Aaero 2 has you rhythmically flying and fighting through gorgeous environments.
2017’s Aaero was a solid rhythm action game featuring a spaceship tracing lines in time to the music whilst fighting off odd enemies and the occasional boss. It was well put together with a great soundtrack, but the occasional frustrating difficulty spikes, especially around those bosses. Aaero 2 is mostly based around the same style of game, but rebuilt to feel better to play and with a more forgiving gameplay loop.
There’s no story to speak of in Aaero 2 beyond being a spaceship flying around, so we’ll get onto the mechanics right off the bat. Your ship flies along a predetermined path with you simply being able to move around a circle along that path. Think moving around in an invisible tunnel and you’re pretty much there. At various points, lines will appear along the sides of your tunnel, and you’ll need to move your ship to trace those lines, earning points, and increasing your multiplier.
These lines move around in time to the song and play neat little tricks like using different sides of the tunnel to represent different vocal tracks within the song. They also act as a path to get through the stages without crashing into obstacles along the way. Depending on the difficulty you choose, there’s some help given, with your ship magnetising to the lines on lower settings, allowing you to be slightly less precise.
Enemies will pop up from time to time who try to shoot you down. Your ship can’t take much in the way of punishment, so it’s wise to avoid these attacks where possible. You aren’t defenceless though, with you having a lock-on missile rack and a machine gun. The missiles behave a lot like in musical classic Rez, with you being able to tag multiple targets at once before releasing them all. If you launch those missiles in time to the beat you even get a damage boost which is a nice touch. The feedback for firing your weapons and hitting targets in pretty anaemic though, so frequently I wasn’t sure if I was timing my attacks well or even hitting the target with the machine gun.
Things can get pretty chaotic with enemies, environmental effects and lines flying at me all at once, so sometimes it was a bit hard to keep track of what I should be focusing on. The twin stick controls are intuitive enough, but I struggled to get my cack handedness through some of the later levels on higher difficulties. Boss stages, of which there are three, were particularly tricky as you need to target the correct part of the boss whilst also dodging attacks at the same time as following lines. It’s a lot to take in, and deaths can be frustrating when there’s so much happening. That isn’t to say it wasn’t enjoyable though. In fact, you can complete boss stages without defeating the boss at all, so long as you reach the end of the track.
Speaking of tracks, I hope you like dub-step and dub-step equivalent music. Every song is very intense and falls into categories that could easily be described as adjacent to that genre. They certainly fit the theme of the world around you as you’re flying through the worlds, but a little more variety might have been nice I suppose. The tracks that are here are solid though, and are certainly in keeping with the previous game.
Now, the game is fun and I enjoyed playing through the twenty-or-so tracks thanks to the gameplay being pretty well polished on the whole. The menus though look like they’ve had very little effort put in. There’s swathes of empty space on the screen thanks to a tiny font for all the options, a font that can’t be changed in the settings I should add. The star icons look simplistic and lack any flair that you might expect for such an impressive game. I know it’s a bit nitpicky to complain about the menus, but when the rest of the game looks so pretty, it’s really quite noticeable.
Aaero 2 is a solid, fun rhythm action game with some very nice visuals. There are even co-op and competitive. multiplayer modes that I didn’t spend a significant amount of time in, so you’ve got plenty to play with for a pretty discount price. It’s a cliche, but if you liked the original, then you’ll enjoy this, and if you enjoy rhythm action games at all then you’ll have a good time here too.
Aaero 2 is out now on Xbox and PC.
