First Impressions | Ava Airborne – LaserDog
From the duo who crafted the mobile twitch-gems HoPiKo and Don’t Grind, Laser Dog’s Simon Renshaw and Rob Allison re-emerged from their subterranean game-forge to show off their latest creation — Ava Airborne — at EGX.
A surprising detraction from their usual formulae of “insanely difficult twitch games which require the timing and precision of someone who has spent years in the Tibetan mountains training in the art of the blade to execute properly” (looking at you, HoPiKo); Ava Airborne is a much calmer, more relaxing game which Laser Dog are hoping will appeal to a wider and more casual audience than their previous titles.
With a familiar one-button control scheme similar to the helicopter flash games of old, you hold to swoop up and release to go down. Unlike the aforementioned helicopter games however, Ava is bound by the unrelenting forces of physics, and momentum is her primary weapon in the battle to get as far as possible before punching the beach with her face.
Leaping from a cliff, Ava will pounce into the Newtonian nightmare that is flight via one of her randomly chosen contraptions: be it a humble hand glider, gyrocopter, an office chair with a fire extinguisher strapped to it, or any of the other inventive ways Ava has to fly the length of the shore. Each device (and thus playthrough) offer a slightly different style of gameplay: the hand glider so elegantly presented in the header image follows the “hold to swoop up” control scheme whereas the Da Vinci-style bird wings has you mashing the only button to get Ava to furiously flap up to either hit one of the assortment of velocity boosters, or avoid the ever-increasing multitude of stuff which will ruin her day.
Hoops, booster pads and power-ups float around in the sky above the beach like some bizarre, anti-gravity litter, allowing Ava to accelerate and gain more momentum to steer into more helpful objects, or to avoid the sort of terrible things you don’t expect to find above the beach; Balloons filled with explosives, batteries with live wires — just dangling threatening to hit Ava with enough volts to disintegrate whatever she is using to fly, but keep her on the cusp of life just out of death’s ever-clasping reach — and the layer of storm cloud above the otherwise clear and lovely shore line which, should she stray into the lower atmosphere for any longer than a few seconds, will electrocute her mercilessly.
Despite the Machiavellian-esque methods to hinder her flight, Ava Airborne is a lovely and surprisingly relaxing game which you can pick up and play for a few minutes or whittle away an hour and still feel satisfied with the gameplay and variety it has to offer.
Coming to Steam in the near future for around £2.50 and mobile platforms for 50p — with microtransactions for unlocking more flight contraptions — Ava Airborne is worth every penny you throw at Laser Dog to help them create more wonderful pick-me-ups like this in the future.
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