As a musician from the time I was in elementary school through college, I’ll admit that whenever there are games that in some way feature band instruments I tend to get a little excited. Weirdly enough, as a side note, one of my favorite band gaming moments was actually from the OG Postal, where when you attacked a marching band in the parade its members came after you with their instruments flailing (damn straight!). Anyway, though we’ve some titles in that vein like the excellent Symphonia, they tend to be few and far between. So you can imagine how my eyes lit up when the pitch for Aerea got to my inbox. A multiplayer action RPG featuring musicians going into battle? I’m in!

Unfortunately, despite my initial enthusiasm, it didn’t take long for the chill of cold reality to set in. The sad thing is, the concept and even some of the elements of play have some appeal, and I’m assuming the developers were shooting for a feel similar to the classic Gauntlet. The issue is that decades after that classic arcade series showed the way, this has managed to feel a few steps behind. Even with the benefit of said time, infinitely more powerful hardware, and plenty of modern wisdom on how to make rock-solid cooperative action titles, it just doesn’t come together very well.

In terms of the issues, for the most part it feels like you could point to almost any aspect of play and find it to be middling at best. The stages are quite meandering in nature, and feel like they’re designed to simply slow you down rather than present a real challenge. Random mines, which are sometimes obscured by objects in the foreground, seem to have no purpose other than being one of the few things in the game that will kill you, only in the most painfully cheap way possible. The controls with regards to your combat abilities are quite limited, quite stiff, and outright lacking when compared to better-made competitors. The thing is, perhaps you could overlook many of these problems if the gameplay was a cracking good time, but sadly it generally falls flat very quickly. I do wish it managed to be a more harmonious success on multiple fronts, but sadly the dissonance of its flaws make it hard to enjoy.