Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure to be playing an early build of Tomas Sala’s upcoming game, The Falconeer, and I have to say I am very impressed.  I really had no idea what to expect going into this; perhaps a twisted version of actual falconry where handlers were weaponizing their birds?  I had no idea the falcons in this game were of mythical scale, the size of the fabled Roc from Middle-Eastern culture.  Marco Polo even wrote about these mammoth creatures, and yes, in The Falconeer your bird is large enough to saddle and support a passenger.

I’ll get this out of the way at the start.  This game could have just as easily been designed with dragons, dragon riders, breath weapons, and all the medieval trappings, so I want to applaud the designer on creating something truly unique and special here.  Let’s take off…

My preview copy had a prologue and the first few chapters of the game which offered a surprising amount of content.  There are already cutscenes, narration, and hours of professionally recorded voiceovers for a variety of characters including your spunky wingman – more on him in a bit.  The prologue sets up the story of you engaging in a performance test to prove you are worthy to be in the service of the Empress; a slick way to hide the tutorial that will teach you just about everything you need to know to play the game.

You control your falcon with the left stick and pan the camera with the right.  Buttons and triggers handle dashing, evasive rolls, and firing your electrical weapon.  It’s pretty basic stuff but nicely designed so you are instantly comfortable flying and fighting, plus the way the missions are designed you are eased into the more difficult aspects of gameplay the more you play.  You’ll learn to dive and rebuild stamina so you can pull off dash and roll moves and you’ll learn how to fly through electrical storms to recharge the batteries on your back that power the electric lance.  Oddly enough, they never did teach me about diving down to catch red and blue fish to eat them and replenish my health and stamina; had to figure that out myself and it’s super-useful.  You’ll earn money after each mission that can be spent on upgrades needed for future assignments.

Each chapter offers a home base with multiple NPC’s offering up a variety of missions and challenges as well as an item vendor where you can purchase assorted upgrades for your bird like weapons, armor, and mutagens that will boost your attributes like speed and agility.  There is a nice selection of mission types like patrol, combat, delivery, salvage, bounty, escort, and minesweeping, and sometimes these will combo like one mission where you had to salvage an item then deliver it to another island.  Every chapter has a primary list of missions along with challenges and even races.  The longer missions will often have you traveling with a wingman that you can command with a button press to attack your target.  He’s surprisingly useful and not just a distraction.

Speaking of islands, The Great Ursee is basically one massive body of water with all sorts of islands scattered about; some big enough to build a city and others too small to land.  Opening up the world map was a jaw-dropping experience just seeing the sheer scale of the world and the endless potential for adventures.  A smaller window to this map can be found in the mini-map which also shows your flight path and nearby wind currents.  Tailwinds will boost your speed while waterspouts will send you high into the clouds.  Electrical storms are also shown on the map and useful if you need to recharge during a mission, but don’t overcharge or you will explode.  There are over 60 discoverable locations and activities scattered about the world map, so there is no shortage of things to do between missions, and you are always free to simply take off and explore.

The look and feel of the game is surreal; almost like a 70’s album cover came to life.  The Falconeer isn’t going for photorealism, so the water may look simplified and the polygon count for the rocky islands might be average but that doesn’t matter in this hybrid world of Steampunk pirates and quasi-Vikings all trapped in some ancient mythical universe.  What truly stands out is the color and lighting and how they interact with the clouds and water.  I’d stack these clouds up against Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator game.  There is a day/night cycle with gorgeous shifts in color and light including some breathtaking sunsets and sunrises and when the stars come out at night it’s magical.  The game is loaded with subtle details including some fantastic bird and other creature models, interesting Steampunk airships, and boats, and some unique city designs integrated into what almost looks like procedurally generated landmasses.  Even the air currents are visually represented so you can aim toward them or avoid as needed.  I appreciated the minimal HUD as well as the ability to remove or add back just parts of the interface such as the compass and mini-map.  There is even a Photo Mode if you want to capture and share a moment.

Sadly, my biggest complaint with the game, at least in this current preview build is that it is just too difficult and combat is simplistic and boring.  I was immediately reminded of playing Ace Combat or just about any other flight combat game only in this game you don’t have rockets and sidewinders.  This is pretty much dogfighting, which was always the weakest part of those games and certainly is here too.  You’re constantly trying to aim for the erratic circle lead indicator and if it ever stops long enough for you to get off some shots it also means you are in their sights as well.  At least there is a generous aim assist in place, but even after 30+ missions I never scored higher than a 23% hit percentage. Combat is an endless cycle of circling each other, braking to let them fly through your crosshair, and spiraling away before they shoot back.  Thankfully there is a target camera lock that you can press to keep your enemy in view during these twisty combat maneuvers. You can also target lock ground/water targets, which makes it much easier to fly over and drop bombs or make cool strafing runs.  I’m really hoping they somehow tighten up the combat system or at least expand upon it in some meaningful way.  The Falconeer is so conceptually brilliant in every other facet I hate to see it ruined by tedious and repetitive aerial combat.

Picking the right bird for the job can help with combat and so can equipping the right cocktail of mutagens to boost those stats.  Obviously HP and the ability to regenerate HP are going to be important.  I’m not sure if the difficulty is going to get balanced better.  As it stands in the current build I had to lower the difficulty to Easy to get past the missions in the first chapter.  There also needs to be mid-mission checkpoints, as some missions are extremely long (20+ minutes) and if you die you start completely over.  The mystical death narration and having to click through missions briefings again is also annoying.

One thing that would be cool is a falcon vision mode that would highlight important objects like schools of fish or the numerous bits of salvage you are supposed to pick up.  I spent nearly ten minutes looking for a bit of salvage I had already located because it was the same color as the water and it was bobbing up and down beneath the surface.  At least let me lock onto the object like an enemy so I have a target to aim for.  Thankfully, the floating mines have flashing lights on them, which is great for me but wouldn’t that defeat their purpose; easy to spot and avoid.

Aside from a few minor nitpicks The Falconeer is shaping up to be one of the more original and challenging games coming out this November.  If you love flight combat games, especially those with an emphasis on dogfighting, then this game definitely has that Red Baron feel to it only now you are flying a giant bird fighting off crazy pirates as you try to rebuild your kingdom in some insanely hostile conditions.  The sheer scale of the world along with the variety of mission designs, activities, and collectibles should keep you flying high until next year.

We’ll be back with a full review of the final game in November.

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Everspace 2 is currently in a prototype phase on Steam and I was fortunate enough to get a very early sneak peek into the game and take it for a test spin.  The original Everspace came out in 2017 and met with very positive reviews. It was a unique approach to the roguelike genre of games, providing the player with a first- or third-person perspective to explore a highly detailed and intense star system.

This second installment in the series looks to be shaping up to take all the things that were great about the first and improve upon them for an even better, more intense, and more enjoyable experience than the first.  The controls of your ship are fluid and immersive, allowing you to fly in all six degrees of space, giving you plenty of tactical choices when going up against the ever-increasing amount of enemy ships that you will face in your quest.

As you progress, you will be awarded experience points and credits which you can use to improve your ship through new weapons, equipment, and abilities. There are many different types of weapons that are available in the game, which will have different types of damage output to shields and armor. Some weapons will do a lot of damage to shields while doing very little damage to armor and others are the opposite. Finding the right balance to put into the weapon slots on your ship is quite a fun part of the game. There are also secondary weapons like homing missiles and mines, as well as various components that you can upgrade, like your boosters or your armor plating, which will help you survive encounters more easily.

The visuals are absolutely stunning. Bright glowing engines streak across the sky trailed by blazing bolts of laser beams or streaks of tracers from gatling guns. Explosions are epic and devastating. And it is all set on the backdrop of the stunning system that you have the freedom to explore as you wish. There are massive ringed planets that will take up a majority of your view with breathtaking color palettes and tones. Also, there are massive structures like space stations and asteroid fields that give you plenty of variety in what you can use as cover during battles or just have fun flying through and around as you go. There is also the ability to fly down on planetary surfaces, which adds a whole different feel to exploration of the environments available in the game.

Scale is something that many space games struggle with. It’s hard to convey the size of things in space, apparently. But, one thing that I found while playing the Everspace 2 prototype was that it seemed to do a wonderful job of conveying the varying sizes of things. Big stations and capital ships felt huge compared to my single-seat fighter. Asteroids seemed to be immense, and planets really felt like planets…giant looming things, not just little orbs floating in space.

Everywhere you fly you will come across things to gather up from ore that is deposited in random asteroids to floating chests full of random loot to gather and either use to upgrade or sell for cold hard cash. Also, destroying enemy ships allows you to loot them for their leftovers as well.

I felt that the game, in its current state, was already very well polished and provided a fairly intuitive difficulty curve. It was challenging without feeling overwhelming.  I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the game is like upon its initial early access release which is slated toward the end of 2020 and can only imagine what it will look like once it’s ready for full release.

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I recall when Wasteland 2 came out in 2014, it was surrounded by the hype of being the Fallout sequel that we deserved, but never got. I had never had the pleasure of playing the original Wasteland back in the ‘80’s, but I did mess around with Fallout and Fallout 2 enough to see how adjacent the two franchises had begun. Then Fallout 3 went in the direction of a first person perspective RPG adventure with a stronger emphasis on the shooter genre.

The Wasteland games have maintained the top down strategic gameplay design of the original, while expanding on the concepts of cause and effect and the ripple effects of hard choices. Wasteland 3 is planning on doing that in spades. In the introductory portion of the beta demo that I was given access to, there are so many choices and variables that get introduced, even from the beginning, that it is obvious how much of a branching storyline the game will have. Choices really matter in these games, which is not something you see very often anymore. Even in Fallout 3 and 4 it seemed that choice was merely an illusion, that no matter which path you took, you’d end up in largely the same place.

In Wasteland 3, even seemingly small choices can have major repercussions later in the game and they are often presented in such a way that there is no obvious “right” or “wrong” answer. Many times, you just have to go with your gut and find out later whether or not it was a good decision. Sometimes, you may never know for sure.

Adding to the complexity of these spider-webbing effects that these choices have, Wasteland 3 is being designed to be able to be played with a friend using online co-op. This fact alone is exciting enough, but the plan is not to make this just a game that you play through with a friend, experiencing the same events side-by-side. No. Instead, the design idea is to create an asynchronous experience, allowing both players to experience the game together, but in their own way. Each player leads their own squad of rangers and can choose to accompany each other on the same missions, or divide their resources and take on two separate missions at once. The choices made by one player would then become a part of that world, which would then impact the experience of the other player, as well. I am very excited to see this first hand, as it sounds truly revolutionary to the genre as a whole.

The game itself plays similarly to its predecessor as far as the basic mechanics go. There is an Action Point economy that you use during combat dividing between movement and various attacks. There are many different characters, weapons, skills, perks, etc. that all add up to a very diverse combination of gameplay approaches to various situations, whether they are socially oriented, combat heavy, stealthy, or what have you.

The graphics have seen a decent improvement from Wasteland 2, and the focus of the new setting, Colorado, is on the icy cold wasteland instead of the arid desert of Arizona. The ice and snow effects are quite well done, and definitely convey a sense of bitter hopelessness at times. There are a few details that feel a little light, graphically, such as a noticeable lack of detailed shadows from the characters, but that is perhaps something that will get fine-tuned as the game gets closer to release.

Ultimately, a Ranger never gives up and fights against all odds. After getting to play through the introductory teaser portion of the game, I very much look forward to the full release in May and will probably be going back and playing through Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut again in the meantime.

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Hot Brass is a game reminiscent of the SWAT series in its design and approach to scenarios, if you combined that game with the top-down perspective and control scheme of something like Hotline: Miami. The goal is not to kill everyone on the map. Instead, you have to go into the situation like a real SWAT officer, tasked with taking control of the scene. Your ultimate goal is to try and take everyone alive. Sometimes, those people will give up quickly and easily at the first sign of law enforcement. Other times, they’ll fight back, forcing you to have to come up with outside-the-box solutions to try and disarm them, or overwhelm them and convince them that there is no other option than to surrender. Sometimes, someone will decide that they’re not going to be taken alive and will leave you no choice but to return fire. But the way the game is designed, they really encourage you to try to find alternate solutions to each scenario than all out bloodshed.

One of the first things that you notice about Hot Brass is the simplified icon system used for representing the characters in the game. At first, I thought that would detract from the feel of the game. Seeing people as a mere icon that shows what they’re holding in their hands seemed to take away from the otherwise highly detailed nature of the rest of the game. After playing the game, I quickly realized that the icon system is a genius and masterfully designed way of relaying all of the pertinent information about the characters in the game to the player. The icons aren’t static, either. Instead, they are animated and will change depending on the events occurring around them. Surprisingly, this is a very effective way of showing the player exactly what is going on with very little chance for misinterpretation, which would have been much harder to execute using more realistic looking character models from a top down perspective.

In a game where split second decisions need to be made about whether or not to shoot a suspect based on their intentions, whether they are hostile or not, the icon system is an extremely intuitive way of showing the player the character’s subtly changing intentions in a quick, clear way. It takes only a little time to pick up on the subtleties of the system, but once you get the hang of it, you can very quickly determine the difference between someone who is merely holding a gun to someone who is intending on using the gun in a hostile manner toward the officers trying to control the scene.

This game is intense. It requires you to approach each situation from a very tactical mind-set. Sometimes, a suspect will attack if you give them the opportunity, but if you overwhelm them with surprise, they’ll surrender, allowing you to arrest them without having to use deadly force. You have the ability to shout at the suspects to get them to surrender, taze them if they resist, and handcuff them to keep them subdued while you clear the rest of the map.

Nearly every part of the environment is destructible, so if you go in with a breaching charge, you can blast holes in walls, or even shoot smaller holes in the walls with your guns, if you need to have a better angle on something going on in the next room. You can equip yourself with various tools that will help you in each scenario, as well. Arming yourself with night vision goggles on a map that is dark will obviously give you an advantage over the suspects on scene. You can use cameras to look under doors and get an idea of what’s waiting for you on the other side. The limit to the solutions available to you for each scenario is pretty much left to your imagination and the tools available to you at the time.

You can either play the game solo or with up to three other people to make a squad. It is extremely challenging to play the game solo, but definitely possible. Playing with others will allow you to work together to come at a room from multiple angles, or to have one person throw in a flashbang while the other breaks in through a window on the other side of the room, for example.

I am very excited to see how this game develops and looking forward to kicking down some more doors with other operators in the near future. For people who like games that require tactical thinking and problem solving and aren’t all about just killing all hostiles, Hot Brass is one to put on your Steam Wishlist.