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Title: Aero The Acro-Bat
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $5.99
Release Date: 08/02/2024

Story

In the first of four Aero the Acrobat reissues, this debut title has you controlling Aero, taking back a circus from an evil industrial villain, Edgar Ektor! Not much of a plot in-game, but the scanned manual provides all that you need here.

Presentation

Another Ratalaika reissue, in the same old wrapper. That won’t be the case for much longer, though. Here we have a nice gallery consisting of tons of concept art, box scans, and even cool bonuses like the pitch document for the game! Surprisingly robust and appreciated.

Otherwise, same usual CRT/display options apply with all looking as it should. This is the SNES version of the game, and it emulates well here with accurate audio. The game itself looks pretty solid too, though being that only the SNES version is included, that does mean we lack the Genesis version’s extra screen space, which would make the visibility better. Still, the audio is vastly superior here, and the in-game BGM isn’t all that special to begin with. Some catchy tunes and that’s about it.

Gameplay

Part of this reissue adds a few new tweaks such as the returning rewind/fast forward and cheats to toggle; mainly to make the game a lot easier and give you infinite ammo/health/lives if you need it, and for those overseas, you can now play a fully Japanese translated Aero the Acro-Bat! I’m kinda surprised it never came out over there back in the day, but hey, Ratalaika pulled it off and it feels just like a natural SFC release would have.

In Aero, you take control of the title character as he sets out across multiple worlds to clear them of baddies and complete various objectives! Whether that’s diving through rings, getting star blocks, defeating enemies or finding a key, there’s a lot of variety here, mainly to stop you from just rushing to the end of a level and beating it.

Aero has a jump attack, where he spins into enemies, and this does a decent job at taking out most weak foes, with only the bulkier ones really needing more hits, and they can bounce you away if you try to attack them. Thankfully, stars are scattered throughout the stage, which act as a projectile attack Aero can use to keep a safer distance from foes. Still, with how relentless some of these foes can get, there are times where the enemies can get really obnoxious.

With that said, you’ll more likely die from things that aren’t enemy contact. Aero can die instantly to some hazards such as spikes, and that’ll kill him regardless of his health amount. Thankfully checkpoints are frequent, and the rewind option is there, but otherwise this game can be a little frustrating, even if it does start out rather gentle before later worlds ramp up the hazards and difficulty of the bosses.

Unfortunately, the game’s biggest sin comes from how levels are cleared, with the mission system. Some of these missions are pretty straightforward and lead to fun levels, while others amount to an annoying scavenger hunt making you go all over the place in case you forgot a block or ring somewhere and need to backtrack a looooooong ways to find that missing piece, then go alllll the way back to the exit to end the stage. It really feels like a thing they added back in the 90s to artificially pad out the game, and that’s the most annoying aspect of Aero. The play control is solid, some aspects of the gameplay are decent, and some levels are a lot of fun, but a bunch of these mission objectives are pretty tedious and dull, to the point you might just lose interest from going around finding that final damn star block.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Ratalaika ported Aero 1 the best way they could have, and outside of the lack of the Genesis version, I can’t really think of much they could have done to improve this package. You get a well emulated version of Aero with the usual QOL features, and it plays as good as it can. The problem is well, you’re playing Aero The Acro-Bat.

Some stages in this game are pretty darn fun, but a lot of them are incredibly tedious due to the dull tasks the game throws at you, and while the Bosses are the highlight here, the overall experience is still rather dull, even with all the QOL thrown in to make it less frustrating. So really you just have a great port of a very medicore game brought down a lot by a bad mission system, but luckily the sequels are far better.

I give Aero the Acro-Bat a 6 out of 10.