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.Aloft Early Access Gameplay ScreenshotsIf 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. The unique sky island setting is a twist that goes a long way.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 island allows you to move it freely, taking whatever it carries (or that you’ve built on it) along with you – and when you get a bunch of your friends to join you, each of whom can import characters and customized island ships from their own worlds, it makes for an extremely amusing time. Most of the usual cozy life-sim activities like taking care of livestock, gardening, and decorating can all be done with friends from the comfort of a flying island, tricked out to your liking and functioning much like a sea vessel traveling at high speeds. You’ll likely get into all sorts of trouble, too, like flying into an asteroid field that tears holes in your sails and sends you careening out of control.While the premise is unique, and building and piloting islands can be a lot of fun, Aloft is significantly less successful at being a good survival-crafting game on its own. There aren’t a ton of activities to play around with yet beyond farming, cooking, building, and raising animals, and even these are fairly barebones iterations of what other cozy games have done better. There’s only a very small handful of animals to domesticate right now, gardening is extremely straightforward, and building doesn’t have enough unique structures to choose from or even a good reason to attempt complex structures since islands have to maintain a healthy natural biome to be pilotable. I’m especially surprised there aren’t survival activities that take advantage of Aloft’s unique airborne setting! No fishing for birds with some bait attached to a kite? No special gardening mechanics that incorporate the altitude or temperature associated with each of the world’s biomes? Here’s hoping these systems get spiced up and fleshed out during the early access period.The relaxed nature means you’ll rarely worry about much of anything.The relaxed nature of Aloft means you’ll rarely worry about much of anything, which goes against the usual survival formula, but that’s not such a bad thing. Flying is never a challenge, as you’re allowed to move in any direction without concerning yourself with fuel or physics, even soaring nearly straight upwards, if you want. Combat is extremely simple, and dying has no consequences anyway as you’ll just respawn at your home island without losing anything but the time it takes to get back to where you were. Really the worst that can happen is if your sails are destroyed by crashing into something and you have to spend some resources to repair them, which isn’t so bad at all. This direction makes Aloft feel quite stress-free, allowing you to focus on exploration, customizing your island, and goofing around with friends – all of which I was happy to do.Not all floating islands will be bright and happy zones to turn into a flying ship at the outset, though, as a fungal infection has taken hold of some of these mini-ecosystems and must be cured before nature can be rebalanced. Most of the time, that means you’ll first have to fight off a handful of mushroom creatures and destroy large fungal nodes to cleanse the island, then restore that place’s health by planting trees, introducing fauna, and repairing existing structures to return it to a livable state.The problem is, at this time, there just isn’t a ton to do once you’ve crafted a ship and begun sailing around. The map is absolutely enormous, but largely empty. There are clusters of islands scattered here and there, but you only need to visit a handful of them to get the materials you need and unlock the upgrades required to progress. And since all the critical places you visit have an identical twin on the opposite side of the map, you can safely ignore half of what’s out there as you explore – in fact, not doing so really only makes exploration feel more mundane, as you discover that there’s nothing to be gained from finding these repeat islands and you’ve basically just wasted a bunch of time and effort (as I did). Obviously a big part of an early access launch is that we can safely expect more content to be added over time, and that will ideally alleviate the current drought, but there just isn’t much to do if you’re looking to dive in now aside from upgrading your sails so you can travel between the three regions that are currently accessible.Curing infected islands also becomes quite monotonous after a short time thanks to a lack of enemy variety and extremely dull combat. There are only four enemy types: stout melee mushrooms, skinny and cowardly ranged fungi, flying squid spores that stun and debuff you, and giant fungal flowers that are the source of the infection and must be killed to eliminate it. Aside from the skinny ranged mushrooms which are always amusing as they scream and run away from you (even willing to jump off a cliff to evade you), the others are uninteresting annoyances to be quickly stabbed at before moving on. Fighting with melee weapons and a bow is as straightforward and bland as it gets, making most of my combat time feel like more of a chore. You eventually get to add enchantments to weapons and learn a few tricks, like one that lets you knock your foes in the air to juggle them for a couple seconds, but the enemies just aren’t challenging enough to make that investment worth it at this point.TieGuyTravis’ Favorite Survival GamesIf you’re interested in building, exploring, and refilling your hunger meter before dying, here are TieGuyTravis’ recommendations for the best survival games you should play!Though this first early access draft runs out of things to do pretty quickly, those who stay long enough to get through the three areas will at least be rewarded with Aloft’s most interesting encounter as a final gauntlet: the leviathan. Somewhere out in the world is a giant flying tortoise-like creature whose body resembles a row of floating islands, all of which have been infected. Tracking down and curing this elusive beast serves as a placeholder finale of sorts (a proper ending is planned to be added later), and though it features the same tedious combat and four enemy types as every other island, it’s definitely one of the coolest activities available. This erratically flying good boy can be quite difficult to track down and will take a seasoned island captain to tame, which does give me some hope for what could still be in store down the line.Perhaps unsurprisingly, Aloft’s other major shortcoming is that it performs pretty poorly most of the time. That’s not particularly surprising given its unfinished state, but I’d say this is on the more severe side of the spectrum compared to other early access games I’ve played at launch. The framerate gets extremely rocky on a fairly regular basis and crashing is a common occurrence, especially if you aren’t the host of a multiplayer world. Beyond that, my playgroup saw instances of items mysteriously disappearing from chests and sometimes I found myself staring at the inside of my avatar’s face, unable to rectify the issue until a crash inevitably came a short while later. This is one of those things I imagine will become less and less of an problem as time goes on, but at least for now these technical issues can be a real drag.
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