Air Twister Review - Screenshot 1 of 5
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Back in 2010, the Wii's Sin & Punishment: Star Successor inadvertently informed how, in various ways, the Space Harrier model could be revitalised in a contemporary fashion. In Air Twister, director Yu Suzuki, famous for creating Space Harrier, Out Run, and After Burner (not to mention Shenmue), doesn’t attempt anywhere near as many shakeups. Rather, it stays conventionally close to the original formula and functionality of Space Harrier, while housed in a modern graphical shell.

Originally designed and released on Apple's iOS in 2022, Air Twister lends itself better to an analog stick and monitor than it does a thumb-obscured touchscreen. Playing as Princess Arch, you tour fantastical worlds, on rails, while either tapping for direct, stronger fire, or tracing over enemies for a lock-on reticle and a homing volley. Both shot types share the same button, so you simply have to stop tapping for the homing property to take effect. As pure an arcade experience as one could wish for, you avoid incoming fire, gun down as many enemies as possible, and then take out an end-of-level boss.

Air Twister Review - Screenshot 2 of 5
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

Air Twister's raw components are enjoyable enough. You shoot, dodge, utilise your weaponry with increasing efficiency, and learn to track the point that incoming bullet trajectories start to even out. Bosses tend to be somewhat samey bar the odd foreshadowed attack, and are, for the most part, hampered in invention by both Princess Arch’s limited abilities and a lack of spark.

Air Twister’s innovations are mostly external, having you accrue stars via points. A playthrough comprises 12 stages, although two of these are brief and frankly humdrum bonus rounds. The entire game is approximately 30 minutes, and half of this is enough to amass a decent initial star bounty. Princess Arch earns new clothing, hair colours, and face paint for your customisation particulars, but “Adventure Mode” and its enormous 2D map peppered with unlockable waypoints, is more critical to in-game progress. Each unlock requires a different number of stars, and provides useful things like health increases, weapon upgrades, and items that can be used once in the main game. For example, certain bracelets or tiaras can protect against spiked objects, and others will auto-activate a shield when health is low.

While unlocking everything will take an enormous amount of time, there are certainly benefits to amassing a large collection of offensive and defensive bonuses, and the further along you get, the more advantageous they become. There are also lots of additional modes like “Trial Ticket”, to try-before-you-buy new weaponry, and “Challenge” mode, where you can unlock boss rushes, score attacks, and strange, slightly unnecessary bonus games where you have to tap a grid of numbers against a ticking clock.

Air Twister’s aesthetic is unusual. With little visually to tie one stage to the next, roaming from mushroom-littered plains and futuristic metallic sub-worlds to giant flower gardens, the only common theme is that it’s weird. It boasts a curious effect of making one wonder whether it’s graphically good for a Nintendo Switch, or bad as an upscaled mobile phone game. In handheld mode, it looks far superior owing to the reduced resolution; but on a full-size monitor some of those textures start to look cheap, with the exception of certain stages that work better on a larger display.

Air Twister Review - Screenshot 3 of 5
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)

In an interview with Polygon, Suzuki downplayed the notion that Air Twister is a spiritual sequel to Space Harrier, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense considering the parity of its design. Suzuki cited the likes of Panzer Dragoon and Rez as influences, but where those examples had either cohesive fantasy universes or abstract aural ‘synesthesia’ themes, Air Twister is more a hodgepodge of concepts: crabs and disembodied skeletal dragons here, and giant Grandfather clocks that fire out little timepiece watches there.

One aspect, try as we might, that we just can’t get on with, is the soundtrack. Suzuki hired Dutch composer Valensia to score the game, coming off as an extremely limited and repetitive cover album of Queen’s greatest hits. With full vocal singing, they’re good pieces in their own right, but they don’t seem to fit here, somehow. We’re sure some may love it, but we were soon pining to have the action married to a classic video game score.

Perhaps Air Twister’s biggest shortcoming, is that it attempts little new. Suzuki and his Ys Net team could have drawn inspiration for myriad projects appearing between 1985 and the present day, but chose not to, and what worked well as a mobile phone score attack game desperately demands elaboration on home console. Where Panzer Dragoon had 360-degree rotation, character evolutions, and a landscape that played a large part in the game’s structure, and Rez a musical interplay, Air Twister just has you circling the screen and shooting formations. Protagonist Princess Arch has no true dynamism, either. She could have been made to navigate the landscape around her, possibly evolving Space Harrier’s ground touchdown by having her run vertically along surrounding walls, but instead you can’t connect her feet to a single object.

Air Twister Review - Screenshot 4 of 5
Captured on Nintendo Switch (Docked)

Going back to some of the ideas present in Sin & Punishment 2, Air Twister has no quick dodge, which would have brought something extra, no bombs or charge shot, no power-ups to obtain mid-game, or any other ingenuities in its shooting arrangement. Yes, you can unlock several new weapons which do more to diminish the game’s challenge than augment its feel, but to do so you need to keep running through it to accrue stars for currency. Honestly, there’s not enough here to encourage weeks of dedication unless you’re desperate to claim a high score.

Stage Three features obstacles, having you move left and right around incoming walls. Stage Eight has a cylinder with gaps to move through, and Stage Nine has boulder masses you can blast out lest you crash into them. These ideas are fun, yet agonisingly and bewilderingly fleeting. Shooting down formations is enjoyable enough, but with a lack of urgency about the action, it becomes repetitive and quickly dull. Most bosses require some form of either figure-eighting or skirting the edges of the screen in a rectangular motion, with only a few, like that of Stage Eleven, having a few interesting attacks to evade. The game isn’t particularly challenging until around Stage Five unless you crank the difficulty settings, but even then the trajectory of incoming bullets can be slightly irritating, as they're easily lost against the avant-garde background pastiche.

Conclusion

While we were desperate to love Air Twister, it feels like an undernourished Space Harrier homage full of missed opportunity. For Sega fans who want little more than a Space Harrier experience in new clothes, there’s little to complain about… except maybe that soundtrack. But, while the extra modes expand the game’s longevity and encourage a clear, they feel tacked on. It’s fine to go back to for a quick blast now and then, but sit with it for a day or two and its lack of inspiration starts to gnaw. The arcade hardcore are most likely to reap the greatest rewards, but even then there may be a nagging feeling of uncapitalised promise.

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