The Falconeer vs The Survivalists
The Falconeer
The Falconeer is a third-person adventure game focusing on aerial combat on the back of a warbird. Best played with a controller, the game features a massive, steampunk-themed open ocean-covered world to explore, thrilling dogfights to dive into, and quests to complete.The Falconeer features a massive open world that the player can explore to his/her heart’s content! There are many different islets featuring various points-of-interest like fortified locations, seachantress, and weaponshop that players can land on, but the most important one is probably the settlements. Here, players can take quests; buy stuff like weapons, serums to enhance your warbird, permits, etc from vendors; complete bounties, and even buy a new warbird once the pre-requisites (such as completing a time trial race within just 30 seconds) are fulfilled.
Now, in terms of combat, I’m a bit on the fence about The Falconeer. Personally, I find the controls in The Falconeer to feel rather awkward. Aiming is also very hard in this game, not because you have to aim ahead like what you’ll typically do in a tank-based game like World of Tanks but rather, aim at a fast-moving target. The crosshair will jump all over the place (if not disappear outright) during a dogfight. At one point, the crosshair disappeared entirely, turning my warbird into a sitting duck. Flying isn’t as stable as I’d like as well. Maybe this is done in the name of realism, but I’ve noticed that sometimes my warbird will dip and fly lower for no reason.
The Falconeer has some incredible, unique world-building complete with beautiful graphics and atmosphere. The only unfortunate thing about the game is probably the controls. It’s very hard to properly navigate your warbird, let alone engage in intense aerial combat when it feels like I’m trying to aim at fast-moving targets while being completely drunk. So, I’d say the game might be suitable for a more hardcore, high-skilled player base but not the average gamer.
The Survivalists
The Survivalists is a survival-themed adventure game focusing on exploring a vast archipelago filled with hidden secrets and treasures as well as mysterious temples and dangerous terrains. The goal here is not only to make a life for yourself by recruiting and training the local monkeys to help with your many mundane chores, but to find a way to crack the mystery shrouding the archipelago and possibly find a way to finally escape!The Survivalists has a sandbox-style, survival-themed gameplay, which means that you’re expected to gather plenty of resources from the environment, use them to build a base of operations… or even multiple outposts and bases… and make sure you’ve got plenty of protection ready for when the local hostile tribesmen attack you, which they do from time to time.
The map here is simply amazing and if you just love exploring, you’ll find the island-hopping experience here pretty satisfying… that is once you’ve got your raft built. Of course, being set in the tropics, there isn’t a whole lot of different biomes to discover, though there are volcanic and swampy areas that are more dangerous than the normal terrain. Even the sea contains dangers and you’ll do well to avoid the ravenous sharks that are looking for an easy meal.
The best and most interesting part about The Survivalists that really help it stands out from all the other generic sandbox survival games is the fact that you can “recruit” monkeys on the island to help you with any mundane tasks. This encompasses all tasks that can be easily replicated by the monkeys. After all, monkey see, monkey do!
That being said, training your monkeys is, unfortunately, also the most frustrating part of the game. Unlike games with macros, you can’t really save the tasks you’ve taught your monkey as general macros that you can then use whenever you need the same tasks done sometime in the future. Instead, every time you need your monkeys to do something, you’ll have to teach it all over again… which frankly speaking is very annoying.
All in all, The Survivalists is as addictively fun as it looks. Being a survival-themed sandbox adventure, there is plenty of stuff you can craft, items to gather, loyal monkeys to train, and bases to set up as you slowly and steadily explore every inch of the massive archipelago. However, the game isn’t without its flaws and I personally think that the game could have made the monkey-training part a bit more convenient and less annoying for the player.