Paris, the city of love, once filled with human beings has been left behind. Humans disappeared and left the city in the paws of the animals and the force of nature. Buildings collapsed and created the perfect nests for all kinds of animals. You awaken as a young eagle, trying to figure out your place in the animal kingdom and the gorgeous city of Paris.
Learning your place in the world
Eagle Flight has a story mode and that’s perhaps the biggest surprise of the game. When I first inserted the game, I was guessing this would be another one of those tech demos showing the potential of the PSVR without really delivering a story. Soon after entering the gorgeous world of Eagle Flight, I was proven wrong. A voice spoke to me, explaining how this version of Paris came to be. Minutes later, I jumped into the story of the game. The story starts in your egg. Two adult eagles, your parents, free you from your egg and take you on your first flight through Paris. What happened next was pure magic.
Thanks to the PSVR, you’ll be sucked into the story immediately, you’re not playing a game about an eagle trying to grow up in Paris, you are the eagle! You see everything through the eyes of the eagle and you move by tilting your head left or right, this works extremely well. The controller is used to speed up or slow down. Ubisoft really managed to create an experience that feels real, even if every brain cell in your body knows it’s not.
The story itself isn’t that innovative or mind-blowing, it just teaches you how to behave in the city, you’ll be the eagle from the day you came out of your egg until the day you meet a partner and create small eagles of your own. The life of an eagle isn’t as exciting as you might have guessed but Ubisoft fixed this problem by creating enough variation in the missions.
Not one mission is the same
Thanks to the story, you’ll always know what to do. It starts rather easy, with checkpoints you need to cross but later on, the game introduces some more intense missions where you’ll have to hunt other animals and try to shoot them down. Shoot? That’s right, Ubisoft didn’t really care for realism and gave the eagles the special power of ‘screaming’ their enemies to the ground. With just a push of the button, your eagle will scream and if this scream hits the opponent, it will fall to the ground. Enemies can also scream at you but you can block this by using your special shield. It’s nothing realistic but it does make the game a lot more interesting to play. There truly is a difference between discovering Paris or trying to scream down other creatures to the ground, resulting in unexpected and unpredictable missions.
Soar above a gorgeous Paris
The missions truly offer enough variation to keep you going for a couple of hours. Think about catching fish, flying through narrow tunnels and a lot more. After every mission, you’ll be granted with stars, you need one to unlock the next mission but there’s a total of 129 stars to collect in Paris. You collect those by beating your personal scores or by clearing certain missions under a certain time. If you collect enough stars, you’ll unlock even more missions that will result in even more stars. If you want to collect every star, you’ll need around ten hours to fully complete the game. If collecting everything isn’t your cup of tea, you’ll finish the main story in around five hours.
You’re not alone
If you cleared the story, you can look for hidden places in the free roam mode where you’re free to go where you want to go, or you can jump into the chaotic but fun multiplayer. In multiplayer, two teams of three are battling to capture a prey somewhere on the map. Once you grabbed the prey, it’s your task to bring it to your nest before the other team manages to steal the prey from you. They can steal your prey by firing ‘screams’ towards you. The best strategy to avoid those screams is to fly low above the ground, creating way more obstacles to dodge. If you’re trying to bring your prey to safety while flying high above the ground, you’ll be hit in no time.
The multiplayer is extremely addictive and works incredibly well. Ubisoft really managed to create a multiplayer experience that’s perfect to play for shorter sessions. Since this is still a Virtual Reality game, it’s not advised to play it for too long, this could result in motion sickness or headaches. This multiplayer however is the perfect example of how Virtual Reality games should work and how long they should demand your full focus while playing. It’s a shame Ubisoft didn’t include more modes like a more traditional deathmatch for example but that’s perhaps something that can be added in the future.
Conclusion:
Eagle Flight is one of the biggest surprises of my personal gaming year. Soaring above this gorgeous version of Paris is extremely addictive and an incredible experience. The story is fun but is kept a little too light to really get you sucked into it. There’s a lot to discover and you’ll always want to find new, undiscovered, places on the map. If you’re finished with the story, you can jump into the intense multiplayer. Too bad there aren’t more multiplayer modes, but that doesn’t take away the fact that this still remains an amazing game. If you own a PSVR, do yourself a favor and go check out Eagle Flight, it’s worth it!
