Jade Empire vs The Falconeer
Jade Empire
Jade Empire is a martial arts-themed action RPG where you get the freedom to choose to become either a noble hero or a treacherous villain. The game also provides you with a vast open world to explore and a host of interesting characters to interact with. As you play an aspiring martial arts master, you'll have access to a wide range of nicely-animated fighting moves and styles that you can mix and match. While you increase in your proficiency of the martial arts, your enemies' difficulty level will scale up accoridngly as well, so every battle you engage in will be as challenging as the next despite having better gear and skills.However, being a rather old game, the combat sequences may feel a bit choppy and awkward today. The graphics looks weathered as well. And if you want to play this game for its story, you might want to reconsider. Jade Empire is famous for mainly its cool moves and well-made combat system back then, and having a completely original and immersive plot isn't one of the selling points.
That said, there isn't a lot of oriental-themed RPGs out there and Jade Empire happens to be one of the best ones. If you love martial art games, you might want to try this game out.
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.