Airheart: Tales of Broken Wings is a top-down shooter by developer Blindflug Studios set in a skyfaring civilization. In it, you play as a mechanic who dreams of capturing the legendary sky whale—I’m not joking, this game has an actual whale with wings skimming the line between sky and space.
Levels in this game are known as “sky layers.” You start at sky layer 1 and advance forward every time you find the mechanism that allows you to go up to the next sky layer (the game gives no explanation as to why you need these devices to go higher). However, you can’t access this mechanism if there are enemies near it. You can return to the home base at any time you want, but be aware that in doing so you will need to start over from sky layer 1. While this will reset the enemies in each sky layer, any bosses you have defeated will stay defeated.
From what I can tell, every 4th sky layer, you must defeat a boss to advance to the next sky layer. The bosses I ran across weren’t alone, forcing me to retreat on multiple occasions.
If you allow your plane’s health to go to 0, your plane will begin to plummet. If you manage to crash-land onto the floating city, then at worst you have a chance to lose the plane parts you equipped. But if you miss the city and crash into the desert, you suffer perma-death. Your save file—and consequently, all the money and upgrades you’ve accumulated—will be erased. Luckily I wasn’t particularly far in the game when this happened to me, but a warning that this could happen would be nice (I’m just imagining how mad I would have been if this had happened to me after I had earned multiple upgrades).
Your character earns money to buy upgrades for her plane by catching flying fish that have somehow found a way to soar above the clouds. You can catch most of these fish by flying into them, but some of the bigger fish need to be harpooned and taken back to base. For laughs, I once tried harpooning an enemy plane and then selecting the option to fly back to base and it actually had my plane drag the enemy back with me! You get some sort of reward from doing this, but I’m not sure what it is (I thought it was the weapon equipped on the enemy plane, but when I went to check my weapons, there wasn’t anything new). Destroying enemy planes only nets you scrap to build with, so the enemies aren’t your primary focus.
As the main character is a mechanic, there is a crafting system in the game. You can use the scrap collected from enemies to create parts. These parts can then be assembled to create plane parts. While crafting intermediary materials for the sole purpose of crafting other materials/parts feels a little round-about to me—I think it would be simpler to just directly turn the scrap into plane parts—I understand there are people who enjoy a crafting system set up this way.
Overall, I had fun playing this game. I think a fair rating for it would be 8/10.
Here is the AIRHEART – Tales of Broken Wings Launch Trailer:
AIRHEART – Tales of Broken Wings is already on Steam Early Access and will launch fully today on PlayStation 4 and PC.
PlayStation 4 Review
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Overall Score - 8/108/10
I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'
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