Yet Another Aery Game; Yet Another Middling Cozy Game
I have a real love-hate relationship with the Aery series, although ‘love’ and ‘hate’ are perhaps a little strong. I feel compelled to play them, thanks to their cozy low-stakes flying and a fountain of achievements after each level. But I also resent that the series regurgitates the same levels with each release. Which makes it a ‘compelled-resentful’ relationship, I guess.
For one level, I thought Aery: Titans of the Future was going to buck the ‘resentful’ trend. One of the biggest flaws of the Aery series is its storytelling. The writers have never figured out how to make a parrot flying through a landscape narratively compelling, but they insist on cramming a story in regardless. Aery: Titans of the Future does similar cramming, but its opening level was surprisingly entertaining. It’s because of one simple rug pull.
Robots from the future have arrived in our world, and everyone is justifiably worried. Death by Decepticon is on the cards. But instead of destroying the White House, the robots start doing menial tasks. Cats get saved from trees, skirting boards are levelled off, and potholes are filled. The robots play the role of eager, young parish councillors.
Robots In Disguise
It’s cute, right? I could imagine leaning into the ludicrousness of the premise, or following one robot and their human friend as they chat about the state of the world. I wanted to read or write that story. It sounds aeons better than any of the other Aery stories.
Alas, it lasted for one level. Because Aery: Titans of the Future repeats this story ten more times. It tells the story of robots worrying humans that they may attack, but instead helping out. They arrive in deserts to stop desertification, forests to stop deforestation, and rivers to stop eutrophication. All the bothersome -tions are dealt with.
But instead of a developing, interesting story, Aery: Titans of the Future delivers management plans for every terrain on Earth, and it is boooooring. We recommend you play a drinking game to enliven things: consume one finger every time the narrator says ‘biodiversity’, ‘climate’ or ‘pollution’, and two fingers every time that nature returns to a location that was previously unlivable. It’s all undeniably good-natured and eco-positive, but Lord of the Rings it is not.
Attack Of The Cy-Bores
You can’t convince me that it’s not written by AI. There are too many repeated phrases and ideas. I can’t help but feel that a human would have been ashamed to burble out the same stuff ten times. The voice-acting is certainly artificial, if not AI, with Robovoice set to various white American and British dudes.
While we remember, we should offer a public service announcement: the voices in Aery: Titans of the Future are incredibly quiet, to the point of being unintelligible. The first thing you should do is hop into the game options and move the music to about 50% volume. Invert the Y axis while you’re there. At 50% volume you can just about make out the narration over the music.
While the story doesn’t pan out, it does give the modellers an excuse for chucking giant robots into the usual landscapes. We’ve flown around all of these locations before, but at least they’re being loomed over by Voltron and Optimus Prime. It’s a shame that the robots can only be posed as ‘standing’ and ‘kneeling’, when they could have done something slightly more engaging, but we’ll take it. The regurgitation of levels is less painful with them dominating.
An Aery Sense Of Calm
Otherwise, Aery is very much Aery. There are ten levels here, each with 25 feathers to collect. As is customary for an Aery game from the past two years, the feathers appear one at a time, meaning you are guided from feather 1 to 25, appreciating the scenery as you do so.
It’s all very chill. There is a reason we’ve hate-played almost every Aery, and it’s because there is a feeling of wellness from playing them. There is virtually no challenge, and the gentle ‘ping’ of collecting feather after feather feels rewarding in a world where rewards might not be in free supply.
Aery: Titans of the Future is also gloriously bug-free, which is no mean achievement for this series. There’s little worse than gliding in a meditative state, only for the game to crash or for the parrot to thwack an invisible wall. But it never happened once for us, which puts Aery: Titans of the Future into an Aery minority.
Gliding Into Familiarity
Level-wise, we had zero expectations for Aery: Titans of the Future and it met them. As mentioned, the levels are all borrowed from other Aery games. There is not one single surprise in there. The feather layouts are friendly: only one river level had us guessing where the next feather might be (we bet that confusion was because the lighting was borked).
If we had to glide Aery: Titans of the Future into a hierarchy of Aery games, it would land somewhere in the middle. It has no new levels of note, and the story is a lecture. But robots are quite cool, I suppose, and there are no bugs to disrupt things. As possibly the most prolific series on the Xbox, we should be expecting some improvements, but I guess we’ll have to make do with ‘more of the same’.
Important Links
Nature Meets Machine in Aery – Titans of the Future on Xbox & Nintendo Switch – https://www.thexboxhub.com/nature-meets-machine-in-aery-titans-of-the-future-on-xbox-nintendo-switch/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/aery-titans-of-the-future/9mtlclbvczls
