Airframe Ultra Review: Rain World's Studio Built a Great Bike and Forgot the Race

Airframe Ultra is the game Videocult made after Rain World because, in their own words, they were tired of making something so depressing. The result is an online combat racer set in Megacity West: you ride a second-hand hoverbike three feet above the asphalt, swing pipes, chains and plasma torches at the other riders, and try to be a winner instead of a corpse. It launched on PC via Steam on 5 November 2026 for 13.49 euros, with a 25 percent introductory discount (10.11 euros) until 19 November. Windows only, and a gamepad is more or less mandatory.

What it gets right

The first ten minutes are electric. The bikes have real physics - they drift, bounce off barriers and wobble when you take a bat to the helmet - and the lo-fi, grainy Akira-meets-Jet-Moto look is the best thing about the game. The soundtrack is loud and dumb in exactly the way the studio promised. Split-screen is supported, so you can bring a friend to the couch, and the character customisation (helmets, jackets, bike parts) gives you something to chase between races.

When a race is close and four riders are trading hits in a tunnel, I understood why the Next Fest demo was talked about so much. There is a genuinely original game here.

Where it falls apart

The problem is everything around that race. Airframe Ultra is online-only. There is no single-player campaign, no bot mode, no time trials - if the lobby is empty, the game is empty. And the lobby is often empty: by the first weekend the player count was hovering in the low hundreds, which in a region like ours, a few time zones off the US peak, means long waits and the same handful of names every night.

Those names are a problem too. Progression snowballs. Veterans with more currency unlock stronger weapons from a shared, random shop, first place earns compounding boosts, and a newcomer can barely finish a lap before the race is decided. The tutorial does not even explain braking properly. Weapons lean towards stunlocks and one-hit kills with little counterplay, several tracks have turns you only read after crashing into them, and I had two crashes to desktop in one evening. Steam user reviews sit at Mixed, 58 percent positive, and I understand both halves.

Who is it for?

If you have three friends who will all buy it this week and play together on the couch or in a private lobby, this is a chaotic, funny night out, and at ten euros it is cheap. If you are buying it to play alone with strangers, you are buying a server queue and a beating.

Verdict

Airframe Ultra is a brilliant bike with no race around it. The physics, the look and the sound are worth the price on their own; the online-only structure, the snowballing economy and the launch-week population are not. I want a patch with bots and a solo mode. Until then I cannot recommend it to most people.

Score: 5/10

Image: PattayaPatrol / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DZ3_1035_Neon-lit_entrance_to_Sky_Music_Restaurant_Pub_at_night_in_Pattaya_with_empty_streets_and_parked_motorcycles.jpg