Airoheart Review

One of the many things that brings me joy about playing video games is taking notice of the different ways newer games draw inspiration from previous ones. Sometimes it’s just subtle things that only a dedicated megafan might notice, while other times it’s much more obvious.  Airoheart by Pixel Heart Studio and publisher SOEDESCO undoubtedly falls into the latter category. The Legend of Zelda series is one of the most popular franchises in gaming, I played a lot of the earlier titles, and in my eyes, the pinnacle of the series is A Link to the Past. Pixel Heart studio must have a similar mindset because they have created a game that is heavily inspired by it – imitating it in both look and feel.

Airoheart is a top-down action-adventure game, with true 16-bit pixel art. While playing this game I felt like I might zone out and suddenly be in 1994. The basic game mechanics will be familiar to anyone who grew up playing SNES. You have a sword attack (which is oddly mapped to the right trigger) and after a bit of adventuring, you gain a shield. The sword attack feels exactly like Link’s basic sword attack in the top-down Zelda games. You also have the option to use bombs; it’s not exactly like the Zelda games – you can’t throw them – but you can use them to find secret passageways. You might not be able to throw bombs but you can pick up and throw pots, rocks, and bushes – all of which look like they were pulled straight out of A Link to the Past. In truth, the mechanical similarities stop there, but the basic mechanics are unmistakably similar to those found in the early Zelda series. As soon as I started playing I was instantly familiar with the gameplay, which holds up reasonably.

I have to mention my biggest gripe with the combat – Airoheart doesn’t have any invincibility frames when you take damage, meaning that you can easily get cornered and take multiple hearts’ worth of damage before being able to escape, or even worse you’ll die. There is no excuse for the omission of I-frames, and it needs to be patched in as soon as possible. When you die in the game you respawn at the last door you entered or exited with half health. Depending on where you are this can put you in a tough spot, especially early in the game when you only have three or four hearts and you start with half that. 

There are quite a few other mechanics that attempt to set Airoheart apart. You can find a number of secondary items which range from weapons such as a crossbow to omni-purpose items such as a flask of neverending water or the magic wand. The water flask is used to fill up water-powered contraptions and strangely enough can also be used to light braziers. The magic wand is truly multi-faceted. There are a total of eight spells you can learn by acquiring the corresponding runes. They range from the familiar such as a healing spell and a fire burst attack to more unique options such as lethargy which slows down everything surrounding you and flight, which oddly doesn’t let you fly, but instead turns you into a feather allowing you to fall through grates in the floor.

The story feels very much like something I would have experienced during the 16-bit generation. You play as Airoheart (yes it’s a strange name) who is half Breton and half Elmer, two races that are on the verge of war; however, there is more happening behind the scenes. It turns out that your brother, Xanatos, is planning to unleash unspeakable evils and is behind the rising tensions between the two races. All he needs to do is collect the powerful Draoidh stones. So of course since he’s your brother, all your friends decide that it makes the most sense for you to track down the stones too and stop him, one of your friend’s logic is that “he’ll be less likely to kill his own brother” HA. Overall I’ve enjoyed the writing. The plot might be a little old-fashioned, however, the writing has a good sense of humor, and at some points breaks the fourth wall and pokes fun at the tendencies of action-adventure/RPG players. I was actually surprised at the amount of dialogue that was written for the game. The game has a large number of NPCs and each of them, even the non-essential ones, has multiple lines of dialogue. Smartly all of it isn’t triggered at once, but only if you keep talking to the characters, meaning that if you aren’t interested in more exposition and world-building then you can easily avoid it. In addition to the main questline that sees you traveling across the game world trying to collect the Draoidh stones and stop your brother, there are a number of side quests to fill your time. I thought these helped keep the game fresh, unlike the slightly generic main story. They also really helped to build the game world and make it feel more lively. The quests have a nice amount of variety and their writing and design are much more interesting than I normally find in most games that are filled with boring fetch quests.

Speaking of world-building, let me tell you about the game world. The developers have been quick to point out that Airoheart has a much more open-world style design than your typical top-down action-adventure game, which is true in part. When I first heard this I was pretty excited. It actually made me think back to the original The Legend of Zelda which had a more open-world design, giving you more options of where you could go. I had hoped that the game gave you the option to tackle the dungeons in any order, but this is not the case. Some of the seven-plus dungeons reward you with an item that expands your exploration capabilities, and other items that have a similar effect on gameplay are given to you at story points related to the completion of the dungeons. To give you some examples, the first dungeon contains a special set of shoe laces that give you the ability to do a dodge roll. Not only can this be used to get out of danger, but you can use it to bridge small gaps in the floor that you would normally fall into. After completing the second dungeon you gain a Draoidh stone that grants you the power to lift small rocks. Up to this point, you will have come across many stones blocking various paths. One final example is the kobold tech rune that is given to you before entering the fifth dungeon. This is one of eight magic spell runes you can acquire and this one essentially functions as a hook shot. All of these different items, abilities, and spells help make the gameplay more compelling. There’s just one problem: you can only have one item equipped at a time. The right and left shoulder buttons let you scroll through your usable items which is nice, but there is no way to quickly change the spell you are using. Some dungeons require the use of spells one after the other, and going into the clunky menu to change them repeatedly becomes a real chore.

I had mixed feelings about the open-world design. I think it works for the most part but sometimes when I didn’t know where I needed to go next I started to lose interest in the game. It’s not that much fun to go back and forth through the same areas over and over, especially since fighting enemies in Airoheart doesn’t give you any real reward. I really enjoyed exploring each area on the first pass through, there are a lot of secrets and side areas to find such as caves and secret warp gates. I’ll tell you about some of my early travels so you can get a better picture of the game’s scope and how getting new items and abilities affect the flow of the gameplay. In a hidden corner of an early area, there is a small race course where a trio of ruffians has staged a seemingly unwinnable race. Entrants must pay 20 gems to enter and their speed champ is blazingly fast. You might think the solution is casting the haste rune, but instead, you need to use the lethargy rune which will slow their speed demon just enough for you to eke out a win (I also used the dodge roll quite liberally since it makes you go a little faster). Winning the race rewards you with a purple crystal. On the way back from the race area I decided to swing by the mysterious magician’s tower which I hadn’t stopped at for a bit. There had been a marker on the map since I first discovered the location indicating that there was something there. Upon my return when I approached the formerly benign purple emblem on the ground outside the tower I was suddenly teleported to a new section of a dungeon I visited earlier in the game. After working through the dungeon, fighting off floating electric jellyfish and flying books as well as avoiding traps and solving puzzles, you are rewarded with an item that will clearly be used to craft a new sword. 

When the game presents you with constant interactions like this it works splendidly well, but as I said before when you have no idea where to go it gets boring very quickly. An issue that makes this problem worse is the fact that you can only see a small section of the map at any given time. There are markers showing important spots, like dungeons, but you won’t be able to see them on the map unless you are close by. Apparently, you can scroll through the map on the PC version, but this is not an option in the Xbox version; hopefully, they will patch it in soon. The game features a unique warp system that lets you warp back and forth from the warp points to a small hub; however, there are only a handful of warp points. When I was in the later stages of the game I really could have used a few more. Going back and forth through the same areas over and over gets boring.

The pixel art is nicely done, but it doesn’t have quite the detail or variety that its inspiration A Link to the Past had in its tile sets and locations. In the early areas (which you revisit frequently) there is an abundance of green, grey, and brown: Green grass, green bushes, brown trees, brown buildings, grey rocks, and grey ruins. Some of the other areas have the same issue. I think if they added some more variations to their tile sets it would have taken the art style to the next level. Some of the later areas feature more interesting and vibrant color pallets, like a small area with trees that have purple leaves, and a larger area where the ground is red. I like how authentic the game looks and feels, but just a little more detail and variety would have gone a long way.

Conclusion

Airoheart is one of the better Zelda-likes I have played and working my way through the game has been a trip down memory lane. It borrows so much from the Link to the Past formula, but also adds in plenty of its own ideas and mechanics. Perhaps the biggest issue I have with the game is its price point, $40 is way too steep for this game. I think if it was $20-25 it would sell many more copies and find a much larger audience. There are a handful of other issues, but most of those could be addressed with a patch. If you’ve been looking for a game to satisfy your classic action-adventure cravings then Airoheart could be your game, at the very least you should put it on your wishlist so you can pick it up if the price changes or it goes on sale.

This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.