From an aerial dogfighter with epic vibes to a city-builder strategy with real-time combat, Tomas Salas’ Falconeer series has seen quite the pivot over the years. Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles leans more towards the minimalist side of construction titles – Townscaper and Islanders come to mind, but at a larger scale – which fits the gorgeous yet stark aesthetic and UI. It leans into exploration and potential conquest as much as building up and expanding your bulwark, though its mechanical depth isn’t quite as extensive as the Great Ursee.

Set in the same world as The Falconeer, Bulwark occurs some forty years later. You start as one of three factions – the Free Houses, who favor peace and building; the Imperial Remnant, which remains loyal to the Imperium of the past; and the Mancer Order. Each faction has a unique starting location and building aesthetics while relying on different materials for upgrades.

"However, you’re not constrained to a particular faction or play style. It’s possible to invite other factions, including the Bannerless and the Freebooters, to join your cause."

After setting up the requisite resource extractors for Iron, Stone and Wood, you need workers. Build out towers and walkways to ensure a steady flow towards resource nodes near your settlement while ensuring said workers can travel to and fro. Expand this into a proper city and build harbors to transport some resources over larger distances. Hire captains who specialize in ferrying certain materials and establish supply routes. It’s all standard city-building fare but stripped down and streamlined.

While you’re encouraged to build indiscriminately – I’m quite proud of my spider-web of walkways – there are some limits. Bulwarks are built on sheer mountainous terrain, or the Ursee – the latter’s depth means you have limited space for expansion. Outposts can be upgraded while towers gain multiple floors and assigned Commanders, while walkways turn into battlements.

However, you’re not constrained to a particular faction or play style. It’s possible to invite other factions, including the Bannerless and the Freebooters, to join your cause. You’ll randomly encounter them in their isolated settlements or sailing about and can invite them to your cause. Doing this allows for demolishing and moving their outposts into your particular bulwark, increasing the allegiance to said faction. Similarly, Captains and Commanders from different backgrounds can be brought on, with the latter lending some unique units to your Surveyor’s battlegroup. You may even encounter Captains with warships who can help secure your supply routes from raids.

Resource allocation can get a little confusing at first since, despite all those walkways, you’ll notice your Mancer outposts are getting no access to the Stone required for upgrades while the Bannerless hog them all. The good news is you can demolish and rebuild your bulwark as you see fit, repositioning specific outposts closer to harbors and bringing in certain resources without any material consequences. While I can understand not having different Captains sharing trade routes and having to create specific start and end harbors, a shared resource pool for the bulwark would be nice.

"If a particular faction becomes dominant, it can lead to benefits – like arranging trade and peace agreements with the Bannerless in exchange for combat support."

Eventually, when balancing out the pops of different factions, some tact is necessary. If a particular faction becomes dominant, it can lead to benefits – like arranging trade and peace agreements with the Bannerless in exchange for combat support. You could even invite their settlements to join your cause, eventually unlocking faction leaders with unique bonuses. Different types of Surveyors with specific stats suited to speed or warfare also become unlocked.

However, other factions won’t take kindly to it, and there can be ramifications when assigning Captains to routes, with some warships refusing to accompany pirates. Unrest will also start to brew, and you may close any opportunity for peace with other settlements.

Of course, being a part of a faction like the Mancer Order doesn’t guarantee that other aligned settlements will want to deal with you. When courting a Mancer outpost, having them join my cause required a deeper knowledge of the faction. On the bright side, you could also take a more aggressive approach when having other outposts, declaring war and reigning down destruction via Skull Ships and Falconeers.

This highlights one of the weaker elements of Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles – the combat. All you need to do is hang by near an outpost while your forces automatically batter the enemy into submission. It often comes down to the health and number of units, which can be hard to gauge amid battle (outside of notifications of losses). Warring sides are indicated by two bars at the top, which dwindle based on who’s losing. It’s not an indicator for your health – wander into an active warzone, and your Surveyor can go down, regardless of how much of the bar remains.

"Translating a city-builder to the controller, even one as streamlined as Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, can be difficult. While the controls aren’t complex, they can be awkward."

You have minimal control over the unit types that join your battlegroup, and though you can meet wandering ships that replenish their health, how you regain units after losing a conflict is unclear. Hanging around the bulwark or an allied outpost does the trick over time. As overly simplistic as the combat can be, accessing mythic units, like a giant sea-faring turtle with armaments that can intimidate other faction outposts into surrendering, is cool.

However, once you’ve provoked the ire of other factions, they won’t stop sending warships. The only option left then is to venture to each of their cities and force a surrender. Some more diplomatic options would have been appreciated, even if there’s a point of no return.

Translating a city-builder to the controller, even one as streamlined as Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, can be difficult. While the controls aren’t complex, they can be awkward. You don’t freely move your Surveyor, specifying spots for it to move instead. If an interactable icon pops up, like building a harbor, outpost or resource extractor, a single button press is enough. However, this becomes more unwieldy as your bulwark is more developed since it’s sometimes all dependent on the position of your cursor.

You can switch to the buildings themselves, which is necessary for upgrading them, and extend nodes from outposts to create towers and snap them together intuitively. However, you manually hop from building to building to achieve this, extending your cursor each time and hitting the confirm button. A free cursor for scanning the bulwark would have certainly made things easier. Also, an option to automatically upgrade all walkways into Battlements and some details on how some of the unique buildings, like Surveyors, worked would have been nice.

"Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles isn’t going to redefine the city-builder genre, and for what it’s worth, it’s not trying to."

Though the gameplay loop can feel simplistic at times, it does shake things up as you fly through the Great Ursee, encountering random individuals and adding them to your settlement or discovering ambushes and fighting them off. Yet, with how gorgeous the aesthetic can be, especially with different weather and lighting effects, whether it’s storms or mist as you sail past sites like The Shard or bask in raging volcanoes, it’s a shame that the narrative elements and characterization are surface-level at best. At least there’s a Freebuild Mode for those who want to build and create massive bulwarks that are a sight to behold.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles isn’t going to redefine the city-builder genre, and for what it’s worth, it’s not trying to. It delivers a more tightly focused strategy exploration title where expanding, light diplomacy and conquest are possible at an easily manageable pace. Additional control options and combat information are desperately needed, and it feels like the setting could have offered more beyond its current narrative confines. Yet, as far as city-builders go, it’s solid, easy on the eyes and enjoyable to delve into.

This game was reviewed on PS5.