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Fallen Aces has just enough immersive sim substance to match up to its eye-popping pulp comic styleFPSOTY (Frying Pan Sound of the Year)
FPSOTY (Frying Pan Sound of the Year)
Image credit:New Blood Interactive
Image credit:New Blood Interactive
This breaks my writerly first person narrative, but I’m jazzed to discover that you can eat said fridge fruit directly without putting them in your inventory first. Ye gads! Is this… better thanPrey (2017)? In this one aspect, yes. Please do not quote me out of context here, Mr. Oshry.
Image credit:New Blood Interactive
The barber gets up from cowering the corner, thanks me, and lets me raid his storage for smashables. I find a medikit and a wrench, which rounds out my maximum inventory space of three items. I am tempted to go visit Pete next, but the city block (and its many opportunities for fighting) calls to me. My initial take at this point is that the combat sandbox - replete with various weapons and throwables and parries, dodges and stealth kills as it is, is where most of the imm-sim reactiveness and choice lives. That said, I do find a back way out of the barbershop through vents and an alley, so I could have stealthed my way through this encounter, were I a rank coward.
Fallen Aces: Episode 1 Release Date TrailerWatch on YouTube
Fallen Aces: Episode 1 Release Date Trailer
Soon, I’m in a harbour warehouse having a chat with a crime-fightery chap named Nightwave via radio. It’s not just the early 20th century mobster stuff: the game also draws on classic superhero comics and pulp paperbacks, right down to the goofy noise when a goon slips on a banana peel. The warehouse itself reminds me much more a classic im-sim level, with multiple routes and elevation levels, plus inside and outside zones with nooks and long shadows for stealth.
Image credit:New Blood Interactive
It’s here I’m treated to my first shootable - a nail gun. I use it to shoot a button which opens the dock office for me. You’ve found a secret! The game tells me. This feels a bit unnatural, but I do enjoy headpats. Next, I spy some mooks. Annoyingly, stealth headshots with the nail gun don’t kill them, but they still go down quick. “Not so tough now, are ya?” taunts my ‘tagonist, which is fine, but nowhere as good as “What’s wrong? Not tough as nails?” or even the classic “Get the point? Of the nails? From my nailgun?”, but you can’t have everything.
The main gate to the next section is locked, so I climb a pile of crates to a water tower, and hop over. I think this is a good litmus test for the game in miniature. In a more granular immersive sim, I probably would have needed to pile those crates myself, rather than finding them arranged in a pleasingly ladder-like fashion. That would have been satisfying, but also slow, and Fallen Aces is clearly pushing most of its chips into its fightin’ sandbox, with environmental considerations mostly widened so they give you more avenues and alleys - sometimes literally - to get the drop on a gang of mooks.
There’s certainly room for a game like this putting brawling front and centre, and all the better if it has such an absolute wealth of objects to lovingly bowl at the back of a flatcap’d mook’s empty skull. I make contact with Nightwave again, who helpfully offers to snipe goons I spot for him - an unexpected bit of set-piece work I didn’t expect to see, but is more than welcome, especially as I wasted all my nails trying to break environmental objects for no good reason. Fallen Aces is available in early access onSteam now, and it’ll only cost you a couple of casual Friday night poker blinds to buy in.
