Aloft is launching into early access, but if you're looking for the next big-scale co-op survival crafting game to sink hundreds of hours I'm afraid to tell you that this might not currently be it. With a world that feels half-empty, a repetitive gameplay loop, and next to no guidance on where you should aim next, Aloft leaves a lot to be desired. There is a decent foundation for it to build a unique experience, but they currently don't feel like enough to make up for how lackluster I found the whole thing.
For a game so driven by its exploration, when I finally got to man the helm, it felt underwhelming.
You start the game stranded on an island following an airship crash. After a cutscene explaining this you're tasked with escaping the cave you woke up in, which introduces the crafting mechanic. It's easy enough since you just need to collect rocks and sticks to make basic tools and then re-build a collapsed bridge before you can scramble across some rocks and make your great escape. After this, you get to craft a glider to strap to your back like a wingsuit and visit some nearby islands to learn more about airship travel and how to fly before getting to build your ship and graduate from glider travel. It's the same routine a lot of survival crafting games follow of 'you wake up in a place and have to find a way to survive' with the added emphasis on sailing through the clouds.
But for a game so driven by its exploration, when I finally got to man the helm, it felt underwhelming. With such a dramatic swell of music playing as I ran out into the world for the first time and the excitement of learning about flight from what looked like ancient tomes on different islands, I may have set my expectations too high.
Sure, it's cool to travel around on a floating island airship or by glider rather than on foot. But in terms of what there is to do or see, it loses its charm pretty quickly. There are attempts to help Aloft set the foundations for what could be a unique addition to the survival game genre, such as its main mode of transportation being either glider or airship rather than by foot or the fact you never visit a mainland and you're constantly between islands. But for the most part, these novelties wear off once you realise each place you're visiting is almost a replica of the last.
Learn to fly
Once I'd clumsily glued a rudder, a sail, and a helm to my airship the world became my oyster. I was free to set off in any direction I wanted and continue the routine check over each floating island to see if there was anything worth pillaging. Unfortunately, a lot of the islands I came across at the start of my adventure felt surprisingly empty. While there were occasionally some animals or vegetation to add to the field guide you craft at the start of the game, and simple resources like wood and stone, more often than not I'd spend a few minutes here before venturing to the next.
The airship is not a simple means of transportation either, which is probably on my part for assuming it would be anyway. Instead, you have six different keys to bear in mind while you're floating around. Two control your elevation, two for your steering, and two for your speed. If you lean on one key for too long and then let it go, your settings won't automatically level out. I learned this the hard way since multiple occasions left me rolling through the clouds quite literally full steam ahead onto an island with no understanding of why I wasn't stopping.
It was an unexpected challenge, one which helped me engage with Aloft slightly more than just running around trying to find where I needed to go, and gave me the same satisfaction I had when learning to sail a boat in Sea of Thieves for the first time, which is a gold star in my book. Sailing through the air is a little tougher than the high seas though, so I ended up relying on the glider you craft at the start of the game to get around more than the airship for the most part.
From the ground up
To contrast how challenging flying your airship is, customising it feels like a walk in the park. As is the way with most survival games, you have to collect materials scattered around the world to craft and build on your base. This is where I finally saw Aloft start to shine. Crafting is basically just a game of mashing items together in the hopes that they become something useful, and a surprising amount of knowledge from other survival crafting games comes in handy here. If you're crafting something for the first time, you're met with a series of question marks rather than the items you can create, so it's a lot of guessing to start. But, it definitely feels more rewarding when you create your first set of tools. Having to blindly throw items together in the hopes of creating something useful, like rope, is one of the most rewarding parts of Aloft, so I was thankful it made up a lot of the experience.
Alongside customising your airship, you're encouraged to build farmlands and animal enclosures too. It lessened the amount of time I spent feeling like Aloft was barren, and it made the arduous journey through the clouds in my airship slightly more rewarding. But, it makes up a surprisingly small amount of the game at the moment. I assume this explains why certain islands are so empty since they're designed to be outposts for farming or animal care. But a lot of the time I didn't find any reward in this, aside from the obvious task of restoring the environment of each island to its former glory, so I can see other players quickly losing interest in another integral part of the game.
Aloft strives to be the next survival crafting game in the sphere of more relaxing gaming, but it has a long way to go before it gets there. It's got the potential of being a neat little game to play for a few hours in the evening, but currently, it's not something I'm desperate to jump into when I fancy something more laid back. Ideally, its world would be more populated and there would be significantly more to do rather than lose yourself in the clouds for a while. It has fun parts, and I appreciate its attempts to set itself apart from other games, but if it wants to be something I'm racing to play with friends then it does need some improvements first.
