It was fun to work with the bird, climbing higher and diving back down to recharge my energy meter (part of what you use to speed up or do rolls). Outside of combat, though, the controls felt very intuitive and similar to other flight titles. It can be almost nauseating if you try to do it for too long in the middle of combat, and it's one of the reasons I ended up not using the mechanic and hoping for the best. The game offers you the ability to lock onto enemy targets at the cost of losing camera control and any orientation of how you're flying. Encounters would generally devolve into spinning in circles, attempting to find an enemy only to be killed no matter how many swoops or maneuvers I performed.
But I often struggled against the camera, and anytime there were more than four or five enemies up against me, I was quickly picked off from all conceivable angles. Sure, yeah, it's a dogfight – barrel rolling and turning usually ends up being the norm. However, I found myself consistently facing difficulties maintaining a good bearing on my foes. It's all great in theory, and most of the time, it's excellent in reality. The game revolves around you flying your giant bird around, engaging in aerial dogfights or strafing sea-bound vessels, targeting forward with your lightning cannon. However, most of the story ultimately relies on combat-something which is both fun as hell but challenging and frustrating at times as well.
Much like how there's excellent world-building with lore hidden around, the game's story is very political – backstabbing, double-crossing, and a series of ever-escalating political intrigue. The story is your main draw, and you'll be sent off to be a mercenary for various groups, building your reputation, skills, and firepower over time. Granted, the giant gaping hole in the middle of the ocean takes a bit of time to get an explanation, but beyond that, it's a series of small port towns, defensive structures, or old shrines. Unfortunately, the exploration aspect wears out potentially early on unless you manage to hold off and focus only on completing the missions. The gameplay loop is relatively basic go to point a, kill some enemies, go to point b, ensure your weapons are charged, rinse, and repeat. The Falconeer ends up, after a point, feeling very repetitious once you've managed to uncover all of the hidden must-see locations around the map.
There's genuinely a massive world to explore, but once you've seen everything on the map, the excitement from the unknown is gone. You may also get an intriguing monologue from various characters, providing world-building lore, such as the creepy shaman/fortune teller woman about the meaning of the place.
Stopping at different locations gives you a chance to buy items or upgrades or find additional quests to complete mid-stream (stuff you can do post-mission completion as well). It takes some time to get around with some of the weaker/earlier birds, given their lower speed, but exploration is genuinely one of the best ways to understand the game. That's not a bad thing, though the world is seemingly massive. The tutorial is relatively useful, given you a chance to test yourself and how good (or bad) a pilot you might be. The Falconeer puts you on the back of one of these birds, strapping guns and some ammo packs on there for good measure, and sending you off into the wild yonder without a ton of orientation. Sky Oddysey on the PlayStation 2 springs to mind as a prominent one, but that's just me dating myself a bit. Thankfully, I've been a big fan of flying sims or general "flying games" for most of my life. In a world where just traversing can seemingly be the most dangerous thing (I saw what looked like a giant, spike-armored whale snake leap out of the water, it's got to be dangerous in there), flying makes the safest sense in terms of getting around.
And if people are not one of the many trying to make an honest living, they're one of the various pirates or warmongering groups that proud Falconeers such as yourself are trying to stop. If you're not sailing somewhere, you're flying on giant birds capable of amazing aerial feats. The Falconeer is an exciting flight sim/air combat game set in a water world that stopped growing somewhere during the Victorian/Industrial era.