Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield is an enjoyable runner with an amazing art style and music, it can use a bit of polish. Can be played on the easiest difficulty for the most time while still unlocking the achievements, 3h+ for completion.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: 3h+ (mostly depending on how good you’ll do in Endless mode)
Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: I wrote an achievement guide, which you can find here.
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: No
Grinding Achievements: Not sure.. for me, the endless mode felt like grinding
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: Yes, most of the game you can play on easy but the bonus level and endless mode can’t be played in this mode
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
This is a runner with an amazing art style and nice music. You have to react to upcoming objectives with 1 of 4 button presses. A nice thing is that you have a lot of variety in which buttons to use. For example, I played this with a controller and there I could use the D-pad or the ABXY buttons (I believe even the left thumbstick worked but that sounds like a bad idea in this game). When you failed to react with the right button or not within the time limit you would reset to the last checkpoint in the main game, or in the endless mode, you will restart from the beginning. The obstacles will have a color code to know which button to press and the tutorial does a good job explaining this. There are 3 difficulty options.. on the easiest difficulty the time will slow down when you get close to an obstacle so you have time to recognize there is one and which button to press. And the higher difficulties have less slowdown time or not at all.
Most of the achievements you’ll unlock while playing the story. For some, you might have to watch a cutscene that you can easily miss if you’re like me and automatically press a button to try and skip the game logo. That logo will pop up a lot, but pressing a button doesn’t speed it up but already works in the background on what is loading. So you might have already passed the main menu at the start of the game if you pressed a button when seeing the game logo, or for this achievement, you might have skipped a cutscene while not knowing. Gladly you can replay levels so none of the achievements are missable, but I wish that button presses wouldn’t work on content loading in the background that you can’t see.
Most of the achievements are very easy, the hardest ones are to complete a bonus level for the last outfit and for playing 30 minutes endless mode to hear all the soundtracks. For the bonus level, you can repeat it by going back to the menu and going to level selection, and restarting it through there. I hope that the developer will change this and make the “not yield” option work so that it would restart the level, as this level can be really challenging and after failing have to go back into the main menu for like 20 seconds to restart makes it annoying. The other hard achievement for playing 30 minutes in endless mode is the hardest because you can\t make any mistake for those 30 minutes or otherwise you have to start all over… This reminded me of an achievement in a Guitar Hero/Band Hero game where you had to play the whole set without pausing.. this was a lot shorter but here no mistake was allowed and in that mode, you can make a few mistakes. Both took me the same amount of time since I don’t have steel nerves… every time I passed the 25 minutes in this endless run I got nervous and made stupid mistakes. If you have better control over your nerves, this achievement isn’t too bad and you will be able to complete the game in under 3h.
I did enjoy Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield but it can use a little bit more polish. Like not progressing the game in the background when the game shows the game logo when the player pushed buttons to try and speed up the game, and being able to easily restart a bonus level without going through the game menu.
If you enjoy runners and are up for an endless run of 30 minutes without mistake, you should give Aerial Knights a try!
Developer:
Aerial_Knight
This review for Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield was written on 8 March 2022, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 28 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.