Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles

There's no shortage of strategy and city building games coming out lately, including sequels to long-running games such as The Settlers. Most of these games are about harvesting and saving up resources for new buildings, upgrades and often armies. Indie game Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles goes against the stream, aiming at a more casual approach. Solo developer Tomas Sala characterises his project as an "open world sandbox builder with some grand strategy elements", which means that instead of spending time harvesting and managing resources, you can focus on building cities in the way you like. And as I found out, with a great visual style, solid mechanics and a captivating soundtrack, that means hours of city building fun.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles takes you to the Great Ursee, a place where surviving factions of a crumbled ancient civilization cling on to little islands scattered around a great ocean. The game is actually a sequel to Sala's previous game, The Falconeer. The Falconeer was a falcon-focused flying game and not a building game, though, but it was also set in the Great Ursee. The two games share a similar art style, but other than that, they're completely different from a gameplay perspective.

I haven't played The Falconeer, so I went into Bulwark: FC with nothing more than a vague expectation of a casual building game. From the start, the game tells you to forgo wanting to understand everything in the game immediately. Instead, the voiceover by Tomas Sala invites you to just start building and explore as you go. I must add that the initial voiceover sounded a bit amateurish, but all other voice audio in the game is a lot better. Anyway, I liked the idea of just starting out, so I accepted the tutorial assistance and began my first game.

There are two control modes in the game. Firstly, you can build new structures or link up existing ones with a system that keeps you locked inside the lines connecting them. From your initial outpost, you can choose to build bridges to a sawmill nearby or build new towers. Once you get access to the other resources, namely workers, stone and metal, you can upgrade your towers to become higher and support terraces that will automatically be populated with little houses. Constructing ports and hiring trade ships is essential to spread resources between your settlements. The second control mode gives you freedom of movement, using your Surveyor. This is a flying airship that can construct outposts, resource extractors and ports, and functions as your air fleet for combat and exploration. I played on PlayStation 5, and while it's perfectly workable, playing this on a controller did feel clumsy at times.

I started building out my initial outpost on a small island in the Ursee. The tutorial voiceover helped me get a bustling ocean city state up and running quite quickly. I had access to wood, stone, metal and workers, without having to worry about how many resources I actually had available. The only thing you do have to get in order is building ports and connecting your different islands with trade routes, which require you to recruit captains. Technically, it's true that you don't need resources in the game, but you will spend a lot of time flying around with your Surveyor to find captains who randomly appear with their trade ships, survivor colonies to absorb and other random events in order to let your cities grow. These appear on the world map, and are also indicated on the small compass around your Surveyor. In a way, it's still a form of scavenging for resources, but in a much more explorative way.

Despite the promise of casual city building, I am often really busy planning my next steps and moving around. Time flies when you're playing Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles. There's a lot to do and react to. Sometimes going to another pirate attack feels like a bit of a chore, but the game does keep pulling you in to enlarge your city state just a little more, especially once you understand some mechanics a bit better. Expanding towers with terraces is important, and taking in refugee cities and other randomly appearing structures by demolishing them first and rebuilding them as outposts helps a lot with expansion as well. These random events also disappear after a while and pirate attacks can hurt your trade, so I did often find my casual building time disturbed by the need to hop on my Surveyor to fight or explore. For the standard game mode that's fine, because there's also Free Build mode, which is a true sandbox environment where you can build freely.

From a visual perspective, Bulwark: FC looks really nice. It's calming to watch your city grow. Little houses appear with every expansion, and ramshackle wooden bridges turn into surprise shapes of pretty stone or metal arches as you upgrade your city. I also like how there are different architectural styles for the factions in the game. The Imperial faction has a nice and orderly classic style, while the Pirates have more chaotic buildings, for example. The game map is huge and despite empty ocean parts, there are many nice details such as weather effects, a day and night cycle and planets moving around on the horizon. It really is a living sandbox world where other factions are also fighting it out, regardless of what the player does.

I spent quite some time in Photo Mode zooming in on my cities and wondering how the people would live in wooden houses on the bottom of a rocky island, looking up to the great citadels I had built on top. I did the same during battles, pausing every now and then to look at the units. While the Freehouses faction mostly has little falcon units, the Marcer faction has dragons and the pirates have a lot of little zeppelins. They all fit the game really well. My favourite units so far are the battleships. You can recruit these when they randomly appear in your ports. They have a cutesy steampunk look to them and fire colourful projectiles when they're engaging pirates or other enemies.

Coming to the game's combat, at first I thought this was pretty much random with little influence from the player. It's mostly just being present with your Surveyor and complementing units when a fight gets going. However, I did seem to notice that I could dodge missiles with my Surveyor later on. Every fight is a colourful spectacle of lasers and rockets, but it's hard to gauge who will win. I guess the only thing that counts is having more firepower than the enemy by having more units. It's also why going to war feels a bit like a lottery to me so far. With every battle I go into, I don't have a clue whether my army is in for an easy victory or if I'm about to lose my entire air fleet. The stakes are also quite high, because once you lose units, it's very hard to replenish them as you're dependent on them appearing randomly.

Many hours and several sessions into the game, I'm not sure yet about everything that can happen with the different factions inside your cities. Once you're at war with one faction, the inhabitants from that faction might rebel, but I haven't experienced this yet. In the session I played the longest, I came close to destroying the Marcer faction at one point, but I lost the final battle at their last city by a hair, so I'm also not sure whether you can actually completely defeat a faction. I do know that in the standard game mode, there's a lot to do on the large game map. Periods of focusing on trade and city building give way to more warfare-oriented gameplay later on.

In my experience, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles keeps you entertained in different ways at all times. There's no stress about resources, but you will be busy scouting for captains, defending trade routes and optimising resource flows in your cities. And if you're really just into relaxing and city building, there's always the Free Build mode that's as casual and relaxing as it gets. It's a game I've really enjoyed playing so far and in my eyes it lives up to its promise of being a relaxing, sandbox city builder. My only real point of criticism is that I keep struggling with the controls using a PlayStation 5 controller. But other than that, for the price you pay on launch this is definitely worth a try if you're into city building games. It launches today on PC, PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series S|X.