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AereA
PC (Steam)
Babby’s Furst Hack ‘n Slash
1/5 stars
As the 8th Generation wears on, the MJ Crew has been finding it more and more difficult to find local coop games that we can play during our weekly gathering. As big “AAA” multi-plat producers commit more and more to the idea of online multi-player – which not only nets them more sales, but on most platforms comes with a subscription attached – local multi-player, where 2-4 gamers can gather together and play one copy of a game on the same screen, is all too scarce… actual QUALITY local multi-player games are all but extinct.
It was against this backdrop that the MJ Crew found ourselves on the horns of a dilemma during the Steam Summer Sale of 2018. Without the assumed quality of any “AAA” offerings, we were forced to pick-through the dubious layers of Indie games that have flooded into Steam since Valve removed the floodgates and burned them to ash. We saw a lot of $20 titles on sale for $10, but nearly all of them were by unproven outfits with little-to-no track record and looked extremely derivative and nostalgia driven. Ultimately, Nick took a bullet for the team and picked “AereA” for purchase, as not only was it the cheapest option at the time, but it received physical releases on both the PlayStation 4 and XBONE contemporary with its digital Steam release. Any Indie developer with the clout to secure a physical release on both platforms couldn’t be all bad, right?
WRONG!
Presentation
“AereA” is a Unity Engine game, and thus comes with all of the caveats and pitfalls commonly associated with Unity games. Even worse, the visuals use by the developer, Triangle Studios, makes the game look like an absolute asset flip. A quick peruse of the Unity Asset Store reveals character models, environmental models, and animation packages that could be slapped together with very little in the way of modification to create a game identical to “AereA.” The visual styling used in fairly minimalist and cartoony, and revolves around the theme of Classical Music. Characters are all fairly short and stylized with horrific helmet hair obscuring their eyes, while enemy designs are incredibly bland and generic outside of the bosses, who are each giant monsters based on a particular musical instrument. Environmental design is generally horrid, with bland, samey-looking areas that drag-on and are far too spread-out, with no real rhyme, reason, or sense of design behind them.
The soundtrack, at least, didn’t come from the Unity Asset Store, but is an original composition by freelance videogame composers, Deon Van Heerden and Gustavo Barcamor. While this soundtrack is competent, it ultimately doesn’t come across as particularly memorable or interesting, but instead seems more like what one would commission when one wishes to use some incredibly generic baroque background noise in a movie or game.
Technically, “AereA” is a complete disaster. Within moments of starting the game with the three MJ Crew members each controlling a character in shared-screen bliss, my character managed to fall through the floor and spent some time walking around in a basement void, following the other characters the best I could, until we reached a point where there were some stairs and the other guys couldn’t climb them because I was stuck in the floor. Going back out to the title screen and reloading the save fixed it… and it continued to fix it the other three times it happened to one of us during our time with the game! Our time with the game was also cut abruptly short when a glitch upon beating the third-to-last boss corrupted an event flag within the game’s structure and prevented us from activating the next objective. We could either start over from the beginning or quit playing. We chose the latter, because even when “AereA” isn’t being buggy, it’s being bland and mind-numbingly boring.
Story
“AereA” tells the story of a group of music students who live in a world where music is magic, and magic is power. Everything in the world of “AereA” is musically themed, and our students currently attend a conservatory overseen by Maestro Guido, who is the most powerful musician amongst the floating continents.
Soon, minor disruptions begin to appear throughout the world, and Guido, being the super important guy he is, can’t be bothered to stop his conducting, but instead sends the students out to investigate. As the students undertake this series of mind-numbing tasks, they learn that the Sacred Instruments have all been stolen from the conservatory’s vault and that Guido’s constant conducting is the only thing keeping the floating islands from falling into the… void, I guess?
A shadowy villain appears during some cutscenes to mutter vaguely about his grand scheme, while the student heroes are sent on tiresome fetch quest after tiresome fetch quest at the behest of Guido, a fat parrot named Cleff, and a shopkeeper and his two daughters.
“AereA’s” pacing is absolutely atrocious, dragging on far longer than it needs to. Even worse, the dialog seems like it was written by English as a Second Language students and never proof-read by a native speaker. The story is predictable and dumb, failing to throw in even a single plot-twist (we were all expecting the ultimate villain to be the conservatory janitor in disguise, but the game played everything completely straight and boring). Nothing in the script, nothing in the lore, nothing in the entire game is capable of ensnaring the player’s attention and making them want to know what happens next.
Gameplay
Multiple times while playing “AereA” with the rest of the MJ Crew, I voiced aloud my opinion that the game seemed like it was designed by an AI that only had the vaguest notions of what humans like about videogames.
“*B33P-B00P* Humans enjoy exploring large virtual environments! Therefore, I will make every stage extremely large and sprawling.”
“*B33P-B00P* Humans enjoy solving puzzles that involve pulling levers and pushing buttons! Therefore, I will place random levers and random locked doors everywhere on each map! I will also place clever place-block-on-button puzzles throughout, but will also place the block within 1 meter of its coinciding button so as not to overtax the human brain.”
“*B33P-B00P* Humans enjoy RPG elements and Hack ‘n Slash gameplay! Therefore, I will include a leveling system that is largely irrelevant and can be broken easily simply by putting all character points into Attack Power.”
“*B33P-B00P* Humans enjoy loot! I will therefore allow each player to carry up to 4 consumable items with them. These items will be found in boxes scattered throughout the stages or purchased from the store after bringing the store the schematics required to craft said items. But to ensure proper balance, these items will be useless.”
Honestly, I feel like GLaDOS designed this game while her moron core was in charge, then decided to torture some humans by making them pay money for the privilege of playing it. While “AereA” does check the minimal number of boxes required to be classified as a Hack ‘n Slash RPG, it feels like one that was designed for slow pre-schoolers… who can somehow read the boring dialog and quest text. Every environment is too big and too aimless for its own good – very little design effort was put into them, with random switches and stupid ‘puzzles’ everywhere, and bland, generic enemies to kill. Quests are tedious and repetitive, always sending the player back to retread old ground in search of some arbitrary thing or another.
“AereA” is also hilariously easy. I’m no H.A.R.D.-head who insists on having his anus destroyed by every single game, but “AereA” actually manages to take it too far in the other direction. When we were killing boss enemies before the game could even pop-up it’s boss battle splash banner and show us the boss’ health bar, there’s something horrifically wrong with the balance.
Overall
“AereA” is a bland, lifeless trainwreck in every single category. The uninspired presentation, the game breaking bugs, the banal script, and the dragging gameplay all combine to make this game one truly soul-crushing experience. Maybe small children who are incredibly bad at videogames could get something out of it, but as someone who was once a child who was incredibly bad at videogames, I wouldn’t have been happy with it even then.
Presentation: 1/5
Story: 1/5
Gameplay: 1.5/5
Overall (not an average): 1/5
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