What is Airframe Ultra

CHECKED 2026-11-07 · Basics

Airframe Ultra is a fast-paced battle-racer from Videocult, published by Akupara Games, released on Windows on 5 November 2026 for $12.99 (launch price $9.74 for 14 days). Steam files it under Action, Indie and Racing; the game's own description calls it an "online, multiplayer combat racing game" and the store tags read Combat Racing, Racing, PvP, Retro, Action and Split Screen.

The short version: you are nobody in a city of billions, you buy a second-hand hover-bike called an Airframe, and you race and fight your way up the Ultra Circuit until people know your name.

Where it sits next to Rain World

Videocult's previous game was a 2D platformer about a slugcat in a dying ecosystem. This is a 3D multiplayer racer with lobbies, matchmaking, progression, a shop and unlockables — the studio's own words in the 3 November announcement are that the jump is "quite a HUGE jump for us". That context matters when you read complaints about missing features: the team shipped the fundamentals first, on purpose, and says so in public.

The loop, in the order you actually play it

1. Load into a circuit. The lobby and matchmaking put you into a session with other racers.
2. Sprint. The pack leaves the line and the track forks. You hold a line, boost, and pick up money as you go. Other racers can and will hit you on the way.
3. Arena. The track ends and the fighting starts. Cash becomes weapons; you can fight from the bike or off it.
4. Next round. The circuit continues, and points bank across the whole event rather than resetting per finish.
5. Garage. Between sessions you spend winnings on parts, cosmetics and a new frame.

The five design pillars the team published on 31 October describe this loop better than any summary: Couch Co-op Chaos, Build Your Cred, Mastery Is Discovery, Fight for Bragging Rights, and Fast and Deadly. That last one is the important one — "A good racer should be able to win games. A good killer should be able to win games. You need to do both to be the best."

What you get on day one

Ten official screenshots and four trailers is the marketing layer. The build itself is smaller than the marketing suggests, and the developers say so: 1.0 "focuses on establishing the fundamentals of the game in a way that (we hope) will break in the fewest amount of ways". Concretely, at launch you get online PvP, local split-screen PvP and co-op, a character creator with helmets and clothing, a frame builder, a shop, and 21 achievements.

You do not get a single-player campaign, and Steam's category list has no Single-player row. That is the single most argued-about thing on the Steam hub this week; the no single-player page separates what the store says from what players are asking for.

The city

Megacity West is a coast-spanning conurbation built during a population boom that never filled it. The store description runs the districts off like a roll call: the rusting shipyards of Slabtown, the sleek scrapers in Vantac, the dune dens of the Ysidro edgelands, the hulking arcologies of the Texicali ZEGO zone. Two maps, Quarry and Estate, are abandoned in the fiction — the developers explain why in the 31 October devlog, and the lore page quotes it.

Price and platform, plainly

Regional pricing is not a straight currency conversion. The publisher says in the October devlog that it worked with a third party to price overseas markets more fairly than Steam's default conversion, so your local price may not match $12.99 times an exchange rate.