Airheart

A fairly basic pick up and play game with lots of extra little mechanics to try and keep things interesting. Fun enough for a 20 minute session here and there on the Steam Deck as a deep sale game.
Ideal for Deck:

I've ticked this game up since it is generally good, but has some quirks. I have not been able to beat the final boss, although I've made it up to it mulitple times. I'm not one who has dived deep into roguelites, although I've played a few.
The general loop is a top-down twin-stick rougelite, where you fly a plane through individual world stages. Each world stage has a boss to defeat. During each run, you want to be collecting fish, which gives currency, and materials, generally from defeating enemies. These resources you will use to mainly craft new weapons and plane parts. Besides weapons, you also have a hook on your plane that can be used for catching rare fish and combat.
Positives:
- Game is visually nice, with nice cutscene art to go with it as well.
- A forgiving gameplay loop; You can end a run at any point and return back with your loot.
- Wide variety of upgrades that you can use with your resources.
- Boss variety
Neutral:
- Your plane and enemies' can fly quite fast. You can take damage from collisions and some enemies' main attack is ramming.
- Bosses do not respawn after they have been defeated. (May be a good or bad)
- Game is pretty short (3 worlds, each with 4 stages, and final boss), and as such there is not a lot of different enemy types. The enemy variety that is introduced is largely from the different weapon types the game has but that that shrinks the in the later worlds as well.
- Crafting is a bit of a puzzle game; While there is a lot of guesswork with minor currency costs for each guess, there are some hints provided for possible craftable upgrades.
Negatives:
- The most annoying for me is the physics when shooting. Every weapon you fire will push your plane in the opposite direction. This does remove a lot of the control from the aircraft, since you will be pushing your aircraft sideways if you fire broadside or cranking up the speed when firing behind you. This was primarily why I stuggled with the final boss since positioning and speed management is pretty important there.
- Some weapons feel pretty useless, and hooking feels like a gimick for the general gameplay loop.
- Some enemies have pretty poor designs. It's difficult to be specific with this one, since enemies seem to have a general template and one random weapon from an assigned list. However some ships are shielded, which requires hooking to remove, but are also able to saturate the broadsides with gunfire. In addition, some enemies are able to see and attack outside of your view. You can circumvent that with certain weapons (being longer ranged of course) but that feeds into the previous issue. (Edit: I think the final boss' design is also in large contrast to the rest of the levels and stage bosses. Stage bosses occurred in the world stages and as such movement was not very constrained. However, only the final boss was designed around more constrained movement and occuring in a very small area. This results in one of the main stats, speed, now become a detriment.
- Some game elements, like friendly zepplins and planes, debatebly the hook, have very shallow meaning/appearences in the game.
- Game could have used a depth of field layer to obsure lower world levels from view to not obfuscate the current world your are in. I had issues where I ended up trying to dodge collidable objects only to realise it is from the previous stage I was in.

pretty fun roguelite-style game! It's dun trying out new parts and seeing how they perform on the field.
The universe they created is pretty great!
Imo it just needs a bit of polishing here and there.

had fun playing it. worth the 15$