Falcon Age

My first thought loading up Falcon Age was that it looked like a pitch deck made into a game: bond with a bird, fight robot colonizers, reclaim your culture. That pitch is genuinely good. The follow-through is where the spreadsheet starts showing red cells. The setup is tighter than it sounds. You play as Ara, wrongfully jailed on a dying colony world strip-mined by the Outer Ring Company's automated workforce. Your only cellmate is a baby falcon. You escape together, find your aunt and the local resistance, and set about shutting down a series of corporate refineries across a scorched desert landscape. The writing, developed with help from 80 Days writer Meg Jayanth, carries real weight on colonialism and cultural erasure, which is more than most indie action-adventures attempt. The world has a clay-textured, almost hand-sculpted art style that holds up well in motion, and the sound design does serious work, shifting from ambient wind and sand to punchy percussion the moment combat starts. The falcon herself is the game's single best feature and also its tightest design bottleneck. You send her to stun airborne drones, direct her to dig up buried mines with an equipped sonar pack, have her air-drop grenades on tougher robotic enemies, and use her upgraded digging claws to uncover loot. Back at base, you cook snacks from foraged herbs, hunted meat, and scavenged materials to feed her temporary combat buffs. Cosmetic accessories (hats, scarves, armor pieces) let you personalize her look. On paper that is a respectable companion-mechanics loop. In practice, nearly every encounter collapses to the same pattern: send bird to distract, close the gap, swing the stun baton, repeat. The baton eventually converts into a whip for pulling gates and grounding fliers, which adds a layer, but not enough of one. The Imprint Mode option, which makes combat fully optional, is a thoughtful accessibility call and actually suits the game's pacing better than the designers probably intended. The structural problems are harder to defend. Backtracking is heavy and there is no fast travel. The fork-shaped map means walking the same corridors multiple times, often through minefields where an unskippable digging animation plays for every single buried explosive, and those minefields reset on re-entry. Quest objectives are vague enough that players routinely grind optional encounters thinking they are mandatory. The PC controls, designed originally around VR motion controllers, feel translated rather than rebuilt: the map key cycles zoom levels instead of closing, there is no sprint or jump, and keyboard-and-mouse bindings feel like an afterthought. A controller is strongly recommended and noticeably better, though the game was clearly built from the outside in, starting with a VR prototype and working backward to flat-screen play. Total runtime sits around three to five hours depending on how much cooking and side content you pursue. That is not inherently a problem. The problem is that the repetition hits its ceiling around hour two, leaving the emotional payoff of the story to carry the remaining runtime on its own. It mostly can, which is a testament to the writing and to how effectively the game makes you care about the bird. If you go in treating this as a narrative experience with light action rather than an action game with light narrative, the expectations align better. Strategy-minded players looking for build depth or decision-making weight will find almost none here, and the AI, both for the falcon and for the robotic enemies, is shallow enough to notice quickly. Mod support is absent. Falcon Age is a short, sincere, imperfect debut from Outerloop Games, one that found the emotional core of its concept and then surrounded it with underdeveloped systems. Catch it at a discount if anti-colonialist sci-fi storytelling and a genuinely charming bird companion sound like enough of an anchor for you.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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