Aloft

Early access review

If you’ve played pretty much any survival game before, then Aloft will immediately feel familiar. It has swinging pickaxes and axes of the non-pick variety to gather stone, wood, and other materials in order to craft your way to greater power. That familiarity quickly fades away as you discover the main thing that sets Aloft apart: the skyborne islands that serve as both places to explore and magically mobile homes to navigate this floating landscape. You’ll use a glider to fly around to visit other islands.

Slapping a couple of sails, a rudder, and a steering wheel onto any island allows you to move it freely. when you get a bunch of your friends to join you, each of whom can import characters and customized island ships from their own worlds, it makes for an extremely amusing time. Most of the usual cozy life-sim activities like taking care of livestock, gardening, and decorating can all be done.

The relaxed nature of Aloft means you’ll rarely worry about much of anything, which goes against the usual survival formula, but that’s not such a bad thing. Flying is never a challenge, as you’re allowed to move in any direction without concerning yourself with fuel or physics, even soaring nearly straight upwards, if you want. Combat is extremely simple, and dying has no consequences anyway as you’ll just respawn at your home island without losing anything

Not all floating islands will be bright and happy zones to turn into a flying ship at the outset, though, as a fungal infection has taken hold of some of these mini-ecosystems and must be cured before nature can be rebalanced. Most of the time, that means you’ll first have to fight off a handful of mushroom creatures and destroy large fungal nodes to cleanse the island, then restore that place’s health by planting trees, introducing fauna, and repairing existing structures to return it to a livable state.

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