Air Hares is a new arcade shooter out on Steam on January 14, 2026, which we first reported on back in December 2025. It has been developed by husband and wife duo Tim and Megan Bungeroth under their Wondoro LLC studio and published by indie.io. We’ve been playing through the first couple of hours of Air Hares to bring you our thoughts on this cutesy blaster. While at first glance, this appears to be just another arcade shooter, some deeper mechanics make this one stand out from the crowd. Within the game, you not only have to fend off advancing enemies, but you also need to plant enough crops to complete each level.
It sounds easy, but when you consider the bombardment of pesky eagles, the enemies in the game, and having to constantly aim your seeds and then water them, the game starts to become quite complex. If you don’t sow enough seeds and water them to produce carrots, you’ll fail the mission and have to restart. It takes some getting used to, especially if you were expecting a straight arcade blaster. After a few goes at the first level, we eventually wrapped our heads around the growing carrots mechanic. You move your plane left to right and wait for a target to appear, then in quick succession shoot a seed quickly followed by the water blast to grow the carrot.
Every level in Air Hares, except the boss battles, which appear every few rounds, requires you to plant enough carrots to win. At first, we found this tough going, but once it started to click, we soon started filling the fields with carrots and eventually got a first 100% success rate. This felt like an accomplishment, especially as you need to juggle the crop growing with fending off the birds that constantly appear. The premise in Air Hares is certainly different for an arcade-style game, and hats off to the developers for trying something unique.
After we got into the flow of the gameplay loop, we started whizzing through levels at a colossal rate with very few retries required. Most of this is down to the great ability to loop the plane back a few moments that allows you to retry sowing crops that you may have missed initially. Once in this groove, the game became very enjoyable, and our initial frustrations with learning the mechanics were long gone. We also had a few boss fights and felt these weren’t as strong as the main levels. The boss’s attack patterns were fairly basic and didn’t take many hits.
Air Hares features some cuddly characters that put this shooter more in the cute em-up genre than pure arcade blaster. This is compounded by the fact that you don’t actually ever kill any of the enemies, more swat them away so they flee. This certainly keeps the overall proceedings kid-friendly, which we could see was very intentional, given that a comic book featuring the game’s characters is also being launched. The brilliant pixel art is also in line with this, as is the music. We could definitely see the Air Hares crew in an ’80s kids TV show.
Once you finish the story mode, there is an arcade mode to blast through. Beyond that, the only reason to revisit is to attempt getting 100% on every level, which would take some time. I don’t feel pure arcade shooter fans will appreciate the growing crops mechanic, but those who enjoy something a bit different and are looking for a kid-friendly title with fun characters should check Air Hares out. It’s a well-made game that dares to try something new and pulls it off with aplomb.
