapidly flit to the other side when new sound types are added into the mix. Since dubstep frequently has multilayered portions that move through their elements with incredible energy, it can be very challenging to keep up with what the line is doing to match the beat. In fact, it is almost humanly impossible to keep up with the songs, but the game recognizes this in how it rates your line riding. Even the highest scores on the leaderboard aren’t perfect performances, the lines emphasizing authenticity over accessibility, but you can still earn a score sufficient enough to get all the stars possible so long as you achieve usually around 80% accuracy and don’t lose your multiplier, a difficult but satisfying feat that is easy to attempt again if you did fall short since stages are only as long as a song.

While the ribbon riding and enemy shooting come together well into demanding but enjoyable rhythm action, the 15 stages you pass through try to give you a visual delight to match. There is often a polygonal edge to everything that matches your ship’s angular design, areas often highlighted with lights that turn even rocky caverns, vast deserts, and flights over the water into something that feels a little mechanical and surreal. Cities pop up as well, empty of life and often dim save for stark glowing highlights, and while Aaero tells no stories with its flights through these environments, there’s often little hints of the place having some sort of history, you just don’t have enough clues to guess what. The three boss levels do add some explosive life to some environments though, these massive monsters emphasizing the shooting more than ever and featuring some truly wild mix ups to the play. You may be used to segments of Aaero taking you into a building or cave for the ribbon riding, but having the sandworm eat you and riding the ribbons until you can blast yourself free is an appropriately tense moment.

These bosses often integrate dangerous level design as well, the giant spider having things like cave-ins to damage you during the line riding sections. Regular levels feature these obstacles as well, hazards like the hydraulic presses that alternate their crushing patterns and must be dodged appropriately standing out as a memorable example. The game will often give you some hints on how to handle these the first time the music takes you through one such as a ribbon showing you how to move through a tunnel full of walls safely, but they’ll then start to pull back and ask for you to have developed a personal rhythm to the action. It is fairly smart design that asks you to pay attention to the music rather than relying solely on the prompts, but there are moments you can find things in a level independent of the beat. Red lights are found around the stages that can be shot as an optional collectible, tacking on another interesting activity to engage with besides finishing levels or going for high scores.

Unfortunately, there are only 15 levels in Aaero, and while they toy with the concepts well in the span of those stages, it does feel like a lot more room to grow would have given it the time to chase wilder concepts. The three bosses are nice spectacles and the levels have some decent variety to them, but recycling stages on harder difficulties doesn’t really reinvigorate the designs. They are engaging yet brief, and thankfully, the music used for the action comes from a variety of styles. I am not well-versed in the dubstep scene but it does seem there are people of note on the soundtrack. There is no one as universally known as Skrillex on it and sadly no one I recognize by name, but songs like Bass Cannon and I Can’t Stop have some excellent hooks, and some songs like Split the Atom and Edge of Tomorrow integrate softer moments or vocals and the degree to which they embrace electronic sound ranges wildly. Pure Sunlight by Mr Fijiwiji is undeniably dubstep but it follows more typical musical construction than something like Some Kind of Monster by Astronaut & Barely Alive that is built heavily off sampling voices or Godzilla’s roar as well as a bold in-your-face digital sound. The dubstep tracks are such a good pick for the game though that, even if they wouldn’t normally do anything for you, they are a perfect fit for the ribbon style of play, and even listening to them after the game I can feel the echo of the motions I made with the ship as the tracks hit certain points.

That faithfulness to the music at the cost of your ability to completely follow it does ensure the prompts are perfect matches that really evoke the sensation of playing this specific style of song. Having played the disc version of the game I was able to play 3 additional tracks from 1000DaysWasted that had the same level of devotion put into the level aesthetic and matching the rhythm, but the skins that came with it just make the ship look different and aren’t really worth a DLC purchase like the music tracks would be. Playing through the game on one difficulty will definitely tell you if the extra song purchases are personally worth it, but these extra stages do feel like more of the same instead of something trying to earn a buy with exciting new ideas.

THE VERDICT: Aaero adapts its dubstep soundtrack to an impressive degree, the texture of the electronic music coming across beautifully in how the ribbon demands your ship to move. It is remarkably faithful to the rhythm of the songs which comes with incredibly active play, but you’ll inevitably miss parts and can’t truly enjoy following the rhythm to the max. The game design accounts for this though by having the scoring system not punish the unavoidable misses at least. The enemy segments are an acceptable break from the intense movement demanded during line rides and the bosses in particular are a bombastic change of pace, but when it comes down to it, Aaero is just a really solid way to experience a small amount of quality dubstep music in a way that feels like a perfect match for it.

And so, I give Aaero for PlayStation 4…

A GOOD rating. It’s really hard to outright criticize Aaero for valuing perfect mapping of the music to the ribbon design. While I have gotten deeply involved in other rhythm games to the point I can imagine the prompts when rehearing music from those titles, Aaero makes it truly feel like those prompts directly embody the sensation of the music’s progression and substance. It’s hard to separate the best moments of parity between the line design and the texture of the music, and that closeness between the design and the song’s construction is what makes it a thrilling play even if the music isn’t to your liking. The dubstep includes some excellent choices all the same, but that devotion to the ribbon segments is probably also why Aaero’s other moments might need more work to match. Shooting enemies in time with the beat is nifty enough but can feel like filling time to prevent you from being overloaded by the impossible demands of the line, and the hazards like the hydraulic presses show there is room for more elaborate dangers in your flight path even though the small level count means they never get to take these as far as you might like. Bosses are the appropriate grand battles at least, but a more even and longer version of Aaero would possibly give it the space to impress with more than its ribbon work.

Aaero might be one of the rhythm games that best matches its choice in music. The ribbon feels like you’re riding the backbone of the dubstep songs even at their wildest, the energy excellently captured in the motion and sensation of trying to keep up with these electronic tracks that wold be impossible with typical instrumentation and musical construction. It takes some necessary deviations to avoid being tiring and the line is perhaps a little too perfect in capturing the essence of its songs, but Aaero is still quite the special rhythm game for its full devotion to embodying its soundtrack.