This city builder can be played by anyone! No longer do you need to learn 20 different currencies or read a long owner’s guidebook to enjoy a civilization-style game? Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is a lot more fun and charming than these 4x games because it’s easier to understand. The worlds of the two games are similar, but there isn’t a clear link between them.
The story takes place in that world after the war, so I’d call it a spin-off. Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles isn’t a game where you want to take over the world by building towns. It lets you enjoy flow, freedom, and even a little success instead.
It looks like a blimp, and you look down at it as you work on your first town. Right away, you’ll notice that the game is played uniquely: you move an item around instead of pulling it straight forward. At first, it seemed strange, but after some time, you could see why it was made that way. You can switch between your spy and a new tower to look around and build in the area.
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Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles
To let you know, Bulwark is the second game in the Falconeer Chronicles series. It was only Tomas Sala who worked on it. A few years ago, the first Falconeer game came out. It lets you ride a big hawk around a rough group of islands. There was a fight in the sky. In this game, you go back to the same rough group of islands and build a city there. In the third game, Project Ancient Waves, we’ll go back there, but this time we’ll do it differently.
I really felt like I was in Tomas Sala’s head, which was strange and interesting to me. There was fog, clouds, and every color of the rainbow in the ocean. The sun lit it up from different angles as it moved.
It looked like an empty ocean, and the sad story of the game fit that. It was like nowhere else I’d been before. I liked how the author made a world that was just for them. It showed how smart a single-player game can be.
Many things about Bulwark make it hard to play, but it’s still great by itself since it was only made by one person. The game has a “story” mode that you can play in when you first start it. You can also play in “free build” mode and have a great time with the beach’s building kits. I say “sort of campaign” because Bulwark doesn’t really have a plan. You can add more until the list is full.
You might be able to take over the oceans if you really want to, but that’s not what the game or its goals say you should do. Instead, they tell you what to do next. You choose your own fun in Bulwark, which can make you feel free and like it doesn’t matter.
Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles Gameplay
First, you can find something like a book that tells you how to build and run your town. This is where you’ll find most of the answers you need when you get stuck, like how to fight. When I ask, “Why can’t I build another extractor on this nearby stone quarry?” and “Am I really making the best use of these outposts I keep collecting?” I never get an answer. This means that you might feel like you’re barely getting by.
Bulwark is the kind of city-building game that you should probably fail (or at least muddle through) two or three times before you really feel like you have the hang of it. This is because the game itself won’t teach you much. Some people like this way of getting around the edges because it’s fun. That wasn’t what I wanted to do, though, because the more I played, the more I wanted to know how some things really worked.
You can leave your town to run in the background while you go do something else, just like in SteamWorld Build. There is nothing to worry about in Lumwark. You don’t need to worry about anything, like making sure people are happy or not running out of funds. On a flight, you can take a break whenever you want. After building my first town, I mostly went outside to see what else there was to see.
You can only find new outposts that other groups can take over, new trade ships that will join your side, and unique buildings that you can fly back to your main home by exploring. For Bulwark, though, this is the point in the game where things start to feel less safe. Unique houses are cool, but they don’t do anything besides look good. These are the same ships that say they can bring “new businesses” to your town.
What kinds of companies? What do they look like? A business is not a type of building in this game and doesn’t even matter. Why should we hire these new people? But there will be better talks soon. When the closest iron source is, say, three islands away, trade ships come in handy. Fight ships keep them safe as they move things from one island to another.
Putting up refugee camps can help you get more people to live in your town. But by the end of the game, they think that watching over your towers is their only job, even though that’s not really it. They don’t feel like they’re used much as real bases, though. Still, you could put them down anywhere on the map where the water isn’t too deep. I already told you that you need wood to build things in Bulwark and that each type of wood needs a different tool when you mine it.
When you first start the game, how many extractors do you get? For your big payment, you need one of each. How do you get more of them? It doesn’t show the game. It doesn’t seem like Bulwark is telling the truth when it says that resources can only go in a certain area. Do you remember what you picked for Resource Flow?
There will be a lot of colored squiggly lines that show how people and things move around your city as it grows when you turn this on. Each resource, on the other hand, can only be taken from a certain point (or a dock if they’re coming from another country), and they won’t follow that point.
I didn’t know why I couldn’t improve some towers farther into my town even though my harbor was full of iron until I looked at the help choices. The lesson doesn’t explain this very well. There were a lot of great walks set up, but I couldn’t go any further because the towers I needed to fix up were too far away for the building range to reach.
Another bad thing about this building limit is that extractors are hard to find. You feel like someone is stopping you instead of pushing you. It’s okay to take things apart, but it’s a pain to put them back together.
Are There Any Limitations in the Gameplay?
It’s great to be back in that world and see everything again. Let’s start from the beginning and go over how Bulwark works again. Weird and secret because of this. You can’t stop or plan how the city grows, which is different from other city makers. When I first got the controller the game told me to use, I had no idea what to do. It’s still giving me trouble after hours.
It’s not really the tools that are broken, even though a mouse and keyboard can help. You need to use the keyboard and mouse. It’s funny, but it has nothing to do with how hard the game is. There’s something else to blame. It’s very simple. There are not many things you can do with Bulwark.
Once you have a few buildings down, you can turn them into towers that link things together.
There is no tech tree or list of buildings to choose from. There is also no way to learn new things or get better at things you already know. You need to click on them to make things better. If you click on a town, wall, or tower again, things might get better. You are in charge of how things go here. Things will grow if you have enough of everything you need.
Conclusion
I wasn’t making much progress, though, so I looked for more extractors. I couldn’t use it while I waited for something else to happen. There are more masters to find, trade boats to bring in, and people to put down. You can only do the same things over and over again, like being stuck in Fallout.
It seemed like the only thing that changed was that enemy groups across the seas became more afraid because my big town started a war between the Ursee that would never end.
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