Ubisoft are taking the year off from Assassin’s Creed games with the likes of the movie and the massive distraction of The Division in 2016, but that doesn’t mean it’s left no room for its long-standing love for birds of prey with one of its first virtual reality games, Eagle Flight. Putting you quite literally in a birds eye view and giving you the city and skyline of Paris as your playground it’s got the potential to be one of the big early titles for VR headsets, the Oculus Rift and the PlayStation VR.
Release date
Ubisoft is being conventionally noncommittal about the intended release date for Eagle Flight, but then with such a burgeoning technology like virtual technology you can’t really blame it. All its willing to commit to at the moment is that the VR flight fantasy will be landing some time later in 2016, so we’re left to speculate that the release will be tied in with the arrival of the Oculus Rift and the PlayStation VR.
Story
The setup is quintessential Ubisoft with a post apocalyptic landscape, but things are a long way away from the harsh New York winter in The Division or the ungrateful undead uprising in a dark and dank London in Zombi U. In Eagle Flight the apocalypse happened long ago and now all there is left of humanity is the cities that they left behind, which have begun to be taken back by the unrelenting entropy of nature.
The setting is fifty years after humanity’s disappearance from the face of the planet in a very lush and green Paris of the future as streets are overrun by fields of grass, encroaching woodland and a growing ecosystem of wildlife. In this dense and green environment you play an eagle that is just trying to survive as best it knows how, just like all of the other creatures left on the planet.
Gameplay
Essentially, you take on the role of one of the wild Parisian eagles and get to fly around the city in first person view through the screen of your virtual reality headset. Like Pilotwings, that sounds like a lot of fun in and of itself, but it’s not enough to ensure an absorbing experience for gamers, who will inevitably tire of just flying around Paris for sheds and girdles.
However, to up the interest level, the developers have also thrown in the potential of aerial dogfights into the mix. Here you’ll need to fight off rivals in soaring battles over the city in a bid to protect your territory. You’ll also have an abundance of single player challenges to tackle, which range from flying through increasingly difficult ring courses to shooting challenges.
You’ll also need to explore the city thoroughly to hunt down and collect the hidden collectables dotted throughout Paris. It sounds a bit like the flying equivalent of chest and helix location hunting in Assassin’s Creed, so could end up being a bit of a grind unless there’s a genuine reward for tracking things down.
The comes comes 6 person online multi-player game modes to take the battle for the skies to the rest of the world in team-based action. Having a good understanding of all of the shortcuts and tunnels throughout the game will be a big advantage in the online multiplayer, so that puts a lot more importance to discovering them and remembering where to find them from your aerial wanderings in the single player game.
Graphics
There’s a unique style to the open world beauty of Eagle Flight that looks somewhere between The Legend Of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD and Assassin’s Creed Unity. The cel shading design works very well when combined with the vast open world setting we’ve come to expect from Ubisoft.
It makes for a big, stunning landscape to soar around in with a lot of recognisable landmarks to circle and swoop through, not least of all the Eiffel Tower, which you can see in the image above. However, some of the granular detail that you associate with Ubisoft cityscape rendering isn’t included in the game, which does make things look a little like a CAD animation for town planning at times.
On the positive side, the pace and slick movement of the flying means that you probably won’t have too much time to notice the slight lack of detail to the brickwork of the city. There’s an impressive flow to the animation and if anything the styling only adds to the otherworldly nature of the VR experience behind the game.
First impressions
Eagle Flight will be won and lost on the gameplay action for the game, which for us ties in to the kind of gamers that would have been excited about the prospect of Pilotwings 3D, following the genius of Pilotwings 64 back in the day. Where the Nintendo 64 title worked well is that it combined what were then stunning visuals and a genius flight sim experience with some very tangible challenges and freeflowing rewards. Where it subsequently went wrong with Pilotwings 3D is that the challenges and rewards with way too shallow. If Eagle Flight can avoid falling into a similar trap and deliver a genuinely entertaining online multiplayer game then it could be a big early name in VR gaming.
