Fallen Aces has had a strong start in Early Access, receiving a ton of rave reviews from critics and players alike. In just a few days, it has collected over 1,500 reviews, 97% of which are positive. The game is reminiscent of the beloved action game XIII , and it is also published by New Blood Interactive , which has released many popular boomer shooters, including DUSK , Amid Evil , and Ultrakill . But Fallen Aces itselfis not like a classic boomer shooter.
Fallen Guardians
Noir, jazz, freedom, comics and boxing – these are the first associations with Fallen Aces . And not blood, meat, corridors, pixels and something loud, dynamic and sharp in the headphones. The plot is partly inspired by “Watchmen” and is made in a comic book style. The action takes place in the 30-40s in the most criminal American city Switchblade, which was previously protected by a group of superheroes who were part of the title team ACES
They are being hunted, and the only one left is the mysterious superhero Nightwave, whose wanted posters are posted all over the city. It all starts with an assassination attempt on a famous politician, a mayoral candidate who is also involved with ACES. Right after that, the killers come to the room of our main character Mike, a typical hard-drinking detective who somehow ended up involved in all of this. But Mike was warned by Nightwave.
After that, a rather dark, intriguing story begins, divided into five chapters within the first episode. We run along the burning streets of the city, visit the port, a country estate and a nightclub. Mike fights or plays hide-and-seek with gangsters, meets a not-so-pleasant person from his past, saves a pretty girl from captivity, looks for evidence at the crime scene and even runs away from sharks. And he also tries to help his savior figure out what is going on. He is always in touch and periodically comes to the rescue.
Naturally, it is not possible to find out what is happening within the framework of the accessible first episode. The episode leaves a lot of intrigue for the future, once again convincing us of the truth of the famous phrase about “look for a woman”. And all this is accompanied by juicy dialogues and expressively voiced comics.
Boxing, Karate and Stealth
Fallen Aces ‘ core gameplay is combat, exploration, and stealth. Like Condemned: Criminal Origins , the protagonist picks up anything that’s lying around or dropped by enemies, including pipes, planks with nails, frying pans, bats, and pool cues, and hits enemies with them, then throws whatever’s left at them—items that break just as quickly.
Mike is a former boxer, so he feels great in hand-to-hand combat, hanging hooks and uppercuts left and right. The main thing is to control your stamina so as not to run out of steam ahead of time. He dodges well (many enemies, by the way, do too) and periodically blocks blows – if you do this in time, the enemy will be stunned for a while and you will be allowed to finish him off.
Although, in general, it seems to me that he was actually a kickboxer – Mike actively swings his legs. He knocks down doors, kicks in the groin, stuns, finishes off with a roundhouse kick and can throw opponents into the water, push them onto explosive traps, and so on. And most importantly, he can use his legs to juicily crush bandits who have fallen to the ground – and here the famous leg of Duke Nukem comes to mind.
Firing from firearms – there are a couple of types of revolvers, a submachine gun, a shotgun, a sniper rifle and a Thompson – is less common. There is also a harpoon in one place. The enemies like to shoot (though not all of them), but the guns left behind are often unusable – all that remains is to throw them at the villains. And ammunition for firearms is in great shortage here.
There are, however, many enemies, and our protagonist quickly kicks the bucket. Therefore, we often have to sneak around, quietly knock out enemies with a blow from behind and carry their bodies away – the others can notice them and raise the alarm. To distract attention, you can throw bottles and other objects. And sometimes we are allowed to call in sniper fire from Nightwave over the radio, so that he can take out the enemy indicated by Mike with a precise shot. This also helps distract the bandits.
One of the chapters is entirely built on stealth. We are immediately given a pistol with tranquilizers and asked to put to sleep, not kill. Nothing, however, prevents us from turning on Rambo. At the end of each chapter, the game simply tells us how many we killed and how many we left stunned but alive – there are no ratings or additional rewards. But you still want to fulfill the request and do everything quietly, and then just run away under the roar of gunfire.
With fists and feet – for freedom!
Many call Fallen Aces a shooter with immersive sim elements, and in many ways this is true. The environment is very interactive, allowing you not only to lift, but also throw or kick almost everything, including barrels, urns, lamps, pots, staplers, figurines, and so on. And a banana peel may well fall out of some urn, on which an enemy will slip. I’m not even talking about the spectacular interaction with explosive cylinders.
But the main thing is the freedom to explore and pass fairly spacious levels. Of course, there are closed locations where you need to escape from a hotel, explore a house in search of clues, get into a nightclub, but both there and on more spacious maps there are always at least two or three ways to get to the right place.
You can go straight ahead, find a back entrance, a basement, a ventilation grate, a window – and if it’s closed, try to open it or kick it in. In the same nightclub, I managed to get to the heavily guarded part of the level through a glass roof, which I had to break in order to effectively appear in front of the stunned gangsters.
This freedom is also useful because it allows you to gather more information about the game world. So you can find a lot of notes, some of which are not directly related to our mission, but give interesting and funny details. For example, on the ship there is a captain’s diary with a story about an encounter with sharks. And in a couple of minutes, if you unsuccessfully jump from the ship into the water, you yourself will encounter them.
And of course, an interested researcher will find numerous secrets and valuables, be it money, weapons or useful consumables like painkillers. That’s how in one of the chapters I, to my surprise, got a rare sniper rifle and a Tommy gun, after which life became easier, life became more fun.
Already at the first level, you can accidentally find a shop where, as it turns out, bandits are trying to rob the owner – if you save him, you will receive a key to the warehouse with valuables as a reward. In some other chapters, there are also optional mini-quests to save NPCs – you may not even notice these situations and run past.
In another place, you can go up to the second floor, kill the enemies surprised by your visit and find a note informing you about a hotel room where valuables are hidden. When you find the key to the room, you will receive a riddle to open the safe. And all this content is completely unnecessary for the plot. This design makes you vacuum and carefully examine each map, and then nervously look at the final message about the number of secrets found and missed – and, rubbing your hands, go through the level again.
Wishes for the future
In some situations, however, such freedom runs counter to logic. For example, in one of the chapters we need to lower the bridge to get to the other side, but no one is stopping us from simply swimming there before we lower the bridge, which, it turns out, is not needed. But the script will not work in this case, and we will have to do everything sequentially, as the game designer wants.
Another criticism is the decision to severely limit the number of items we are free to carry in our hands. There are only three slots, and the game doesn’t care whether you picked up a shotgun, a pipe, ammunition or food (it restores health here) – a sandwich or even one cartridge will take up an entire slot. This is inconvenient and limits the freedom to use the arsenal.
It is not very clear why we need to save and collect money and valuables that are converted into dollars. Now there is simply nothing to spend them on. The maximum you can buy in vending machines is cola and cigarettes, which give temporary bonuses, but they cost one or two bucks. And by the end I had saved up more than $8 thousand. Where can I exchange them for real ones?
It wouldn’t hurt to add more tools and opportunities for stealth. However, this is already a matter of taste. But what definitely needs to be done is to fix the silicon brains of the AI. In general, the enemies are quite attentive, but there were cases when they crowded in the doorway with a question mark above their heads, and I stood opposite, but they ignored me – it was even offensive somehow. And one enemy, standing a meter away from another, did not notice how I knocked him out.
The developers have plenty of time to fix, add and improve everything. They say that Fallen Aces will be in early access for a year or two. The final version will contain three episodes and a built-in level editor. The developers have made a bid for success – within just one episode we have received a full-fledged game that is reminiscent of superhero comics, classic shooters and noir films. Now the main thing is for the studio to maintain the set pace.