Aero the Acro-bat is a three ring circus of bullshit with all the show-stopping trademarks of a failed mascot platformer: slippery momentum, uneven enemy hitboxes, a character that outruns the camera at full speed and runs into enemies you never saw coming, and an endless supply of one-hit-kill traps hidden off-screen. You will launch yourself out of a cannon and into a spike trap you had no way of knowing about dozens of times. You will have no idea how many hits some enemies take, or if they're even taking damage at all. And you will restart the multiple autoscroller sections again and again and again.

There are a few high points in the game, though. For one, the music is fantastic throughout. Nearly every level has a completely unique track, and they all have great energy and arrangement. Secondly, the game puts extra lives absolutely everywhere, almost as if they knew the general gameplay was unfair. Lastly, the final boss fight is genuinely exciting, with timed platforming and multiple phases that are checkpointed fairly. It does last a bit too long, but it's a high point to end an otherwise extremely middling experience.

Aero wants to be the next big mascot, but he's just another victim of the 90s "rad" era, with his sunglasses and moonwalking not being nearly enough to distract from a game that's just not all that fun to play. When it's not being outright unfair, it's just downright "okay." This star of the big top is a big flop.

I love mascot platformers, I really do, but Aero the Acro-Bat is not a good one, even when it has all the right elements.

Aero is a circus bat, who's only attack is a divekick basically downwards or upwards. This means, that you need to dispatch enemies with this attack and also use it for platforming.

The problem here, at least for me, is that the level design is not the best, and sometimes really confusing (looking at you pillars).

Also, the movement is really floaty, Aero is very hard to properly control, but the animations and the overall look of the game is pretty decent.

There are also objectives for levels, so the game is at least tries to be fresh.

There is also a sequal and a spin-off so I will definetly checking out those too.

Every unkind thing I said about TaleSpin is applicable here, only you should consider my vitriol doubled for this piece of crap. Aero the Acro-Bat is truly undeserving of even a modicum of recognition, and if I could give it zero stars I would.

Aero is a slippery unwieldy mascot platformer borne from a desperate attempt to emulate the success of Sonic and Mario. That is to say, it's just one in a slew of mediocre-to-bad platformers that the generation was rotten with. There is, however, nothing particularly remarkable about it as a game to earn it any sort of staying power the way something like Awesome Possum or Bubsy has, though I do recall it being heavily marketed in gaming magazines at the time. Perhaps that's why there's still people today who remember Aero the Acro-Bat. It's certainly why I sat down to play it, my memory of the game itself (which I rented a few times back in the day) being far more vague than those of the adverts, which featured Aero bursting through the pages, or chomping down on large letters spelling out BITE ME.

It wasn't worth the effort, and I should have known better. Some of the worst games of the 16-bit era had good spreads, after all. Aero's levels are massive and every inch of them is agonizing. The controls are horrible, and missing a jump and losing progress as a result is rage inducing. It doesn't help that your senses are assaulted with one of the most screeching, grating, eardrum bursting soundtracks ever to "grace" the Genesis' sound chip. Imagine blasting off in a canon up to some tight ropes and needing to make a very careful jump while "EEEEEEEEEEE DUHN DUHN DUN DUN DUN DUN DUHN" blasts through your speakers. They found a way to package misery in a clam shell case and sell it to children, and something about that just seems like it should be illegal to me, I don't know!

EGM awarded Aero the Acro-Bat the title of 1993's Best New Character. The press is the enemy of the people.

It sounds like a genius idea to make a circus-themed platformer, but calling Aero the Acro-Bat a good game requires some serious mental gymnastics. Aero's diagonal jump attack sucks, you barely ever get any stars to throw at enemies, and the levels branch out in every direction with a different objective every time. Again, it SOUNDS like a good idea to have big branching circus levels you have to bounce around, but in practice it's boring as shit, just like Aero as a mascot. At least the graphics and music have some personality and there was some attempt to do something fun with the circus theme, like having trampolines, unicycles, and rings to jump through.