Aloft Early Access Review

ign.com:

Some of my favorite games are the product of mashing two seemingly incompatible concepts together. After all, where would we be if someone wasn’t crazy enough to combine deckbuilders with roguelikes to create Slay the Spire (or Dream Quest before it), first-person shooters and loot-heavy RPGs to create Borderlands, or cars and soccer to create Rocket League? Aloft aims to do something similar, mixing the relaxing principles of a cozy game with the generally uncozy mechanics of a survival crafting game amidst a floating archipelago akin to The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. That odd combination certainly pays off in some ways, like its floating island-ship-hybrid building system that completely rules and the low-stakes cooperative exploration that makes for a very chill time with friends. But in its current early access state, it’s also quite short on things to do, has way more dull and repetitive combat encounters than it should, and suffers from numerous performance issues that really started to grate on me over time.

If you’ve played pretty much any survival game before, then Aloft will immediately feel familiar. It has you swinging both pickaxes and axes of the non-pick variety to gather stone, wood, and other materials in order to craft your way to greater power and security. But that familiarity quickly fades away as you discover the main thing that sets Aloft apart: the skyborn islands that serve as both places to explore and magically-mobile homes to navigate this floating landscape. You’ll use your trusty wingsuit to zip around the world in search of resources to harvest for your crafting efforts, then turn those islands into skysurfing ships that serve as your base of operations.

This unique twist goes a long way toward making the roughly 30-hours worth of adventure that are currently available feel like more than just another survival crafter, even when it falls short in other areas. Slapping a couple of sails, a rudder, and a steering wheel onto any