Posted on: January 8, 2026
d50l3m
Verified ownerGames: 166 Reviews: 3
Fun ideas, well-executed
In Aaero 2 you control a flying ship that moves within a perfect circle in the center of the screen. Along the edge of this circle are glowing lines which you need to fly through in order for the music to fully play (with vocals or another track being activated as you do). Sometimes enemy ships will appear and you need to dispose of them "to the beat" to get the max number of points while dodging their fire. (You do this by locking on to them, and then letting go of the trigger when the metronome at the top left of the screen is centered.) Both gameplay elements are mildly challenging on their own. but when the game throws both of them at you at the same time.. things can become rather interesting (and difficult)! There's a little over 20 songs, each with its own unique stage. A couple of the stages involve boss battles - where there is one HUGE enemy that takes a LOT of perfectly timed, rapid hits to go down. The songs vary in genre but most of them incorporate EDM in some way (which is definitely fine by me!). The bonus tracks stand out more and are more unique (rock and 80's inspired synth/vaporwave?). If you like Monstercat, you'll be fine. The only downside of the game is probably the lack of any graphical options. There's no real way to improve performance unless you lower your resolution. Not even a Vsync or frame limit option. I played this on a Steam Deck (through the Heroic launcher) and the game completely ignores the screen refresh-rate limit - running anywhere between 30 (on stages with water) and 100 frames per second depending on the level of chaos. (I did manage to eventually find a way to limit it with the DXVK_FRAME_RATE environment variable under the "Advanced" Heroic settings for the game, choosing a value of 30 to save on battery... but that's an awfully convoluted workaround for what I feel should be an in-game setting.) As for the DLCs, I was a bit confused about whether or not they unlocked more levels in the game, but it seems like they don't. They are music files only. Still really nice to have (though, for some reason, the Arcade Paradise mp3s play at a much lower volume than any of the other songs). Ultimately, I had a lot of fun playing through the game. There's also some incentive to continue playing after the end to achieve higher scores thanks to leaderboards and profile stylings - with a few developer scores to aim for. Worth a playthrough.
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