The Falconeer review for Xbox Series X, Xbox One

While I wouldn?t say I was over-the-top excited for The Falconeer, I did approach it with some amount of enthusiasm. After all, it?s the first game I?m playing on my Series S, and I was eager to see what innovations the new generation would bring.

In The Falconeer?s case, not a whole lot that you couldn?t have gotten from the previous generation. In fact, if you?ve played any aerial combat games in the last, like, twenty years, I?d say that there?s nothing here that you haven?t seen many times before.

To be fair, it does probably look better than most other games. Flying across the ocean can be breathtaking, whether you?re soaring through stormy clouds or skimming along the surface of the water. Without a doubt, the game does a very good job of capturing that feeling of flight.

Unfortunately, a lot of the magic of that wears off as you realize there?s not much else The Falconeer has to offer. You fly to waypoints on your map, you engage in a protracted dogfight with other falcons, and then you fly off to repeat that somewhere else. You realize pretty early on that what you?re doing in the tutorial is what you?re doing for the entire game.

This, in turn, is an issue, since it?s not particularly fun. The controls are kind of wonky — as enjoyable as it is to soar, the birds here aren?t exactly the most agile things in the world, so you spend a lot of time banking around and coming in for a new pass, and doing that over and over again until you finally shoot down all your enemies.

All of this is probably fine if you want to do is aerial combat for a couple of hours. The Falconeer really only does that one thing, so if it?s your thing, then you?re in luck. Don?t expect anything more than that, though, because there?s pretty much nothing else to do.

Wired Productions provided us with a Falconeer Xbox Series X code for review purposes.