Aloft is developed by Astrolabe Interactive and published by Funcom, Aloft is a co-op survival sandbox game that puts the player into a world of floating islands. You explore the floating isles by using one of them as your own skyship. After turning a small island into a ship, you can build a base where you grow crops and keep and raise four kinds of animals (alpacas, sheep, goats, and pheasants). As you explore, you must fight through the corruption that has taken hold on some islands and work to restore the environment once it has been defeated.
While Aloft offers players a large and expansive world to explore, it’s best experienced with someone else. Boasting a 1-8 person co-op, the core sailing mechanic doesn’t necessitate playing with others but it greatly improved. With animal husbandry, an extremely vast world to explore, and a creative building system, there is no shortage of things to do. But having a lot to do doesn’t make something perfect.
Aloft co-op is fun, but it also features frustration points that keep the experience from becoming a must-play to add to your multiplayer game rotation. Ultimately, though, the things that keep it from hitting “excellent” aren’t that many.
More Variety, Less Vastness
There is no denying that Alotf is big. It is expansive and begs you to explore without any guidance, save a furnace that directs you to points of interest. You are a small skyship in a vast world, but the vastness can become problematic when variety doesn’t match it.
There are three biomes (that feel more like palette swaps for season), four animal types (alpaca, pheasants, goats, and sheep), and three enemy types (that I don’t actually know the names of but are effectively mushroom creatures growing from corruption). This means that all ways you interact with the islands beyond resource farming are limited to small categories. After you clear three or four sections of the map table, visiting new islands becomes repetitive instead of dynamic exploration.
Yes, Aloft offers a lot to do, but when the encounters become homogeneous, it offers little to hold onto. This isn’t to say what is there isn’t intricate. Some islands offer caves and waterfalls, and others have whole cathedral-like ships built into the side of them. There are beautiful moments of care and creativity, but with such a wide world to explore, those unique moments begin to get lost in the shuffle.
Shared Servers Maybe? Please?
When it came to playing Aloft, I took over building while my partner took over flying the island ship and exploring the islands. This meant that after the first three sections of the game, I mostly just hung back on the island, building it up unless a new island offered an Anchor or Learning Stone to collect. For my partner, the most he did was build necessities like the compost bin, stockpiles, and other resource stations.
We split the work this way because the world we were playing in was mine. The style of co-op that Aloft uses relies on the local saves of the person running the host world. If I was logged in, my partner could join me and edit the island ship and steer it as well, but only if I granted him permission every time we logged on. However, if my game crashed or I wasn’t online, my partner couldn’t edit my island. And let’s be honest: if you lose access to a building on one island when someone else isn’t there, why bother building it in the first place?
I understand the complexities of managing and hosting services, especially as an independent developer. However, it does leave a bit to be desired when fully immersing yourself in a world that isn’t your own. Even with the ability to spawn your Home Island into another user’s world, your play session ends when the host leaves the world. And if you’re okay with leaving your playtime with a friend just in their hosted world, well, you can’t claim a Home Island in that instance. When it comes to Aloft’s co-op play, it is a great time, but it also has more than a few rough edges that run against what you would think would facilitate investment in playing cooperatively.
The bright side to all of this is that your character, regardless of the world you learn crafting in or gather materials in, you keep that progression. You can learn in one world and play in another, and that rocks. But we all know that in survival and sandbox games, what you make is just as important as any skill or item you attach to your character. Being able to walk away from a co-op game feeling that the time you spent playing wasn’t wasted is how you separate a truly excellent experience from one that’s just fine.
Building replayability for a game that thrives on playing with others requires investment from everyone involved, and you lose that with locally hosted instances. From my own personal experience for Aloft, I stopped playing for a couple of days, and so did my partner. It wasn’t because he wanted to stop playing, in fact, he kept asking me to hop on. But life happens, and instead, Aloft remained untouched. Our animals weren’t petted, we didn’t expand the base, and we didn’t find new lands because we both had to be on to do so. The local hosting serves the single-player experience more than the co-op one.
Get the Friend’s List Sorted
For all of my time with my time with Aloft, the friend list didn’t function. A known issue, it’s probably one of the most frustrating hiccups to have in a game that has you play in worlds hosted by others. Right now, every time you join a game, the host will have to give players “Trusted” status in order to make any changes to their home island and to steer the ship. It can get annoying quickly as you hop off and hop back on to play again. And while a Friend’s List at least makes it easy to invite people directly instead of just using a code, it allows players to set friends as Trusted indefinitely.
It’s probably the smallest change I’ve mentioned that has more to do with convenience than gameplay, but it’s one that allows players to get online faster and start playing immediately without having to do to the “oh wait, you have to give me Trusted” back and forth after they’ve already glided away or started working on a project around the skyship base.
None of this is to say that Aloft isn’t a great time. For those looking to get into survival games without the stress of monitoring vitals or fearing a base being destroyed by people you don’t know on a server. It’s cozy, it’s fun, but it can adjust to become a must-play experience instead of a fleeting weekend.