The Falconeer looks good. You check the screenshots, looks cool. Check videos, looks even better. You start it up, and the story bits roll out and start pulling you into this post-apocalyptic / mythical combo world. Then you actually get to play the game, and oh boy...
Things go to sh-t faster than the reactor at Chernobyl.
The controls in this game are absolutely atrocious. The gameThe Falconeer looks good. You check the screenshots, looks cool. Check videos, looks even better. You start it up, and the story bits roll out and start pulling you into this post-apocalyptic / mythical combo world. Then you actually get to play the game, and oh boy...
Things go to sh-t faster than the reactor at Chernobyl.
The controls in this game are absolutely atrocious. The game suggests gamepad or joystick. Don't have joystick, so went with game pad. Flying around when nothing is going on is already a bit clunky, but the cumbersome controls and the janky as f-ck flightmodels turn combat into an infinitely frustrating ordeal as you struggle to force your bird to fly and turn where you want it to go and hitting enemies is a pain despite the very generous autoaim. It was actually a bit better after I switched to mouse+keyboard, but still borderline unplayable.
The combat itself would be fun though, a bit chaotic and quite fast. It's a damn shame it's so frustrating to participate in it.
The graphics are very stylized and the world is well designed and looks great for the most part, with some pretty distinct locations, but the color palette is very bland for the most part, seeped in shades of greys, blues and such. While it certainly helps build atmosphere, after some time, it's just too dull. Also, some particle and weather effects are just terrible. Looks like someone thought the overall style of the game would hide their lack of effort, but the PS2 era whirlwinds, for example, are very distinct - very distinctly bad.
Sound is good, for the most part, great ambience, etc. Voiceacting is also great - but some of the npc-s are not voiceacted, and it's very jarring, when you swap between merchants and some of them talk, but others don't. This applies to non-story relevant characters, the story relevant ones are, as far as I know, all voiced. But still... Honestly, if you did not have the money or time to voice all of the low level NPCs, would have been better to not have any of them voiced. Consistency would be better choice than random NPCs of the same level speaking and others not speaking.
The game is also not very good at communicating information. Your warbird has stats, but they are displayed graphically and it's hard to quantify them, especially at the beginning when you did not yet get the opportunity to try more than a few. You can also upgrade them, but some of the descriptions of upgrade items are pretty confusing and mention effects that don't really show anywhere in the gameplay, or they appear to have no effect at all - the yellow line representing your bird's agility gets longer, but there's no real change, etc. Then again, anything modifying the movement may simply get lost due to the atrocious controls.
The game also does not explain its economy very well. You can buy trading permits, but they are not mentioned at least at first, so you just randomly stumble upon them, and so on. I guess the game tries to go with the "show, don't tell" approach, but it does a terrible job of it. You get a lot of stuff in merchant inventories and it just isn't explained what this stuff does. Or, on your map, straight from the first mission, you get "Found Seachantress 0/3" - but nowhere is it explained what that is. There's a lorekeeper in the harbor, which is supposedly providing the lore, but all he does is tell you two or three sentences about the current location and timeline. No interesting or useful information. And so you just stumble in the dark... The game doesn't even tell you dead enemies drop currency - I learned this again from a merchant's inventory where I found a related item, increasing radius at which it is picked up - because you see, the currency drops to the ground or water below you, or perhaps even spawns there, no idea. But you fight high in the sky. So I never noticed, until I found this item, and actively went looking for it...
The world is great, the lore has some great parts, the fantasy tech is pretty interesting, but the game is uncontrollable, and has some mind numbingly stupid gameplay design decisions where I can't fathom why they were made. Was it some deliberate attempt to make the game harder because the game was too easy, and the devs just did not playtest them? Did they run out of time and is the game simply unfinished? Or did they know the gameplay is trash, but just could not be bothered to fix it, sure that at least some people would buy it for the way the game looks in screenshots? Are they just not good at gameplay design? Or is there some other reason? I don't know.
What I do know is that the end result is an frustrating, unplayable mess.… Expand
The FalconeerYour Score0 out of 10User Score
