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Aero's Quest

Aero's Quest

Written by Russell Archey on 8/4/2015 for PC  
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Puzzle-platformers are an interesting genre.  The game has to have a decent balance of both platforming elements and controls as well as puzzle elements to keep fans of both genres entertained and satisfied.  Aero’s Quest attempts to achieve just that.  From screenshots and videos it seems more platforming than puzzle at first glance, but let’s take a deeper look to see if Aero’s Quest can bring out the best of both genres.

Aero’s Quest revolves around Aero who is attempting to save his girlfriend Ariella who has been taken captive by a fearsome android named Andraus.  After Andraus captured Ariella, he also captured Aero and partially turned him into a machine before dumping him back into the woods.  Now Aero must prove his love to Ariella before Andraus can rip it apart.  In other words, it’s your basic story of “boy likes girl, villain also likes girl, villain takes the girl, and you have to rescue her”.

The game is comprised one hundred stages which is spread across five areas, each separated into two parts with ten stages in each.  In each stage you’ll find anywhere from one to several red switches on the ground.  To complete each stage you have to turn on each switch by stepping on it which opens a cage at the end that contains Ariella, then reach the cage only to have Andraus take her away.  Kind of Meat Boy-esque in a way.  Unsurprisingly it’s not typically as straight forward as that as you’ll have to occasionally find keys to open locks to some of the switches, dodge enemies, and basically find the best way to accomplish all of this without getting hit even once.

The early stages are simple enough; hit the switches and get out.  As the game progresses you’ll be introduced to different enemies and obstacles you have to avoid such as cannons and rockets that shoot out from the walls, as well as a few different power-ups to collect such as temporarily being able to jump higher or the ability to slow down time.  These add some interesting mechanics to the game, but at times can seem a bit misplaced.  I’ve seen a couple of times that I’ve had to backtrack through some obstacles and the game gives you a stealth power-up to pass right through them, as it would be very difficult otherwise, but then a stage or two later you have a very similar scenario and the game gives you a Time Warp power-up instead.  Granted that slows down time but with the fire rates and speeds of some of the bombs and rockets, it’s still difficult to find the right moment to proceed without getting blown up, even with time slowed down.

The controls aren’t too bad but they feel a bit tight and loose at the same time.  The controls are very responsive and you can even change directions in the air on a whim, but the jumping itself is kind of floaty.  What I mean by that is when you jump you kind of float back down a bit as opposed to realistically descending at a normal rate.  It’s hard to put into words but think of various classic games such as Mario and Mega Man, or even more recent games like Axiom Verge.  When you jump up you come down at a reasonable rate.  Here it’s a bit more slow and can throw off your timing or make various obstacles hard to avoid.  I swear I had one stage early on in which I died close to two dozen times at a set of steps that launched out rockets because I kept mistiming my landing speed and end up landing right on a rocket.

Graphically the game looks okay.  I wouldn’t say it’s anything to write home about, but it’s not bad either.  It fits the game pretty nicely, but there is one thing that I have to complain about, and that’s the foreground.  The game has around one hundred stages taking place across several different environments, but sometimes the foreground and area effects can actually hinder things, such as in the volcanic area.  I appreciate the art as well as the heat effects they put in, but on numerous occasions they’ve actually hindered my progress and I’ve lost several lives because the foreground blocked my vision of what was ahead.

In terms of replay value there’s quite a bit if you can manage to clear the stages themselves first.  You have the ability to replay any level you’ve already cleared in an attempt to earn stars with each stage giving you three possible, and sadly all three are earned the exact same way every time…and I don’t mean “it’s always X amount of points and such”, but the exact…same…way.  The first star is for getting at least 1500 points, the second star for nabbing at least two drones in each stage (drones are little orbs that randomly fly around a stage), and the third for finishing it without dying.  However, if you fulfill any of these requirements when you first play through the stage while going through the story, you’ll already have that star completed when you go back to it later.

Finally there’s a speedrun mode which lets you basically rush through the game in two different ways: either the entire game as a whole or each set of ten stages (keep in mind that each of the five areas has two parts of ten stages each).  I like this as outside of the full game run you only have to worry about ten stages, but there are two things I thought would have been done differently.  First, I’m a little curious as to why you can do each individual part, but not the area as whole (ie. twenty stages instead of ten).  Second, you can even do the areas that you haven’t even been to yet.  I figured that like when going for the achievement stars you’d have to have an area available in the story to speed run it, but apparently not.  I was able to go straight to the last area in Speed Run mode before I was anywhere near it in Story mode…not that I recommend it, I died a lot.

In the end, Aero’s Quest is a fun and challenging game if you like puzzle-platformers, but it’s not without its flaws and a couple of them can frustrate some players quickly.  The foreground elements can on a few occasions get in your way, but not to the point that it’s a major hindrance for the entire game.  The jumping is probably the worst area for me and, again, it’s not game breaking or anything, but I felt like a lot of the deaths weren’t necessarily because of me, but because of how the game handles the jump physics.  Overall if you like puzzle games of this nature, this is one to check out and give a shot.

Aero’s Quest is an entertaining puzzle-platformer with a basic story (not that puzzle games necessarily need one) and nice graphics and music.  However, the jump physics feel too floaty for a platformer and at times that threw off my progress as I kept dying due to “floating” down into obstacles.  In the end though, Aero’s Quest brings quite a bit of challenge to the genre and is definitely worth checking out.

Rating: 8 Good

* The product in this article was sent to us by the developer/company.

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About Author

I began my lifelong love of gaming at an early age with my parent's Atari 2600.  Living in the small town that I did, arcades were pretty much non-existent so I had to settle for the less than stellar ports on the Atari 2600.  For a young kid my age it was the perfect past time and gave me something to do before Boy Scout meetings, after school, whenever I had the time and my parents weren't watching anything on TV.  I recall seeing Super Mario Bros. played on the NES at that young age and it was something I really wanted.  Come Christmas of 1988 (if I recall) Santa brought the family an NES with Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt and I've been hooked ever since.

Over 35 years from the first time I picked up an Atari joystick and I'm more hooked on gaming than I ever have been.  If you name a system, classics to moderns, there's a good chance I've not only played it, but own it.  My collection of systems spans multiple decades, from the Odyssey 2, Atari 2600, and Colecovision, to the NES, Sega Genesis, and Panasonic 3DO, to more modern systems such as the Xbox One and PS4, and multiple systems in between as well as multiple handhelds.  As much as I consider myself a gamer I'm also a game collector.  I love collecting the older systems not only to collect but to play (I even own and still play a Virtual Boy from time to time).  I hope to bring those multiple decades of gaming experience to my time here at Gaming Nexus in some fashion.
These days when I'm not working my day job in the fun filled world of retail, I'm typically working on my backlog of games collecting dust on my bookshelf or trying to teach myself C# programming, as well as working on some projects over on YouTube and streaming on Twitch.  I've been playing games from multiple generations for over 35 years and I don't see that slowing down any time soon.
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