Video Game Review: The Falconeer

The Falconeer

Developer: Tomas Sala

Publisher: Wired Productions

Open World Flight Simulation

The Falconeer is an open-world aerial dogfighting game where the aircrafts you pilot are enormous warbirds rather than airplanes and everything takes place over a vast ocean interrupted only by tiny, craggy islands. Though the premise is creative and promising, the game itself is unfulfilling and full of messy design flaws, whether they be bugs or simply poor decisions. Either way, the result is the same: a game I spent the majority of my time in being either bored or frustrated and at times even both.

The avian aviation which composes the gameplay is set in a third-person perspective with a fairly standard control scheme as far as flight simulators go and all the dimensional freedom that conveys. Unfortunately, this also comes with some of the more disorienting aspects of flight simulators and then some; on many occasions during my playthrough I had myself pointed in a completely different direction from where I was trying to go either for no apparent reason or due to poorly measured collision hitboxes which caused me to bounce off a nearby rock that I had not actually visually hit. On other occasions, I would get knocked around by collisions with allied NPCs, whose weak AI caused them to near constantly crash into me and send the already awkward and disorienting camera careening out of control to the point that I was glad when a mission didn’t give me a wingman. Even in the moments when the interface stops fighting against the player long enough to line up shots against adversaries, hitting them is still a challenge because the targeting and leading system is either finicky or doesn’t work the way it says it does, and I honestly can’t say which. In fact, much of the game is poorly explained when an explanation is offered at all – for example, I didn’t realize that the “brake” command could be used as a height gaining flap until I noticed as much by chance, both because this is never stated in-game and because the brake animation doesn’t particularly resemble flapping. Various upgrades to both your bird and weaponry are available, but so much of it is prohibitively expensive, and grinding out the necessary currency doesn’t feel worthwhile.

The broader structure of the game isn’t much better than the moment-to-moment flying. Mission designs are repetitive and dull, consisting almost exclusively of flying halfway across the map, getting into one or two repetitive dogfights, and then flying back to port to turn the mission in. Occasionally this monotony is broken by having to escort a ship, but these instances are frankly worse as the ships move much slower than your falcon and you have to wait for them, which often means flying in pointless circles. Additionally, it felt like I simply was not receiving the rewards from missions about half the time, with no apparent rhyme or reason for why they might be withheld. In addition to story missions, players can find side-gigs at various ports scattered around the game world, but the only noticeable difference between them and the main quests are the locations involved. There is a small mercy in that a fast travel system is available which makes it unnecessary to fully endure flight times, but for some reason opening the world map to access it must be done through the pause menu instead of having a single quick input for it. For as much as people like to joke about the touchpad on the PlayStation 4 and 5 controllers being glorified map buttons, not having that feature in a game that has a map is both conspicuous and aggravating at this point in time.

The actual world and plot don’t provide much motivation to continue either. As with gameplay mechanics, the setting is poorly explained when an explanation is bothered with, and the delivery of the information itself can be annoying. The voice performances in The Falconeer aren’t bad exactly, just average, but they are repeated such that it would have been better not to have them at all. When perched at a port and cycling between major NPCs or when hovering over a location on the world map (such as when you want to fast travel to it) the game will play the same lines of dialogue no matter how many times you may have heard them before. The results are cacophonous, and I frequently ended up muting the game when I wasn’t actually flying around. Even then, a similar issue arises with the canned taunts and threats made by enemies. Speaking of, enemies are all named, which would actually be a cool little detail if not for the fact that there are only about four or five different names that get recycled between the dozens of grunts you’ll shoot down and blow up while playing.

I generally like to try and say at least one nice thing about a game even when I don’t like it, and for The Falconeer that would be making a note of the game’s graphics. Everything is presented in a smooth, low-poly style that’s surprisingly pleasing, especially with the way the waves of the ever-present sea undulate and dance with light. However, this too is undermined by the fact that the color palette is limited, and thus the novelty quickly wears off as you realize that if you’ve seen one view in this game you’ve seen them all. On top of that, half the time your vision is going to be obscured by thick cloud cover anyway, so trying to take a moment and observe as far as you can see from as high as you can go is an exercise in futility. To top it all off, the photo mode included is non-functional, at least on PlayStation 5. When hitting the capture button after positioning and adjusting the camera, it immediately takes you back to the pause menu, meaning you can’t actually grab what was on your screen a moment before. I suppose you could save a clip and then save a screenshot from that clip, but the results of doing that are never as crisp as a straight screenshot and that’s a lot of extra steps to navigate around something which shouldn’t be an issue in the first place.

As I played more and more of this game, my frustration at all its flaws continuously mounted until I eventually began to resent it. Perhaps with even two or three fewer problems with how the game functions they wouldn’t have all built off each other like this, but even if that were the case (and it isn’t) the fact remains that The Falconeer is just kind of dull. Uninspired mission design and a story and world that failed to grab me meant I had very little incentive to keep playing, and even less to recommend that others should start.