NO CHECKPOINTS! Do not design hour + long missions without check points, especially if your AWACS controller is going to be ridiculous slow in identifying threat. Create a mode with no checkpoint for people that do not have a premium on there time or create shorter missions with lower missile counts. Creating a game in the vein of Ace Combat is fine, but ACE Combat is better, especially ACE Combat 7. This not because of the studio verses Independent developer resource issues, it's that the independent developer made purposeful decisions that reduces the convenience of the game and adds to the frustration. Poor mission briefings leave you only a passing idea of what you are supposed to be doing and far from what a real mission briefing would include. At it's core it is an ACE Combat knock off, but mission design, HUD interface, presentations of mechanics, and heads up tactical information in battle is inferior to those you would find in ACE Combat 7. Message timing in missions will have you end up getting killed as suddenly a message is flashed on your display and your controller rambles on with some story dialog instead of giving you concise instructions which then gets you killed and leaves you to play the often hour long mission again. It is one thing when the player gets killed through there own action, its another when your 'elite' mercenary support is slow on the draw, especially in a fast paced designed game. The shame of it is that the technical aspect of the game is good. Graphics are good, controls handle well, sound is good. It is in the mechanical choices that this game falls short especially when it is in direct competition with ACE Combat 7. My advice. Purchase ACE Combat 7 instead, and if you have finished that game, maybe pick up this game on sale if you want some more like it.
If you are looking for an arcade style fantasy flight sim where you ride on the back of a giant eagle or with the DLC a dragon, then the Falconeer might be the game for you. The flight mechanics are simple with the primary flight concern being that you need to keep flight energy in your energy bar. You can get energy boosts from updrafts, diving from altitude, or if you have picked up the item from killing enemies. If your energy bar drains out, your mounts slows to a crawl and you can't engage evasive and quick turning rolls. This is enough to keep the flight combat from being brain dead but not so complicated that it keeps you from zenning out, relaxing and enjoy flying and combat. Combat is fairly simple, you have an energy weapon that fires forward and in third person arcade style you turn, dive, climb or roll to get your enemy in your cross hair and then riddle them with energy bolts until they take a dive into the sea below. There are a few ammo types but they don't really make much of a difference. There are some boosts you can purchase for you and your mount but there really isn't much customization. Missions are a bit repetitive and lack verity, and there isn't much of a range of enemies. The story is told in a past tense, so you are playing through memories of people of the past thus have no control over the story. In each chapter you play as a different rider from a different faction so you learn their view on the events that unfold. However the story ends when you finally reach the present. And this choice is why I can't give the game a fifth star, because the game stops the story at what should be leading into a climactic war, where you feel like you should then get to choose a side, and then fight in an open world war campaign. But instead the game stops and you never learn how things are resolved. That puts a drag on an otherwise good game. However if that isn't a deal breaker for you then the Falconeer could be the game for you.
If you are looking for a game that recaptures the old red storm rising games continue on. For all the game tells in the tutorial none of that seems to apply in the campaign itself. Even worse for some reason a massive oversight is that air units do not show up on your tactical display. So engaged a massive surface force spent three hours dogging four escorts taking them out one by one, and finally sank the last one leaving the five transport ships unprotected, Come up to periscope depth and activate radar, EMS mast and periscope, lock on to the transport fire missiles. Check my EMS and I have strong radar signal, check the tactical display, see nothing, Dive just to be careful, fifteen seconds later I hear the props of a helicopter and then explode. No indication on tactical that there was aircraft nearby, no warning from the XO, nothing to hint that there was a threat. This is a critical oversight. This in addition to the fact that the game is more arcade than actual sub sim with several things just wrong about sub warfare. Not to mention how often your own torpedos jam or even arbitrarily explode even though they should be running safe before you activate them. And you must have the worst sonar man in the world becuase he can't even tell the difference between a surface ship from a submarine, and you have to waste your time trying to figure it out.
The designer's choices on what mechanics to port over from the pen and paper and which ones they left behind is baffling. With only one combat speed in the real time enviroment while mixing in the inititive portion from the table top game, you end up in disjoined transitions from traveling mode to combat mode. The pace at whcih you level is pathetic to the amount of combat you see, the experience awarded way below what you would receive in the table top version. Often requiring scum saving to make through areas, as the stupid intitive system can suddenly make your whole group pause and then take a rain of crippling spells. Even worse is the delay between requesting the casting of the spell and when the spell is cast oftem make line and area effect spells worthless. Monster power often spikes abruptly and without warning, resualting in constantly having to "scout" through dying. The adventures and situtations you are shoehorned is literally the resault of having your character's chain yanked all over the place by the villians. Even worse you end up with an entire roster of heroes who are worthless unable to go and resolve issues without your own personal attention. Missions often ignore the existence of the stealth skill or the fact that the invisibility spell exists. A good example is on a mission where you have to sneak into an enemy camp to chanllenge an enemy leader. A stleath mission where you have to absoultly do everything on the rails is bad design, especially when you should just be able to dimension door your own hero into the camp, use invibility, or just use your rediciliously high stealth skill to by pass guards. The companions you find along the way are some of the most poorly created characters both from stat arrangement, to class setup. It is the most attrocious I have seen in one of these games. Most characters are shallow as well. That is before you get to the pain that is nation managment. Thankfully you can turn that off.
TL;DR The encounters in this game boarder on idiotic, several are instant death, and with no option to flee combat it forces you to scum save. The game does not follow Pathfinder rules making so several classes are unplayable, especially ones that require positioning or finese Any game that forces you to scum saves breaks your imersion in the world. The party balance is junk and you are forced to manage with what ever hog pog group they decide you get. The real time nature of the system and rules they decided to keep and ones they didn't makes certian classes not viable. Classes such as the magus need percise timing to be able to five foot adjust out of threatening reach to cast then be ready to strike, but there is no way to have such control in this game. However if you try to play such a class you will be constantly punished with attacks of opportunity. Managing maigc in this system is abysmal, and as far as I can tell instead of making it so the AI will not cast AOE spells into combat, they just made it so the enemies do not get hurt by their own AOE spells. The game does not use the same rules as Pathfinder so you do not get bonus spells for high Int for a Magus or Wizard nor do you get bonus Skill points so several stats are not longer balanced, the point buy system caps your stats so you can't have an 18 stat to start. That is before you get to the quests which bounce all over the place as far as difficluty which as this is not a skill based game you will end up in ecnouters that come out of left field and just wipe your party. this type of poor balance not only waste's the players time but is also extremely frustrating. You often have no warning of what you were about to encounter, and with no way to flee combat you end up reloading a lot, Then with timed quest that fail often without any indication that their was a time only add insult to injury.
So I started the career mode for Urban Warfare Difficulty on normal. The missions are completely F@##ed of balance compared to the listed difficulties A two skull mission where an entire company of of mechs drop as reinforcements in three turns half of them heavies and an assault with my escape LZ behind them on the far corner of the map. missions of one and two skulls with a entire company of mech often with and entire lance of mediums. Again and again, missions have you out numbered no less than 2 to 1 and most often 3 to 1 and even 4 to 1 or greater. This happens so often that I want to fire Darius and get a new intelligence officer or shoot him as a traitor. The new ECM mechanic sucks for you and is great for the computer. Sensor lock can over come the ECM and the computer always as a surplus of units to defeat your ECM, but when they have it you have to sacrifice the turn of one of your four mech to break through the ECM. Again being limited to four mechs with these types of ratios is BS. The designers said they didn't give the player more mechs because they didn't want to slow down game play, but they have no problem of dropping 16 enemy mechs on you nearly at the same time. This burns even more has the game lags terribly, especially on the new city maps. The new attack defend missions tend to be ridiculously unbalanced. A two skull mission attack defend again enemy started with 7 medium mech and a heavy to start and continued to drop more lances of mediums which only made the game lag worse and worse. If you have the main game and Flashpoint skip this add on as it make the encounters often unbalanced, unwinnable and the lag and poor memory managment make is a plague to run even on high end systems.
This could have been a good game, however, the scaling difficulty as you upgrade your ships causes sudden and abrubpt difficulty spikes, muptile grind style gate ways block your advance, The story is very weak, the variety of enemies is slim, your tactical HUD places all the important tactical information at the corners of your display instead of towards the center so you can see it without having to look away from your target, and this is just the start. Honestly their are better space sims and you should save your monet for those.
The controls are extremely clumsy especially when you need to use the manual, control. Home world had already been released at this point with much better control scheme that felt intuitive. This game is the exact opposite. The interface is clunky and having to engage manual navigation of your ship is punishing. Getting your ships to fire the right weapons at the right time is a nightmare, espeically using the artillery attacks. Overall the game is a painful grind.
The main reason to not get this game is the clunky controls. A first person platformer is hard enough, but without controler support even with the few contorls you have, you find that you constantly fall becuase you don't hit that wall run just right in tight quarters and end up falling. This gets compounded by some of the auto save points that put you at a point where you have lost your momentum, at which point you die over and over again. Add in that your first person view is constantly jerking about, that advancment markers are often not very clear, which is especially bad when you are being shot at, and a very clunky 'combat' mechanic, reminds us why there are not many games like this. This game probably would have been ten times better with a third person view.
Remember those bad game masters that made their own home brewed game systems and would run you through those terrible home made campaigns, trapping in combats that overpower you where retreat or withdraw is not an option. This is a game that takes all that frustration and pours it into a into a single poorly executed mess. Lets go with the pros of the game: It's pretty and runs well. Cons: The pacing of the game is terrible. You are constantly struggling against being out numbered, out classed, or out leveled. Often it's all at the same time. You do not get equipment, cash or levels fast enough and every battle is a grueling slug fest. This is a turned based game that is put to a real time beat, so managing your group in combat leaves you constantly pausing the game to micromanage each character. Character pathing is atrocious and the character 'bases' are larger than they look often making it look like you can move a character thru a space but then the get stuck or roam around the entire battle field provoking free attacks from the enemy which leads to... The stupid engagement mechanic. If you 'engage' a target and then they try to move away you get a free attack. This only works against you never in your favor. Enemies that come in large groups will pin your front line and then the rest will maneuver around and get to your casters and if they try to flee, the enemy gets a free attack. When you have a stat that adjusts the radius of a spell you need a casting circle so you're not constantly guessing where the spell is going to strike. Also you can't cast on character portraits so you have to hunt for your team on the battle field to heal or support them. The stat system is anti intuitive spreading defenses over six stats so you always have glaring weakness that allows one of the enemy to one hit your characters. There is no enough space for the aggravating cons of this game. Don't waste your money.
