Sometimes games are more than the sum of their parts. This is the case with The Falconeer. To describe it is to simply say: You climb on a semi-responsive giant bird and fly around shooting down other people on giant birds and sometimes shoot down other things. While you are doing this, sometimes other things happen like the story advances. It’s an open world game in a world surprisingly devoid of life. But…
The Falconeer
Developer: Tomas Sala
Price: $30
Platform: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X, Series S
MonsterVine was supplied with Steam code for review
Those of you of a certain age (old) may remember when games were a little more…scattershot. A little harder to find. You’d download a demo but never buy the real game. You’d rent a game from the video store (I am dating myself tremendously, yes), find it came with no manual, spend a weekend blundering around figuring it out, then never find it again. And that is the vibe The Falconeer nails: Some lost treasure of the Super Nintendo era that you can’t quite figure out, but something you’ve always remembered.
It’s the art–interesting, engaging, but not over the top–and the world itself. It’s not an open world game with a ton of NPCs with exclamation points over your head demanding your attention. Mostly, you’re alone or with a wingman, soaring through clouds or diving down to skim the ocean and watch fish jump. Storm systems come and go. Air currents wisk you through the sky. You recharge your weapons by flying through lightning storms which…sure, game, we’ll go with that. The towns are little islands and stopover points in between but, mainly, you interact with people through dialogue options and menu screens.
The big draw is the aerial combat, which is supposed to feel like Crimson Skies but with giant birds. That’s about right and it gets most of the way there. I kept hoping there’d be a little more to it, but it leans on the arcade-y side. It’s hard as hell, though, you really have to work to understand the system and to get good at it. And it’s not quite as good as it demands you to be. You’ll get shot down plenty and never quite figure out why.
But that world and that flying, though. The bird by and large knows how to fly, so you just sort of gently steer, swooping into dives to gain momentum, turning into clouds, tilting into combat then roaring down to break contact. You can get into the rhythm of it and it’s really absorbing, aided by the excellent but very ambient music, the surprisingly good voice acting for an indie game, and the general feeling of mourning.
Something terrible has happened to this world, leaving it consisting of a vast ocean where civilization clings to rocky outcroppings, pirates savage those that remain, and warriors soar on giant birds. You can veer off the course of the missions to explore the world, but there’s not a lot to it. You’ll seldom find anything except more endless ocean, more fish jumping, and more desolation.
On balance, it’s not a world-beater, and you probably won’t be passing up Cyberpunk 2020 or any of the other massive must-play holiday titles for it. But it is interesting and if you, like me, are a moving antique that remembers many vague impressions of games you played for two or three days and never found again, it will make you feel like that. It’s probably not as good as you remember, but what is?
The Final Word
Interesting indie game that’s not quite as good as it wants to be, but still aims for the sky and hits.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
