A gentle and unusual building game that’s memorable but missing some purpose.
Bulwark is a city-building game that works differently to any city-building game I’ve ever played. Faced with the barren rocky outcrops of a stormy archipelago, and a handful of buildings to place on them, I thought I knew what to do. In a sense, I did – I knew I needed to build all over it. But how I’d end up doing that would be in a way completely of the game’s own. Bulwark is eccentric. Bulwark is its own thing, for better and for worse.
I expected that, to a degree. To fill you in a bit: Bulwark is the second game in what we now know will be a trilogy – the Falconeer Chronicles – made by solo designer Tomas Sala. The first game, The Falconeer, came out a few years ago and had you fly around a stormy archipelago on the back of a giant falcon. It was an aerial combat game. This second game takes you back to the same stormy archipelago but puts a zoomed out, city-building perspective on it. And the third game, known as Project Ancient Waves, will take us there again in a different way. I like this.
