Airlock Arena: Profit or Perish Review

Airlock Arena: Profit or Perish is a top-down co-op roguelike shooter developed and published by Mason Norvell and John Norvell of Frostbane Studios. In this game, you will play as a space smuggler who has everything to lose or gain, trying to make their mark on the galaxy and become a mega-rich legend. You (and up to three other friends) will be taking contracts to steal cargo, rescue people, and transport all your spoils to be sold. However, don’t expect the life of a smuggler to be an easy one as your reputation grows and you get the attention of the authorities.

Capitalisim at its finest.

You have quite a few tools to help you in your dubious space escapades, which are all explained in a pretty decent tutorial. You can grapple to grab cargo from a distance or pull yourself towards something, boost for a faster walking speed and to move around in space, shoot to kill enemies and destroy walls, slash with a laser blade to kill without collateral and block lasers, and repair to fix anything you break. You will need to take advantage of all of these in order to survive the harsh trials you’ll encounter and make it out with a decent profit. That being said, the controls can feel sluggish at times, which is bad for a game like Airlock Arena, which requires fast movements and quick reactions. Also, a controller is a must for this game.

Make it out alive and you'll live like royalty.

But enough of that, let’s take a contract. A contract is a procedurally generated mission with objectives tasking you with grabbing certain types of cargo, either found drifting through the infinite blackness or on other ships. You’re given three missions to choose from, each with different parameters and difficulty. For every contract completed, your payout increases but so does your notoriety. You’ll be forced to take on more difficult missions until you all die or retire. The objectives are technically optional, even the main one, but you get a bigger payout if you deliver the specified cargo along with anything you can grab in space. Even corpses and body parts fetch a decent payday. After all, “Survival is optional, profit is mandatory”.

This is the last time you'll see a ship this clean.

For every contract, you’ll be given… well, a giant metal coffin that barely qualifies as a spaceship (such as only coming with one toilet). Seriously, they malfunction all the time, even with the most reliable ship available to use. Its layouts are randomised per contract, and it will break on you thanks to everything going on: fire, radiation, drones, bombs, alien bugs, asteroids, debris, and the cold vacuum of space will be a cause of at least one death. Heck, destroy part of the hull with your gun, and you'll cause all the air to be sucked out in the room… and maybe you with it. Useful for putting out fires, but also with a real risk of being left behind by your own spaceship.

And that’s just par for the course for a contract. If you take too long, the federation will arrive to destroy all your hard work. They’ll laser and bomb your ship, your cargo, you, and your teammates. You will respawn if killed, but they are limited and carry over from contract to contract. You can gain more by… well, feeding any corpses (including your own) into the bioprocessor. Bodies can be a real hassle to drag over depending on the layout of the ship, especially when the doorways are so narrow that you can barely fit through and you’re being shot at by everything and their grandmother. If you manage to make it to the end, your contract will be considered complete; all your loot sold is tallied then deducted to repair the ship if there is any. If things go badly enough, you might come off the job with debt! This is all in order to retire as a legend with a hefty bank account, getting to the top of the leaderboard at the end. However, if you run out of respawns before you choose to retire, the money earned will be rendered void.

HOLY CRAP WHAT IS HAPPENING

Essentially, your gameplay loop is a series of rapidly deteriorating situations where you must deal with several things at once while under pressure, and at the end of the day, you’ll be deciding whether or not to keep going or to quit while you’re ahead. Hey, a bad score is better than no score at all, but as I played, I could feel my greed telling me to push harder and get one more contract in. Profit or perish. It’s actually pretty fun running around while attempting to make the most of the many, many bad situations you'll find yourself in, even if you decide to fly solo (which is a mistake). I also quite liked Arina Arlock, the alien lady who would praise or admonish you after completing your contract, although I predict it can get annoying eventually with enough repetition. It is a roguelike, after all, and failure is just part of the fun.

Spawn camping is a strategy.

I very highly encourage playing in co-op, though. It’s balanced for more than one player doing jobs, and it just makes putting out multiple fires at once easier. And I mean that quite literally, given the fact that some ships I’ve used have been engulfed in flames. If you’re tired of your friends screwing up though, there is a deathmatch mode to let off some steam and use the game’s mechanics to murder your buddies. However, Airlock Arena needs Steam's Remote Play for online multiplayer. While that does mean you only need one copy to play the game with your mates, it also means it's just couch co-op with extra steps, and I prefer more user-friendly methods built into the game.

Now, onto some technical aspects. The game runs fine, with no notable frame drops despite all the chaos that tends to happen. For some reason, though, my screens blackout for a good few seconds whenever I exit the game, which gives me a mini-heart attack every time it happens.

Quitting while you're ahead is an optioon.

Overall, Airlock Arena is a fun game and it can make for some frantic, chaotic moments that will either end in spectacular wins or hilarious failures. However, it’s more balanced for multiplayer, and going out on your own feels like hell. I hope you have friends.