The game Fallen Aces was released on June 14, 2024 on Steam. The game is currently in Early Access, meaning that it is not yet finished, but is being semi-frequently updated and at a reduced price. The likely reason why this game has taken this route is because it has a very small development team of only two people, Trey Powell and Jason Bond. The game is also published by New Blood Interactive. Fallen Aces currently only has Episode 1 released, consisting of 5 levels, which the game calls chapters. There are a total of 3 episodes planned to be released. Even though Fallen Aces is not yet completed, I think that it may become one of my favorite games in the future, and even now I have greatly enjoyed my time with it.
The first thing that I want to mention about Fallen Aces is the game’s visuals. Honestly, the art style was the driving force behind me buying this game versus others. Even now that a lot of games try to replicate the style of older games, they usually don’t replicate the look of games that have 2D characters and objects in a 3D space, like in the original Doom. This combined with going all in on looking like an expressive ‘30s comic gives this games a very unique visual identity. In addition to how the game looks during gameplay, the cutscenes are animated as motion comics, which contributes to this strong visual identity.
Fallen Aces’s gameplay allows for a lot of player freedom. The levels only give you a few objectives, and you are free to get to those objectives any way that you would like. The most obvious way to approach a challenge in this game is through combat. Essentially any object in a level that you see can be used as a weapon. These weapons make things a whole lot easier, but the game carefully manages what is available to you. At the start of the game, you only have three inventory slots, so you have to carefully choose what items that you think will be useful. While you can buy upgrades later on that can expand your inventory, those extra slots can only be used for ammunition and food (Although food can also be used to throw at enemies). Another factor determining what you can use is durability. All weapons will break after a while, so you can’t rely on one really good item to carry you through tough combat encounters. Also, enemies only drop broken weapons when beaten in combat, making it hard to fight your whole way through a level.
Guns are a good representation of the way that weapons are managed in this game. Just like other weapons, guns are unusable if they are dropped by a enemy that has been beaten up. In addition to guns already taking up an inventory slot, spare ammunition takes up another. This occasionally puts the player into the tough position of finding ammunition for a gun they don’t have, and leaving them with a tough decision. They can either keep the ammunition and have less inventory space in hopes that they stumble upon a gun that can use it later on, or they can drop it and have more space, but be out of luck if they find a gun later on. This situation is pretty frequent, because guns and their specific ammunition are not often in the same location. While these limitations on guns may sound annoying, it ends up making it incredibly satisfying when you do get a fully loaded gun and are able to easily blow past an otherwise tough grouping of enemies.
Stealth is also a big part of how a player can get around obstacles in Fallen Aces. Because all items are throwable, the player has a lot of chances to make distractions to better get around enemies. If you sneak up on an enemy, you are able to chop them, which instantly and silently takes them out. The important thing about chopping enemies is that it is the only way to get an enemy to drop their weapon intact. This could lead to a player who is good at stealth having a much greater surplus of weapons, although they won’t be able to carry it all. There are also a lot of shadows throughout levels, which add to the game’s atmosphere while also aiding you in stealth.
Players can also get around obstacles through traversal. Platforming is a surprisingly important part of this game, and there hasn’t been a time where I saw somewhere in a level that I couldn’t climb to. I think that this aspect of the gameplay is what really makes Fallen Aces unique. Other games like this that focus on player freedom only really focus on solving challenges through combat or stealth. When traversal is a focus, it is usually a pretty basic way to get from point A to point B. Fallen Aces differs in that it isn’t always too obvious that you are able get somewhere, which really makes you have to think for yourself.
The final thing to note about all of these ways to approach problems in this game is that they all interact with each other. As I’ve already mentioned, stealth helps you get intact weapons for use in combat, but a lot of the time, there are also weapons hidden away in far-off parts of the level that you can only reach by climbing. Traversing to a good vantage point helps with determining the best route for stealth, or even what order to fight a group of enemies in. No one option is the best for every situation, so you have to think about how to approach problems.
Another gameplay feature that sets this game apart from others is how you have the option to either kill every enemy you see or take a nonlethal approach. Simply killing enemies is almost always the easier route, but trying to be nonlethal is still very fun. The game has no extrinsic reward for not killing an enemy, but managing to do so in a level feels incredibly satisfying. Trying not to kill enemies makes you consider things that you wouldn’t have previously, like making sure that you are only using blunt weapons or that you aren’t kicking people off of steep inclines.
I won’t spoil any specifics, but the game has an engaging story and an intriguing mystery. What has been shown so far has me hooked to see what will happen later in the story. Tonally, the game is well balanced because it manages to be pretty dark while also staying true to its premise of being based on old cheesy comics. The game can swing from investigating murder scenes to humorous dialogues while feeling very natural. While the story is mostly told through cutscenes, the levels also contain details that add to the story, like conversations between NPCs, journals, and secret areas. While these details don’t have large impacts on the story, they do provide interesting bits of foreshadowing. Some of these details have already been paid off in Episode 1, while others have not, which excites me about what they may lead to in Episodes 2 & 3.
Episode 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but development has started on it. Previews of what will be in Episode 2 are posted to the developers’ and New Blood’s social media on sites like Twitter and Bluesky. The new levels are the main focal point of these posts, and they show set pieces like a police station, a suburb, and an abandoned mansion, among other locations, unlike what has been seen in Episode 1.
The next two episodes are not the only things coming up for Fallen Aces, as a level editor is supposed to be released this month. This will be used with the Steam Workshop, so that players will be able to download each other’s levels. I don’t think that I’ve ever played a game before that had a level editor without being centered around it, but this feature does suit the game well. The game also has had a lot of smaller updates that it will continue receiving, like updates to enemy animations and new voicelines.
Right now, Fallen Aces is only available to get on PC, but console ports are possible in the future. Additionally, Steam is the only place to buy the game, but it will be available on GOG after all Episodes are released. If you predominantly use Steam, the best time to get the game would likely be now, because the price will go up as more episodes are released. I think that it is definitely worth the price because even though it isn’t too long of a game, the gameplay being so open-ended encourages plenty of replay value.
