Falcon Age is a VR game that set out to achieve one goal: craft a story about an environment and the player’s experience within it. It does this well but falters by making some major design decisions that contradict each other regarding what its’ core audience should be. Falcon Age communicates its’ narrative through the player’s actions, gestures, and facial expressions. The game uses this to showcase that there are tensions between humans and falcons. The falcons are under constant surveillance by humans with cameras and drones in an attempt to keep them under control.
The falcon has a strong connection to family, trust, and loyalty. It feels like your companion throughout the game, but it can’t actually follow you too well.
The game is set in a desert environment that feels very bleak due to its’ lack of life (that element comes later) The landscape is barren with only drones patrolling the area. There are many items scattered around for players to find and use.
Falcon Age is not a very long game, but it doesn’t overstay its welcome. The player can warp to specific areas at any time which makes backtracking easy if needed. The music feels right with the environment giving off an almost creepy vibe in some parts of the game. Players will be able to play this game in about 6 hours if they are thorough with exploring.
Each time the player throws their falcon out to explore it opens up a lot of opportunities. They can fly around and spy on enemies or humans, scout for items, or even interact with other falcons to make new friends.
The voice acting is quite good which makes the story more believable and immersive. There is a lot of bad voice acting in VR games, but Falcon Age manages to get it right. The sound design helps with the music fitting the environment, and everything else sounds like it’s’ supposed to (minus falcon sounds made by humans).
There isn’t any combat in this game besides using your throwable rock as a weapon or using traps around the landscape that you have gathered from items found throughout the land. The problem is that there’s never a real reason to engage with enemies unless its’ for a quest item. Luckily the AI is smart enough not to attack you since you’re still considered an unknown entity at times even though they will shoot projectiles out at you if they see them which also feels really good when you dodge them.
Falcon Age is one of the experiences that feels more like a game, rather than a VR experience. It doesn’t rely on just being a simulator of sorts and it also has a dynamic story with great voice acting which helps elevate its’ otherwise linear gameplay.
What’s Good: Great voice acting, Interesting environmental storytelling. The unique use of facial expressiveness, Solid sound design
What Needs Improvement: Feels out of place in the Quest library Gameplay gets repetitive before long
Rating (out of 10): 7
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