Aero The Acro-Bat Reviews

Classic gaming enthusiasts will definitely applaud this game seeing the light of day again, but it doesn’t come out of the era unscathed. Shinyuden’s work done to do just that is worth complimenting to some extent, but it doesn’t erase how rough this game can be for some. Aero the Acro-Bat shows flashes of a good platformer, but the foundation laid by its original developers might be too big of an obstacle for some modern gamers. The door price may be low, the rest of the franchise is o...

Our own Levi Buchanan ran a whole series of insightful articles called "What Hath Sonic Wrought?" around a year and a half ago over on IGN's Retro channel, diving into all of the different animals-with-attitude characters that popped up in the wake of Sonic the Hedgehog's early '90s success. Aero the Acrobat was the featured star for Volume 2 of that series, and I'd recommend you clicking over to check out Levi's thoughts on the character and his legacy too before making a final purchasing decision. For me, though, Aero's a good investment. His origins aren't entirely original and he can be a bit hard to handle here in his debut game, but the great variety of level design, different goals in each stage and silly circus scenery make this a VC download that's worth 800 of your Wii Points to experience.

Overall, the game is a slightly above average early 90's platformer, and although the presentation is quite entertaining, the gameplay will prove frustrating to most people. Unless you'd like to play all of Sunsoft's games, there's no real reason to get this, especially when its sequel, which is also coming to Virtual Console very soon, improved on a lot of things and is considered the better game for it.

Little seems to have been lost in the translation from the 1993 original, but then again, it was a mediocre game to begin with.