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Rogue-like flying game Airheart soars on to Nintendo Switch

Gone fishing

Rogue-like flying game Airheart soars on to Nintendo Switch
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| Airheart

Following its successful release on PC and PlayStation last year, Airheart has finally touched down on Nintendo Switch. If you’re a fan of retro-futurism and rogue-likes – and don’t suffer from vertigo – this game is sure to reel you in.

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Swiss indie developer Blindflug Studios has built on the universe it created in prequel Cloud Chasers, this time taking the action from the desert to the sky. You play as a young girl named Amelia Airheart (a nod to pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, who mysteriously vanished over the ocean). She’s an aspiring pilot and fisherman with big dreams: to explore the far reaches of the sky. That means leaving the floating city of Granaria and climbing up and up, catching flying fish and fighting marauding sky-pirates along the way.

Airheart features a top down perspective with layered levels. There’s no drab post-apocalyptic grey in this dieselpunk world – it’s all big sky, puffy clouds and bright colours. As you elevate up a level, the last couple of levels are still visible through thin cloud cover, giving you a pleasing sense of depth.

The game's ecosystem is designed in a way that the marine life for each skylayer will change in species and colour depending on your interaction with them, so each playthrough has the potential to throw up something different. As you dogfight with pirates using the twin-stick controls, you can salvage scrap from their aeroplanes to craft new parts and weapons – there are more than 40 weapons to try out.

With the new Switch version, you can now play with friends. The exclusive co-op mode allows up to four players to ride a zeppelin all the way to the stratosphere.

Discover for yourself why the game was the deserving winner of the Big Indie Pitch at Gamescom 2018. Take to the skies in Airheart, available now from the Nintendo eShop.