Airframe Ultra Hits 1.0 Today: Rain World Devs' Hoverbike Combat Racer Arrives on PC

Three feet above the blacktop lies another city, and its legends are made on the street. In Airframe Ultra you race a hand-built Airframe — a hoverbike that floats three feet off the cracked asphalt of Megacity West — against friends and foes. You can thrash rivals with pipes, chains, and plasma torches, or leave them in the dust with boosts and pure nerve. The people racing here are gutterborn: squatters, smugglers, pickpockets, and thieves who see a second-hand Airframe and a heavy bat as their one shot at freedom in a city of billions. Win a circuit, and the chanting starts; keep winning, and the whole city knows your name.

The racing is only half of it. Tracks break up into wide arenas where you are expected to dismount, fight your opponents on foot, and hop back on your bike when the timer is up. Being knocked off your bike does not end the race: you drop to the street, brawl on foot, and can steal an opponent's ride to get back into the competition. PC Gamer's hands-on preview described the on-foot movement as deliberately weighty, and noted that you can also simply explore the maps on foot until the game mercy-teleports you to the next arena. Melee weapons are the heart of the combat — pipes, chains, and plasma torches, per the Steam store description — and the arenas are built for that kind of close, messy fighting.

Airframe Ultra ships with both split-screen and online multiplayer, covering PvP and co-op. Steam's category list confirms shared and split-screen PvP and co-op alongside online PvP and co-op. PC Gamer's hands-on noted there is no ranked play, but described the game as having competitive depth and mechanics to master, with as little as possible between the start menu and the beginning of a race. The same preview described the model in plain terms: no engagement hacking and no battle passes — you pay once. The game also includes character creation, lobbies, matchmaking, progression systems, stores, and unlockables, according to Videocult's launch message.

Videocult is taking this first release deliberately slowly. In the studio's launch message, James and Joar write that the initial 1.0 release focuses on establishing the fundamentals of the game — in a way that breaks in the fewest ways, works as an introduction for new players, and is still fun for veteran beta players. They add that some veteran players may notice certain elements are absent from this release, and that if something is not there, it most likely means the studio is working it into something much bigger and more fleshed out for a future release. That is the studio's own framing: missing pieces are planned expansions, not cut content.

Once the launch bugs are worked out, Videocult plans to keep up roughly the pace of the beta period, rolling out new content every quarter or so until the game fills out everything the studio has in mind for the world. The model is spelled out in the same launch message: every few months a new Expansion arrives. You can buy it for a few bucks if you want to support the studio, and you get it one round earlier. Otherwise you wait — when the next expansion drops, the previous one is rolled into the base game. The studio is explicit about the rest: it will never sell individual digital items, only these expansion packs, one at a time.

Airframe Ultra arrives with a long public testing history behind it: five public beta rounds, starting with the first in January 2025 and ending with Beta 5 wrapping up in September 2026, when the November 5 release date was announced. The free demo on Steam currently functions as a tutorial, so anyone unsure about the controls can try that first. The first thing to watch now is what players make of the 1.0 fundamentals — whether the racing, the arena fights, and the dismount-and-steal loop hold up once the full player base arrives — and how quickly the first quarterly expansion follows. No review aggregate was listed on Steam at the time of writing, so this article makes no claim about review scores.