It’s a new year, which means it’s time to restart the yearly gauntlet of playing half-finished early access survival crafting titles. Aloft is half of a good game right now, and at times this cozy survival adventure is so cozy it verges on tedium that it almost sends me to sleep several times.
It has its merits – the flying island mechanic is a great idea that is fairly well-realized even at this early stage – but overall, I don’t know why you’d play this game when there are other fantastic survival experiences (namely, Enshrouded) that do what Aloft does, but way better. Aloft is lacking many staples of a good cozy game, mainly better building options and animal husbandry, farming, and decoration, and lacks the grand scale of exploration and diversity to be a proper survival game.
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In its current state, Aloft is literally a half-finished game: half the map is a direct replica of the other side with no way of knowing how it will develop moving forward. That’s not necessarily a bad thing (I don’t want to explore more of the map anyway, I’m tired), but the illusion of scale is misleading. In theory, this should provide Astrolabe Interactive with plenty of room to expand things – and according to its 2025 early access roadmap, that will be the case, with added animal husbandry, more island activities, and new building materials on the horizon.
Work To Be Done
For Aloft to be considered equal to any decent cozy or survival game on the market, Astrolabe has a lot of work to do. There are currently four enemy types – punch-y mushroom, throw-y mushroom, fly-y mushroom, and big, wobbly mushroom – and a handful of weapons and special abilities to attack them with. Combat is just about functional, and that’s it. It’s not particularly difficult or interesting. There are some special moves, like jumping up in the air and repeatedly slashing your enemy to pieces, but when most foes die in two hits, this feels largely pointless.
Exploration is fine, although after ten hours or so I realised that the majority of islands were basically empty. I could spend 15 minutes cleansing an ecosystem (more on that in a minute) to get my hands on a lousy recipe for stone columns, or I could just make a beeline for the important areas marked on my map. In one swoop, one of the biggest selling points of Aloft – flying your island and exploring the ruins of a lost civilization – is reduced to rubble.
I don’t want to explore because some of the islands require you to cleanse the ecosystem to unlock whatever awaits on them. This means you need to plant seeds, release animals, cut down infected trees, destroy corrupted nodes, and maybe, for good measure, build a birdhouse. That’s a novel idea, you think. Aye, it’s a novel idea: but it’s also repeated over and over and over and over and over again until it reaches a point that if I saw an island needed to be cleansed, I just jumped right back on my ship and sailed the hell out of there.
Novel Ideas: Flying Islands, Thunderstorms, A Lost Civilization
Aloft is full of novel ideas, which is what gives me hope for its future. The ability to take any island in the game and turn it into your flying ship is fantastic. All islands are designed by humans, rather than procedurally-generated slop, which means some of them are very interesting and provide a good canvas for building and farming. Building, like many of the mechanics in Aloft, is just about functional. I don’t enjoy the snapping mechanics much, and there’s a severe lack of building materials and styles – but it’s enough to make my island look like a ship, and that’s good enough for me.
I also enjoy the atmosphere and subtle world-building. Progression is made through the discovery of frescoes, which are cave-like paintings left-over from a long forgotten civilization. Aloft has no narrative whatsoever – at least, none that I could actually string together from the frescoes – but there’s a foundation here for some lore, at least.
Sea Of Thieves
Aloft suffers from a problem I’ve always associated with Sea of Thieves. If you’re going to spend a long time piloting a ship, a) the ship better be fun to move around, b) you better give me something pretty to look at while I’m sitting at the wheel. Aloft’s piloting mechanics are decent fun for the most part.. You don’t need to worry about wind speed or direction or anything because the island will always move. It’s an intuitive system which doesn’t aim to ever get in the player’s way.
The skybox is at times very beautiful and other times a grey, homogenous blob. As a Brit, I know all about grey homogenous blobs. In fact, I spend a lot of my life looking at them. In a fantasy world where islands fly and mushrooms come alive, I would love to see something other than a grey homogenous blob. It feels like it’s dark all the time and constantly raining. Where is this game set, in the skies above a flattened and forgotten Glasgow?
Aloft, like many other early access survival crafters, will either live or die according to how many updates it receives over the next year. To stand out in this saturated market, you really need to do something completely unique, or get the fundamentals absolutely spot on. Aloft doesn’t quite hit the mark on either front. It is, however, a serviceable experience that will likely keep a group of friends entertained for a few hours.
Aloft is a feel-good, cozy survival game set in the clouds, where you can transform any island into a flying ship and explore the vast skies.
Navigate the world, discover new islands, gather resources, build your dream home, and take care of your animals, solo or as a group of up to 8 friends.
Yet within nature’s beauty, a corruption spreads. Root it out and cure the fungi threat that devours all other life. Uncover lost knowledge, brew powerful antidotes, enrich the biodiversity of the islands, and restore balance to the airborne ecosystem.
Aloft’s feel-good survival is more about rewarding positive action than punishing mistakes.
The sky provides everything you need; cook up delicious meals for buffs, gather resources to craft tools, and explore to find new technology. Soar the open sky freely and discover ancient ruins to uncover the secrets of the past.
Soar the open skies in a vast sandbox world and turn any island into your personal skyship.