Falcon Age Review
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Falcon Age
- Developer: Outerloop Games
- Publisher: Outerloop Games
- PS4
Up until its ending, I was never sure where Falcon Age was going. From the colonialist labor camp it opens on, until the final moments where you’re asked to choose between two paths, I never understood where my place in Falcon Age was. Its anti-colonialist message rings clear, and while it’s refreshing to see such a clear political stance, it never digs meaningfully into the effects or consequences, or finds a way to explore them within its framework.
Let me be clear here–its explicit enumeration of the crimes of colonialism and rejection of the colonial ideology is admirable and something I’d like to see other developers follow–my problems with Falcon Age are where it goes with ideas, which never achieve anything as coherent as its stated message. It aims to tell a story of bond between a falcon trainer and her falcon, resistance and its toll, and keeping your culture alive against a force that attempts to erase it, but it constantly distracts from its message through the act of play.
Falcon Age’s mechanical framework seems to be assembled out of leftover ideas ripped from the open-world sandboxes of larger games. Resource gathering, hunting, character upgrades, crafting, farming and base take downs are all nominally here–they exist as activities that you can do, but serve little purpose, are far from required and feel outright unfinished.
As an example, there are several recipes you can cook from materials found on the desert planet, each which imbues your falcon with certain buffs. The most useful of these are recovery items, which quickly restore your falcon’s stamina. Useful being a relative term, since these take a lot of effort to gather materials for and create, and your falcon can be restored to half health easily through simple commands, with little penalty aside from lost time. Combat never demands that you use the other defense or attack buffs that other recipes imbue, and there’s even an inexplicable stealth buff in a game where you never perform any stealth.
Thematic threads of reclaiming the land and recreating a sustainable relationship with the planet are hinted at, which materializes as the ability to grow food in a minuscule 2x2 grid of vegetables. Alongside the very basic hunting and crafting you can do, these mechanics all feel as if they were leftovers from a much larger game, before it was quickly and aggressively cut down to the more limited experience it ended up as.
None of these add anything to Falcon Age, nor help tell its narrative. Often they hurt it, as the winding paths and open spaces make it more difficult to hold onto the few narrative threads it offers, slowing down the pacing and chopping up the main narrative across empty tasks. Each interaction is perfunctory, and almost feel as if they were left in only to give the player something to do. Which is a shame, since the open world games it draws from are often riddled with colonialist approaches to space, explicitly rewarding dominating and bringing under control their people and geography. A structure that engaged with those ideas, and even refuted them, could have created an interesting conversation between its themes and these ubiquitous game mechanics.
In the other direction, Falcon Age would have also likely benefit from being cut down even more. Losing these extraneous mechanics and focusing on the narrative and interactions between the player and her falcon would have driven hoe the thematic threads of the bond between them, allowing certain moments to hit stronger. As it stands, Falcon Age’s message feels undone by its desire to be a videogame. Not because subjects like this can’t be told within these bounds, but because it feels to insecure about having enough to interact with that it can’t let go and leave its narrative and themes to lead.
Falcon Age constantly glimmers with promise, skirting up to the edge of interesting ideas and storytelling. Its depiction of its falcon, alongside all the various interactions and emotes available for it are genuinely lovable, and if nothing else the ideas it introduces through the story that is there overflow with potential. Which only makes it more frustrating when it fails to pick up on any of the threads it leaves dangling. Falcon Age’s explicit anti-colonial approach may be refreshing, but it’s disappointing to see it dragged down by the way it becomes subsumed into the all-consuming structures of videogames.