There’s a new compass, Diplomacy Events and three Merchant Ships, and depending on how you handle different individuals and factions, you can gain Splinters. You can also access Improved Wonders – including Oberon’s Gate for escaping from the Ursee – and turn enemy factions into Vassals, ensuring they’re no longer a thorn in your side.

As for Splinters, they’re used to “reshape and revolutionize” one’s strongholds. According to the post-launch plans, you can use these to build new Extractors (often in short supply) or Battlegroup repairs. Time will tell, so stay tuned for more details.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is available now for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5 and PC. Check out our review – we awarded it a seven out of 10.

It offers three new Captains specializing in “trading with other factions and then providing buffs on the output.” There will also be three new diplomacy events – offering, demanding and requesting Tribute, each having different effects depending on the settlement. Spoils provide resources for making new Extractors or repairing the player’s Battlegroup and are gained from certain world encounters and winning battles.

In May, the Naval Command Update goes live, allowing players to create a naval force of battleships and declare “Total War” with a unique harbor, Naval Command, to post up. It also includes four new carrier ships and three naval events. As the name indicates, Total War means no diplomacy, just straight-up combat.

Other new additions include something called Mad Lector, faction expansion, new architecture, and mod and workshop support (which Salas is “still figuring out at the moment). These also aren’t the only updates coming as “things not mentioned now could find their way into life!” Stay tuned for more details on the first update, including a release date, in the coming weeks.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and PC. Check out our review here. Of course, a third Falconeer game is also in the works, though details have yet to be revealed.

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.

In Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, players are thrown into the tumultuous world of the Ursee. Players will be tasked with navigating through the world’s history of conflict and war by now helping in rebuilding the shattered landscape.

Along with the game’s launch announcement, Sala has also revealed that a year’s worth of support for Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles has been planned. The roadmap for the game is set to be revealed in late April, and will feature a mix of free and paid content.

Wrapping things up, Sala has also revealed that a third game in the Falconeer series is planned, making it into a trilogy. The third title, currently titled Project Ancient Waves, will bring the perspective of the franchise’s setting down to a human scale. It will revolve around people who do the things that help a society in running more smoothly. More details about Project Ancient Waves will be revealed later this year.

According to the Sala, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles features in-depth building tools available to players. A trailer released earlier this month went into detail about some of the game’s city-building tools. The trailer showcased a massive city built using 20,000 different constructions, and housing 100,000 citizens.

A demo for Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles was released back in February, featuring a scenario to play through, as well as up to 25 different buildings to experiment with.

With 20,000 different constructions and 100,000 new citizens, it’s an incredible network of old and new buildings. Some sections link together with bridges, but airships also roam the sky. Combined with the atmospherics and times of day, it highlights how intricate and gorgeous some cities can get.

Of course, there’s more to the experience than building, as players must prepare for real-time combat, forging alliances and ultimately ensuring the survival of their city. Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is available March 26th for $19.99 on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, and PC. Pre-order now, and get The Falconeer: Warrior Edition for free, ready to play.

Publisher Wired Productions also released a new trailer showcasing Photo Mode (included with the demo). Along with changing the depth of field and time of day, players can replay the construction of their builds, pause and play, and fully manipulate the camera. It’s great for admiring one’s city and the visuals in general.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles is coming to PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC on March 26th, retailing for $19.99. Pre-orders also get a free copy of The Falconeer: Warrior Edition and can start playing immediately. Stay tuned for more details on the title in the coming weeks, and check out our interview with the developer here.

The demo will be the first chance that console players will get to try out Bulwark: The Falconeer Chronicles, since the last demo was released only on PC. The demo will feature one complete scenario that is designed to teach players Bulwark: The Falconeer Chronicles. It will feature up to 15 buildings.

Bulwark: The Falconeer Chronicles was originally announced all the way back in August 2022. Taking place in the Flaconeer universe, the game was announced with a trailer showcasing its oceanic setting of The Great Ursee. Gameplay in the city builder will revolve around managing resources, building up a city, and making choices that make defending the city easier or harder.

What sets Bulwark: The Falconeer Chronicles apart from its city building contemporaries is that it encourages a more freeform style of city-building, rather than forcing players into more rigid grid-based layouts. For more details on the game, check out our interview with Tomas Sala.

According to Sala, the demo for Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles will be an “evolving demo”, which will be getting updates based on player feedback. In many ways, Sala’s statement indicates that the demo is also a way for him to beta test the upcoming city builder.

“Putting out a new demo or game is always as anxious as it is exciting. I’ve put in a lot of effort to take in all the feedback and improvements suggested by players already,” Sala said. “This new demo then is an evolving demo, as I’m aiming to continue that process. It will be updated as I continue development and serve as both a showcase and opportunity for players to be heard, I hope everyone enjoys what it has to offer.”

The demo for Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles hopes to highlight the game’s free-form approach to city-building, allowing players to build and expand their settlemenets depending on the demands of the harsh landscapes of the Ursee.

"When the itch for a new project came around, I first evaluated The Falconeer and decided to continue with the parts that most resonated with players, sort of critiquing it as well. It was clear that the world, both the visual quality of it and the worldbuilding resonated best with gamers so that was a healthy starting point."

Bulwark is set in the world of The Falconeer, but it is, of course, a very different kind of game. What was behind the decision to develop a strategy title in the universe? Was making it its own IP something that you considered?

I think when you start to look at another project as an indie, you are driven by necessity as much as creativity. I strongly believe that the ‘game jam’ model of bashing out something new till it sticks is inherently wasteful and less and less sustainable in today’s marketplace of massive amounts of games.

So when the itch for a new project came around, I first evaluated The Falconeer and decided to continue with the parts that most resonated with players, sort of critiquing it as well. It was clear that the world, both the visual quality of it and the worldbuilding resonated best with gamers so that was a healthy starting point. What resonated most with myself, and I enjoyed most about the process of The Falconeer was creating the little towns and forts. So combining those two, Bulwark was born. With the core premise being,” design your own Mont Saint Michel”, a premise that also feels right for a world full of pandemics, war, and natural collapse, we all need someplace to feel safe. I also helped tremendously by watching the genre of sandbox builders and chill strategy games being born during the development of The Falconeer, something very inspirational.

Bulwark is taking a unique approach to its building mechanics, with its in-world 3D building tools. Can you talk to us about how these work in terms of the moment-to-moment gameplay and how they help set the game apart from other strategy titles?

So I think it’s unwise to call Bulwark a strategy game or even a city builder, I’ve already learned this from the demo. It is in essence a 3D sandbox builder in a living (and conflicted) world. When you play Bulwark it’s not about going into a problem-solving mindset, it’s about enjoying building a fortress or settlement and watching it come alive (and interacting with other factions on the Ursee, including a spot of combat). I make the joke, there are no mistakes, only happy accidents (quoting the lovely Bob Ross). So gameplay reflects that when there are resources they are unlimited and only transporting that unlimited stream across vast distances is a challenge, which you solve by building.

So when you want to build a giant fortress somewhere on a lonely rock, you’ll need to provide some resources to that location. You can do that by first placing an outpost on the island and then building a bridge for your main resources to reach that outpost, but you can also set up a trade route with ships. But you might find that say iron (there are workers, wood, stone, and iron in the game) isn’t reaching that outpost, the mine is too far away. Your solution is either to find a shorter route to the new outpost or simply build up the iron-producing area. You can do that by simply building more stuff around that area, getting workers there, and automatically they will build up production. The solution is always to build something. That is the core gameplay.

One thing to add is that there is no list of buildings to place, unlike a city or colony sim, you don’t decide what gets built for the most part. You get a few basic buildings, towers, outposts, and harbors, but once you place them workers will build houses or industry around them. The building then is quite simple, you stretch out a line from your outpost (or other building) and if the cursor is close you get a foundation, is it far and you get a new tower and a walkway or wall that connects it back to your current selection. The procedural system decides how that wall looks, which foundation is possible over a certain angle or cliff. So you have some powers to steer things, and you can upgrade towers with resources (if they have access) which gives you fancier foundations and walls between towers.

There is a sort of balancing here I’m trying to achieve, where it’s more that you paint over the landscape and your settlement literally grows out from that core infrastructure you lay down. It is really satisfying to see your settlement grow as you drape it across some brutal cliffside while you upgrade the towers to massive fortresses, but it does require you to let go, relax and go with the flow. I find some people’s first question is always “but how do I decide what I build”, and for a part you don’t, you discover what can be built. It’s a game about exploration as a creative force.

"There is a sort of balancing here I’m trying to achieve, where it’s more that you paint over the landscape and your settlement literally grows out from that core infrastructure you lay down."

How much will Bulwark overlap with The Falconeer in terms of its gameplay mechanics?

Very little, you have a surveyor airship to fly around the same world and interact with other factions and people, to explore new places and drop down some starting buildings to get the ground building going. But even that has a more cursor centric control system. But you will recognize the Ursee, but then 40 years later, some places flourished, others destroyed after decades of war, and the factions and units will also largely make a return. Though with some evolution.

Do you have plans to add multiplayer support to the game?

I am not a multiplayer focused designer, and technically it requires a much larger team than myself. So for now no.  But I have been toying with the idea of having some way for people to share their creations, perhaps via modding or something related, but that is in its infancy and won’t be in the release version.

Roughly how long will an average playthrough of the game be?

This one is tricky, it’s a sandbox and not a linear campaign. I can tell from the testing so far it’s a game that will eat up the hours quite quickly. There will also be some more conventional goals, where if you fully align with a faction you will gain a ‘wonder’ for your settlement, I suspect it will take more than a few hours to unlock such a wonder.

As a solo developer, what sort of challenges have you faced with Bulwark’s development, especially given how different it is from The Falconeer?

I think the main risk for a solo developer is staying stuck on something for too long, but related to that is not getting enough feedback. Covid was quite damaging in that regard, no shows and places to watch people play your game. For Bulwark I’m using demos and public releases as a way to get lots of feedback in a short time and do high pressure update cycles live, so while people are playing try to address their issues and feedback and improve the game. So that’s something new for me and quite a challenge but also already quite fruitful. Without team feedback you have to make the gamers your team as it were.

"I think the main risk for a solo developer is staying stuck on something for too long, but related to that is not getting enough feedback."

Can fans expect more games in the future set in The Falconeer’s world that offer different kinds of experiences?

I have plans for at least one more game in the Falconeer Chronicles series. At the moment the idea is to make a sailing game , either a chill trader set in an earlier version of the Ursee (the world of The Falconeer). Or make a tugboat/pilot game where you are a captain/pilot that pilots giant trading and warships into safe harbour and while the world devolves into war you learn that small acts of resistance can have a great impact. These are just ideas at the moment, but definitely something nautical. There are also plans to get into animation and other forms of storytelling focused on this universe, but more about that in the future.

Taking place in the oceanic world of The Great Ursee, Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles will involve players having to manage resources, build up a city, and making choices that might make defending said city either easier, or much harder.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles was originally unveiled earlier this year with a reveal trailer.

One of the things setting Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles apart from other city builders is the fact that this game doesn’t force players into rigid for their cities. Rather, the player is encouraged to build and grow their cities in more organic, dynamic layouts depending on what the terrain will allow them to do.

Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles still doesn’t yet have a release date, but we do know that it is coming to PC thanks to its Steam listing.