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dkirschner's The Falconeer (PC)

[March 22, 2026 04:40:50 PM]

This is an aerial combat game. Admittedly not my favorite genre, but The Falconeer won a BAFTA, despite receiving lukewarm reviews, and I got it for free or in a Humble Bundle, so I decided to try it out. It apparently had a remaster, so I was hoping that whatever issues it previously had would be remedied. It nails a visual style and commits to political-military worldbuilding, which I respect. Unfortunately, that’s about all it nails.

The amount of things the game doesn’t bother to explain to you is perplexing. It begins with a prologue and combat tutorial, the first and last thing the game explains. I appreciate figuring things out on my own, to an extent. When I decided to quit, I noticed some text on the menu screen that said I’d leveled up and saw that I was level 3. There are levels? Are there experience points, too? What do the levels do? Do they improve my stats? The stats are AG, SPD, ENG, HP, RGN, DMG, and ROF. What do these mean? Some I can interpret—SPD must be speed, for example—but others, I am at a loss. ENG? What is this? English? Engineering? What is AG? Agility? What does that do? There is no tutorial for this, no tooltips.

I also discovered shops. What is the point of shops? I played an hour without buying anything and it didn’t hamper my mission success. Do I have to buy things? What are these different categories of things I can buy? I stumbled upon an inventory of sorts, I think. Do I equip things? Some things are damaged. Can I repair them? Speaking of the difficulty, it seems to be random. There are skull icons indicating difficulty of each mission. In the hour I played, these ranged from 1 skull to like 6 skulls (out of 10?). I didn’t notice a difference. It would go like 1, 2, 6, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1. What does the difficulty mean? Why was there a “6” difficulty mission 15 minutes into the game? And why was it easy? Why are enemy names re-used over and over? I killed the same named enemies, blew up their falcons, sank their ships, and yet they continued reappearing. What is the point of the shrines? Are a lot of the open world locations just places to discover, but you can’t interact with them? What’s the point?

Related, the story is a dense political-military slog. There are a bunch of different factions, or countries, or organizations, and they are all fighting, allying, betraying. Some guy keeps barking orders at me to take main missions. I don’t know what I’m doing and I don’t really care. It seems like the developers built a neat world here, but the narrative isn’t presented in an interesting way, and exploring the world on your falcon is boring, too. There’s a big map, but there’s nothing to do. The open world is empty, just an expanse of sea with islands and cities here and there, and various shrines and other “open world” boxes to tick off, but there isn’t much substance to any of it.

The controls are a hot mess, too. You can fast-travel immediately, which begs the question of why there is an open world at all, especially since there is not much to do it in. Actually, fast travel only works sometimes, though I cannot discern when or why. Sometimes, you can press “A” to fast travel and sometimes it doesn’t work. Other times you press “A” to fast travel, and the fast travel indicator doesn’t appear, yet you will fast travel anyway. In missions, you press “A” to target enemies. Sometimes “A” will target them and other times it won’t. It was very irritating. Occasionally, in combat the camera swings up for no apparent reason or the bird ascends, which is disorienting.

I gather I am not the only one turned off by all these issues. On Steam, 57.8% of players completed the prologue. Then just 10.6% completed the first chapter! That’s a huge attrition rate. Then nearly half of those bailed before completing the second chapter, which just 5.9% of players did! It looks like it’s not until the third chapter that players committed to finishing (4.7% in chapter 3, 4.3% in chapter 4, and 4.2% completed the epilogue).

I was just trying to knock something out in the next week so I could have a completion for March (because I’m in the middle of two long games), but this ended up being a retirement. I’ll have to pick something else to beat this week.