Aero The Acro-Bat 2 – PS5 Review

We have a confession. Until we started playing Aero The Acro-Bat 2, we’d not twigged the pun in the title. You see he’s a bat and an acrobat. Never mind the first game came out more than thirty years ago. The gag entirely passed us by.

In the case of Aero The Acro-Bat 2; a direct sequel to 1993’s first game; it was originally released in April 1994 on Megadrive and latterly the same November on the Super NES, originally developed by Texan codeshop Iguana Entertainment and published by Sunsoft.

This is developed by Shinyuden and published by Ratalaika, who have pivoted from their early itch.io ports on Vita and PS4 to rather more polished fare such as Dicey Dungeons and this. The original producer David Siller managed to retain/regain the rights, probably due to Acclaim who bought out Iguana becoming themselves defunct, and its him that Aero The Acro-Bat 2 is licenced from.

For the emulation purists, you can go with either the Japanese or American ROM to play on. The emulation appears to be of the Super Nintendo version rather than the Megadrive, at least going by the manual in the excellent frontend. The frontend has the manual, sprite sheets and a jukebox for the game music to name a few of the extras.

For those of you wanting to ironman Aero The Acro-Bat 2 by playing it in one sitting across the eight distinct stages with three levels in each, you can play without resorting to the save states that let you carry on where you left off. Once you die, you use a continue. We did this for a while, until we ran out of continues and our playthrough is now reliant on liberal save scumming and rewinding to get past trickier areas.

If you’re really wanting to negate any challenge though, you can enable an abundance of cheats from infinite lives through to invincibility. We’ve reached a middle ground we guess. We’re not sure if they affect trophy unlocks, we’d suspect they don’t as rewinding makes no difference.

Mechanically, this is still very much a thirty-year-old game, though we confess we always preferred the likes of Plok! and Nintendo’s first party efforts. Though we’re not likely to ever see Yoshi’s Island or Super Mario Allstars ever show up on Sony consoles unless Nintendo abandon hardware altogether.

Your prime method of attack is the drill attack, either by jumping up or down then attacking diagonally or via a vertical attack. We found we defaulted to the vertical option in the early stages before the diagonal attack became our bread and butter. You can also find magic stars that you can use as a projectile attack, but you’d do well to not rely on this.

As you go, you’ll also find food, extra A’s which increase your health to a maximum of five hits and most usefully, extra lives by way of an Aero symbol. There’s other powerups you can find too, such as one for flying to find obscure treasures, though unless you’re wanting to 100% the levels for completions sake, there’s no real need to.

You can also find A, E, R & O’s in each level, which unlock a chance to get an extra life by way of a three cups game against the main villain of the game. It strikes us as an attempt to show off parts of the engine if we’re honest, but an extra life isn’t to be sniffed at.

At the end of the day, Aero The Acro-Bat 2 is either going to be a game you love or have  no particularly strong feelings about. We don’t mind it, but neither are we feeling any particular pangs of nostalgia for it either. It’s a well implanted enough platformer of the time at least. The emulation is well done and the trophies, while a rinse in the same way early Ratalaika games were, at least encourage you to play the game in its entirety as opposed to giving you a platinum with less than half the game played.

In conclusion, Aero The Acro-Bat 2 is a good port of a classic 16-bit platform game with tons of extras for fans of the game. Even for those of us who didn’t play it the first time around will be fairly well catered for, though we’ll be happy to never have to play those damn snowboard levels again.