Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles is an almost indescribable and unique experience

As we all know, people can be strange — and perpetually hard to please. We consistently hope and wish for new experiences, yet when we have them, we complain that they are unfamiliar. Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles is a prime example of this. A strategy game about city building, exploration, expansion and occasional conflict, there is very little here that you’ll recognise from standard convention.

There are a few ways to play Bulwark, but the basic mode places the player on a large map that is mostly unexplored. From their highly mobile airship, the player can choose to build towers, resource extractors, docks and a few other structures. Once at least one of these things is in place, the player can switch between being “locked” to the airship and locked to the network of connected buildings at, erm, sea level.

I say at sea level, because in Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles most landmasses are small and almost always present themselves as cliffs poking out of the sea. That’s no real obstacle though, because if you have wood (which is extracted from giant fungal structures) then you can always build anywhere within a certain range, no matter how obscure the land might seem.

What this can mean is that what small islands there are will quickly be covered by your towers — each of which is connected by a bridge that spans between them. If you are lucky enough to find two resources within range (such as wood and stone, or wood and iron) then you can also use various overlays to see how those resources, and the workers that use them, are connected and flowing.

More often than not though, Bulwark requires the player to use their airship to find resources on other islands. When this happens, a new extractor can be built, new towers erected around it, and then the flow of resources between each “island” can be managed by paired docks that can be placed on each of two islands.

There is some fiddliness here for sure, and I had a couple of either bugs or moments of misunderstanding where I couldn’t get resources to flow. This is perhaps linked to an additional variable, which is Captains. To pilot each ship through the very dangerous waters of Bulwark, a ship must have a Captain — and most Captains will only carry a couple of resources.

Broadly speaking, this means that if all your workers are on your wood island and you want to connect it to a stone island, then you’ll need to build a dock at both, then assign a captain who can take workers (from the wood island to the stone island) and stone (to take stone back to the wood island). In this scenario, how does the stone island get wood to build towers? Well, it’s a fair question — and you might need to hire a second Captain, or set up a wood supply initially (and build as much as you want to) and then switch.

There are also other uses for Captains — who are few and far between. A Captain is needed to man certain unique buildings so that the player can become the head of a guild, or for certain military purposes. None of these decisions are complex in nature at the time they are presented to you, but Bulwark expects you to learn when you should make these choices, and doing so at the wrong time can really slow you down.

But then again, that’s what Bulwark is — it’s a game of discovery. The airship will quickly uncover a whole world of unknown and previously unseen things. From rifts in the ocean, to secret enclaves that you can either ally with or fight against, there’s always something new to find.

Whilst it’s a bit of a weird comparison, I get a similar sense when playing Bulwark as I did when I first played Sid Meier’s Pirates more than thirty years ago. They may not be called the British, French and Spanish, but the various factions who make up the population of your expanding cities feel similar to those of the 17th Century Caribbean, and the mysteries of the sea are just as bizarre looking backwards in time as they are in Bulwark’s own alternative world view.

It wouldn’t be fair to review Bulwark without commenting on its controls specifically, which are designed for play on a controller (whether you play on PC or console.) Personally, I found everything about them fine except for the “locking” to either the airship or the current structure group that I mentioned earlier.

This gets better over time, but I’ll admit that even after more than ten hours or play, I do still sometimes forget which element I am locked to, and if it does happen to the “ground” view, then it can be annoying to navigate along a chain of towers one at a time, rather than just being able to fly the camera as you would in most other strategy games. I am sure there is a reason why Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles removed this feature, but I can’t think of one — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is my motto.

There is much more to Bulwark than I’ve revealed here, but a lot of it occurs in the fine detail. The main sentiment that I want you to take from this review is that this is a hugely interesting and engaging strategy game that certainly isn’t perfect, but it might just be unique. Just like the world that Bulwark presents to us, the gameplay is familiar — you’ve explored and built many times before — but different, because you’ve never done it quite like this. If that sounds like your bag, then I’d go for it. Even if you don’t enjoy everything about Bulwark, there’s enough here to amuse for a good long while.

You can find Bulwark Evolution: Falconeer Chronicles on Xbox, Playstation and PC.