There are over a dozen Aery games on Xbox. They’re mindless flight titles focused on recycling music as you spend an hour of your life getting 1000 achievement points. Is Aery Calm Mind 3 different? Do you finally have more to the game, for an hour, while earning your achievements? Read on and find out in this incredibly short review.
Broken Mind
No, you do not do anything besides fly around and collect acorn-looking objects in the sky. You are a parrot and you hover around using the left stick. A speeds you up, B slows you down, and each bumper can spin you in a direction. Momentum is a constant, and you will forever be hurtling forward like a Banshee in Halo. Go up or down enough and you’ll perform a terrible feeling loop d’ loop. That is all there is to the Aery series, and this game doesn’t even have the hilariously odd text that would pop up in the previous Aery game that I reviewed.
Graphically the game looks a smidge better than I remember, mostly due to performance feeling far closer to a lock sixty frames per second than in the past. Featuring a low polygon look you will be transported around thirteen stages, though the achievements claim there are 14. The music ends, literally, it keeps going from the main menu into each level and plays on a ridiculously short loop. You can beat the entire game in just around an hour, and you will hear the same songs 5 or 6 times over and over again as you do it.
The level design is as mind-numbing as always, with two styles of stages. A few are the “the next acorn wing thing will show up when you get the previous”, and it’s a short linear experience. The more abundant, and far worse level type, have you searching out a set number of the items in the envFLYronment (sorry), and if you miss one in the larger maps it is a tedious affair to try and find the or two you need to finish things off.
Instead of clearing my mind, the game made me want to fall asleep, forever. In the end, people come to this series for a quick and easy 1000 gamerscore. Sadly, “clear level 14” appears to be broken. I completed all thirteen main levels and nothing changed. I saw no way to get to level 14, and I was stuck at a 13/14 achievement completed list. I don’t give a hoot about gamerscore though so I was happy to leave it. Some google/bing’ing on the interwebs and I saw that yes this is a known issue affecting both the Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game.
Wrapping Things Up
Until they fix the level 14 achievement, don’t buy this one for a quick 1000 achievement score fix, which is what this series is about. Keep an eye on the user reviews and once it’s fixed this is another mind-numbingly boring $10 Aery game. You know what you’re getting, and it isn’t very good, but at least it’s short.
Aery - Calm Mind 3
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Flying Almost Feels Ok
- Eventually an easy 1000 gamerscore
CONS
- Final achievement is broken
- Music repeats too often
- Hunt missions are not fun
- Occasionally headache inducing graphics
