When Ubisoft first introduced Eagle Flight, I was ecstatic, despite the obvious Assassin’s Creed-esque feel to it; after all, Ubisoft has experience in building sandbox cities. Ubisoft has taken those skills, changed art direction, and borrowed the eagles from Assassin’s Creed to create Eagle Flight, a VR game that is a step in the right direction but never truly reaches its full potential.
In the game, you take control of an eagle and go on its life journey from birth in the fine city of Paris — except that Paris is significantly more condensed, and humans have long been gone from the planet, replaced by flora and fauna. Conceptually, Eagle Flight is truly cool. You get to fly around a city — and let’s face it, we have all wanted to experience flight — but just how would you translate that into a nausea-free experience? Ubisoft has managed that by giving full control of the eagle through the VR headset; your controller is only used to speed up and slow down. Tilting your head left or right will shift direction, while looking up and down will allow you to maneuver through the vertical space. Looking left or right gives just an ever so slight bend, but you have to tilt your head for the full effect. Visual effects conceal what would prove nauseating. For example, flying low through the narrow streets increases the vignetting, concealing the flurry of building textures that would make you dizzy. Up in the sky, the vignetting is reduced, and appears only so slightly in the direction you tilt. It’s not very noticeable when you’re in the action, and it works brilliantly.
As far as the action itself is concerned, this is where Eagle Flight doesn’t soar as high as its potential. There are three modes for you to choose from: Story Mode guides you through the life of the eagle, with a set of missions each taking place in a specific neighbourhood of Paris. Missions including gliding through rings, collecting feathers (does this remind you of another Ubisoft game?) and some bird combat here and there. Missions vary in difficulty and you’re rated based on your performance, but there’s really little incentive to play Story Mode — there is little story here but more of a National Geographic kind of documentary narration on the animals and suburbs. What Story Mode achieves is introduce you to the mechanics, which you will be using in the other two modes.
The second mode is a free-roaming mode where you explore the city at your own pleasure. Paris is lovely, if a little small. From high up, it’s impressive to look at and appreciate how little the buildings and everything down there can be. The perspective is kind of eye opening on a philosophical level, but I am not going to dwell on that in this review. Should you want exhilaration, swoop down and navigate through the streets, ruins, and crevices that are abundant in the city.
The meaty aspect of the game is multiplayer, which is — for now — unfortunately restricted to 3v3 capture-the-prey skirmishes. The city is open to you, and you’re thrown into a team with random people and have to find the prey and bring it back to base while fending off the other pesky eagles. Where the prey is positioned is often tricky, and it’s a lot of fun swooping down and zipping in between buildings avoiding the other eagles while looking for that rabbit — and hope you won’t crash into a building or a tree. Once the prey has been fetched, you have to take it back to base. The unfortunate aspect here is that the base is shared with the rival players, so should you be within metres of the base and you crash or get killed, a member from the other team can pick up your hard-earned prey and just fly those few more metres for a quick win. It often results in unfair gameplay, but since players are random and there is no means to communicate, it’s unlikely they will coordinate a strategy to cheat you.
What is problematic about the multiplayer set up is that, on many days, it’s quite often difficult to have a full team on either side. On numerous occasions, it’s a 2 vs 1, or 2 vs 2; rarely is it ever a full team party. And since it is only one map with one multiplayer mode, it will get old fast. There are day/night cycles to add variety to the same landscape, but soon you will grow tired of it.
And that’s the main issue I have with Eagle Flight. On paper, it is fantastic and exhilarating. It is also well executed and provides you a unique VR experience. It starts out strongly, but the novelty soon wears thin, and it being light on content and general difficulty in finding players does not go in its favour. Even on good days when you have many players online, you’ll find yourself losing interest after a few matches and switching to free-roam mode and just enjoy the view. Perhaps that is really the selling point: not the story mode nor the frantic multiplayer, but to simply sit back glide through the sky, relax, and enjoy the view.
