Stonefly Critic Reviews

Stonefly provides an intriguing premise that lends itself to strange and fantastical gameplay. With an emphasis on aerial piloting, the combat and exploration give ample control while not feeling too fast for the laid-back spirit. While it can be confusing to shuffle through the various materials, power-up formulas can be brute-forced when necessary. Stonefly smartly lets the player control its tempo without lingering for too long, which appeals to all kinds of gamers.

A wonderful coming of age adventure wrapped up in a gameplay loop that never asks much but delivers a gorgeous world to explore. Stonefly isn't going to save the world but it might make your insides a wee bit warmer.

All in all, Stonefly is a fun experience that I’d recommend to anyone who enjoys action-adventure games. I would not, however, recommend it to people who just want to fly around a peaceful environment. While you can spend a lot of time gliding from tree to tree and mushroom to mushroom, there’s always a risk of tripping an encounter that will force you to battle bugs in surprisingly intense combat, and even the exploration sequences can be stressful if you can’t figure out how to advance.

Piloting insect mechs in a beautifully tiny world is a breeze, but heavy resource grinding stops this adventure taking full flight.

In Stonefly we are going on an adventure together with the main character Anika. Anika is very small, which makes the world around her really big. With our mech-bug, we explore the world, which looks like a Pixar movie merged with damped colours. Our biggest criticism are the many bugs – pun very much intended – which gave us a hard time. Many of the gameplay mechanics do not work the way they are supposed to or are just not well enough thought through.

A girl the size of an insect searching for her father’s bug-like mech in a forest where nature meets sci-fi is a great concept that makes Stonefly worth checking out. Too bad the developers’ creativity ends pretty much right there. While the game is a clever mix of genres and offers an original twist on hack’n’slash combat, it does next to nothing to evolve the gameplay or the story, so sooner or later monotony will set in.

With its charming, restful universe, its polished soundtrack and its original approach to mechas who can achieve feats in combat, Stonefly is a fun game, but more calibrated for short sessions than for long-term immersion.

Stonefly had all of the right parts to create an impressive and cool-looking machine, but unlike its heroine, it wasn’t able to fully assemble them properly. The end result is an ambitious journey that has a lot of moments worth checking out, but quickly begins to grow tiresome thanks to overly-repetitive combat, backtracking and grinding. Stonefly is a game with a lot of terrific concepts, but unfortunately undermines them by stretching things out in various ways. Come for the journeys across breathtaking bits of nature, leave when it comes to the combat.

The enemy designs were done with care and detail that stunning a cluster of the creatures and then scooting them off a leaf feels like snatching survival from their jaws. And, as more and more inventions and upgrades unlock, the rig is yours to helm and personalise. On a console, I could certainly see Stonefly being a firm favourite for younger children, especially with the multiple save slots, accessible story, colourblind modes and the assist mode that lets you switch on invincibility. There are a few wrinkles, but it's nothing that a helping of elbow grease won't fix.

Just like the sport of soaring, while everything is great when you’re up in the air, the fun comes to a screeching halt when you’re down on the ground. Cruising around on those rising currents of air is an incredible experience that truly captures the feeling of flight. You can sometimes keep your glider aloft for hours by weaving around the sky in just the right way. When you touch down, there’s no getting yourself back up into the air, though. Flight School Studio was on to something with all the gliding, but didn’t quite stick the landing.

Stonefly is a game full of good ideas and intentions, that unfortunately fails to execute them well.

Stonefly takes flight in a fantastical world where you glide amongst giant trees, branches twisting improbable pirouettes in the sky. But the initial wonder soon sputters under frustrating combat design and runs aground against the mundane grind of its progression structure.

This gorgeous microcosmic mech game just about survives its more frustrating moments.