You can’t go wrong with an airship, that’s what I say! Well, apart from that one time when things went very wrong with an airship. Historically wrong, some might claim. Ahem. But at least I can confidently state that all the best videogames have airships in them, like everyone’s favourite Final Fantasy, 12, the third best Bioshock game, and, er, middling survival sim Forever Skies. Look, I just like airships, okay? Let me have this, please.
Chill city-builder and definitely not a strategy game Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles already features airships in abundance, which by my admittedly unusual metric makes it the best videogame ever made. But where do you go once you’ve ascended to the zenith of creative expression? The answer, of course, is bigger airship.
Ginormous blimps are the headline feature of Bulwark’s latest update, which introduces the biggest balloon yet seen in Tomas Sala’s gentle game of mountain fortification management. The Behemoth is a vast, heavily armed aerial flagship with three different upgrade tiers that players can acquire as they explore Bulwark’s lofty world.
Players can find this flying fortress by tracking down the “Master of Ammunitions” located somewhere in Bulwark’s silent sea area. While the update’s Steam post doesn’t describe in detail what the Behemoth does, it does say the ship is “OP AF”. This is not something most developers would typically brag about, but Sala has repeatedly stressed that Bulwark isn’t designed to be a tightly ratcheted strategy game, even changing its name at one point to avoid confusion. Instead, it’s more about letting players express their desires for construction and/or conquest with minimal friction.
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Alongside the Behemoth, the update adds several other locations to Bulwark. The most notable of these is the Entagon, which has little to do with tree people but plenty to do with spies. Acquiring the Entagon unlocks subterfuge diplomacy events, letting you acquire settlements from rival factions, corrupt faction commanders to do your bidding, undo vassalizations, and disrupt settlement defences.
Elsewhere, the update adds Arbologies which will grow trees when supplied with workers, curved walls for more nuanced construction, several quality-of-life features like a limited fast-travel system and a supersampling setting for antialiasing, and the usual array of balance tweaks and bugfixes.
Sala prefaces the update’s Steam post with a couple of requests to “help keep Bulwark and a new game development going”, presumably because, like so many games, Bulwark is struggling against the ferocious riptide of new Steam releases for prominence. He asks players to review the game on Steam, adding that “any review helps, even the critical ones”, and also requests that Bulwark fans follow him as a developer, noting that “Valve has told me many exciting things that will make this super worthwhile in the future.” Intriguing!
If you’ve yet to try out Bulwark yourself and all my airship talk has got you curious, it’s currently available for less than half price as part of Steam’s autumn sale. That brings the price down to $9 (£7.19). The discount ends on October 6.
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