Aaero

TL;DR: Nah mate. Not newbie friendly at all, and lacking Linux support for more than one letterboxed resolution without a mod. Doesn't support Playstation controller rumble OOTB. Some of this stuff may have been fixed in the second game, but looking at reviews it doesn't look like it and I am not willing to buy it just to see. It should be noted I have joined the discord and asked about the letterboxing issue and haven't received a response yet. The review will be updated if I do. On launch I was greeted with an extremely loud intro sound along with letterboxing on the top and bottom of my screen. Further searching revealed this is an issue that others have had which seems to have gone unaddressed for at least 7 years with the only fix being to install some random dude's mod. I launched into the tutorial and it was just a video showing you gameplay and how moving the left stick influences the ship. Gameplay: After watching the tutorial I started the first song "Bass Cannon" which was okay. It was a pretty good introduction except for there were enemies and at the time I had no idea what they were so I just tried to dodge their attacks, thinking this was the only way to deal with them. As it turns out, you have to use your right stick to aim at enemies and the right trigger to shoot (I'll get more into this mechanic later). This wouldn't have been a problem if the tutorial actually showed you fighting an enemy and using said controls. I also noticed that rumble support for Playstation controllers was completely missing, so I enabled Steam Input which fixed the issue but made the game display the wrong controller glyphs (yes I know how it works). I played a few other songs and, suddenly, there were new enemies that had no introduction whatsoever. By this point I had figured out how to fire and was now trying to juggle staying on the ribbon as well as firing at enemies I had never seen before with new mechanics which could screw up your run because you forgot to spam the trigger. The game pretty much relies on you trying songs multiple times in order to understand the enemies and traps introduced in each. This gets boring quite fast, as you'd imagine. There is a "chillout mode" which still has enemies with infinite lives but for some reason keeps the timer after you die to be able to keep playing. It is confusingly labelled and not immediately visible. Graphics: Meh. They're interesting but really you'll be focusing on staying on the line and firing at enemies. There is no anti-aliasing but you'll forget that pretty quick, and the letterboxing goes out of your mind when you start focusing on the game. Music: Not for me. It's electronic which I'm not a huge fan of. The gameplay doesn't influence it enough either. I also struggle to find a connection between moving your joystick and the music.