Early Access. Survival. Crafting. It’s a combo that you’re likely familiar with if you’ve spent a reasonable amount of time browsing the Steam store. Aloft is the next in a long (and seemingly never-ending) line of these games, aiming to carve its own slice of the survival crafting pie.
Aloft doesn’t make the strongest first impression, unceremoniously dumping you into a cave after limited character and world creation. Your only real hint at what’s going on is a single sentence during the loading screen, which talks about an “eternal storm” leading you to a broken world.
It doesn’t take long before you go through the motions of any survival game, picking up stray wood and stone to craft a hammer that will serve you for hours to come. From there, you learn how to build platforms, more items, and tools, then escape your rocky confinement into the outside world.
This outside world is where Aloft’s main selling point comes into play. Rather than one large open map to explore, this is a world made up of many smaller islands. After crafting a glider and flying out to neighboring islands, you soon learn how to create various sailing parts like a helm and sails.
Rather than crafting some sort of airship, you instead use these parts to commandeer one of the aforementioned islands. Once claimed, an island acts not only as a base of operations but also as the main way to traverse across the vast sky.
Traversing is something you’ll be doing a lot of. While worlds are randomly generated, they each follow a set pattern: each world is split into three rings, with each ring split into sections on the map. Sections are populated with clusters of islands, with some holding key points of interest.
Exploring islands is Aloft’s main gameplay loop, as you scour them for resources and crafting recipes. Cutting down trees, opening treasure chests, it’s all that you’d expect from a survival crafting game.
Where things differ is the island ecosystem mechanic. Some islands you come across will be in a state of decay, missing certain vital parts to keep the ecosystem alive. This can range from not enough animals to a lack of fungi or flora.
Most resources on the island stay locked until you satisfy all conditions, which are easy enough to check via a craftable field guide. At first, I thought this could be an interesting way to have the player think about their impact on the environment, carefully picking and choosing resources instead of ransacking everything.
Instead, it’s a shallow system that rarely impacts your playstyle. Most of the time you can just leave islands that require extra work, opting to find one that has a complete ecosystem instead. Even if you do choose to fix things, it’s generally little more than planting a row of flora or trees.
Aloft is full of these shallow mechanics and systems, most of which barely increase in complexity by the time you reach the end of Early Access content.
Combat is simple — all tools double up as weapons — and is clearly not a big focus. In fact, there are only three enemy types, alongside some larger growths that impede progress on some islands. The only real times I found myself in danger was thanks to lag spikes, something relatively common on any of the bigger islands.
This has the knock-on effect of making cooking mostly inconsequential right now. You can forage or grow a number of crops, with Aloft currently allowing you to cook a wide variety of dishes. But most serve very little purpose right now, especially since dying has no consequences.
I found myself crafting little more than basic clean water, since that allowed me to swing faster — a useful buff for both combat and gathering. This also serves the double purpose of staving off the desert heat in Aloft’s current final biome, though even that has very little going on right now.
As of the Early Access launch, Aloft only contains three biomes — two are almost identical, with the last being desert-themed. On top of this, there's a noticeably limited pool of islands that be spawned into a world. You’ll run into the same islands many times, with most having no defining features or reasons to visit.
To stop you from just making a beeline for the next map marker, the world throws a couple of roadblocks at you. Between the outer and middle rings on each side, you’ll have to make it through a field of floating rocks. The south and north sides of the map require progressively better sails, with the crafting recipes being found on random islands.
Because of this, you end up reaching a new cluster of islands, giving them a quick look for said recipes, then moving on to the next. With how plentiful most resources are, there’s not much point in lingering unless you really need to.
In between islands, you’ll use your trusty island-turned-ship, fitting it with new sails to go faster or one of many crafting stations. Crafting is all there really is to do when traveling to a new island, as there are no random events or items to look out for. You'll likely find yourself tabbing out often since you'll otherwise be waiting for minutes with nothing to do.
And honestly, that’s mainly my problem with Aloft right now. After a few hours, the gameplay loop ends up as a bland mix of quickly checking repetitive islands, and then spending my time away from the game while your ship makes its way forward.
Releasing too soon is a pitfall I’ve seen Early Access games like Nightingale fall into, and I wonder if Aloft has done the same thing. Realistically there are only a few hours of actual meaningful content here, stretched out across 15-20 hours or so of repetitive exploration before you exhaust everything.
More can absolutely be added during Early Access, with the Steam store page promising more biomes and “challenges to overcome”. But as of right now, a unique gimmick doesn’t set Aloft apart from other, more engaging titles.
Aloft was previewed over 25 hours of gameplay on PC via Steam with a key provided by the publisher. All screenshots were taken during the preview process.
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