Eagle Flight (PS4)

Flight is a concept that has captivated humanity for ages, spurring our push to develop planes and other flying vehicles as well as placing near the top of lists for peoples’ most desired superpower. It’s not surprising that when there are discussions about what kind of games are a good fit for virtual reality, a game that lets the player feel like they’re flying often comes up, and for PlayStation 4’s VR headset, Ubisoft swooped in with Eagle Flight to fill that niche.

 

Eagle Flight positions the player as a bald eagle, the visual display of the headset even incorporating feathers on its edges and a beak at the bottom to better make the player feel like they are viewing things through the eyes of an eagle. There is no landing in Eagle Flight, with the bird taking flight the moment you start playing a game mode. While you’re always moving forward under the game’s control, you do of course have control of your turning and elevation, the way you tip your head while wearing the VR headset determining which direction you fly in. While diving or flying upwards are as simple as moving your head forward and back, turning is handled not by looking left or right but by tilting your head to the side. There is of course a natural inclination to try and move your head to look in the direction you want to go, but the head tipping does make for the most precise turns as the game asserts and it can be adjusted to once you’re more immersed in the game’s world. Eagle Flight captures the act of flying very well, your head movements having a clear and immediate effect on your in-game movement that allows for greater precision as you angle to navigate more complex or tight areas. Despite trying to make you feel like you’re flying, Eagle Flight doesn’t seem to care too much about the physical body of your eagle, in that you can easily fly into small areas that the bird logically wouldn’t be able to fit through. The space your body fills is essentially the size of a small cursor in the middle of the screen, and while this does alleviate some navigational frustration and even improves your flight capabilities by opening up more movement possibilities, it does ruin the potential immersion of feeling like you’re an actual bird taking flight.

The controller might play a part in breaking your immersion as well. While your movement is dependent entirely on the virtual reality headset, you must hold a PS4 controller to handle a few other details, such as managing your flight speed with the shoulder buttons. The game also dispenses with trying to mirror reality fairly closely when you unlock special abilities for your eagle, such as a screech attack that launches a sonic projectile or a shield of sound to protect you from the attacks of other birds. These seem odd additions if you’re hoping to play this game for a fairly simple flight simulator, but there is a free play mode where you can just fly about for the thrill of the experience alone and not have to use these clear video game mechanics that do enhance the more structured game modes. In all modes, you will be flying over the French city of Paris 50 years after humanity has gone extinct, and nature has managed to reclaim the city to make for an environmental mix of nature and man-made structures. Animals once kept in the zoo have begun to thrive here, adding elephants, giraffes, and more to the biodiversity of the city, and you can expect to find the remnants of Paris’s famous sights like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower in this postapocalyptic cityscape. There is only the one city to fly about in, and while it is large and has plenty of distinct areas, it can feel like they phoned in some area design like clusters of identical buildings that might have emphasized authenticity over playability.

 

For those looking for a structured story experience, the game provides one in the tale of an eagle who is finding its place in Paris, the player provided missions where the bird gradually builds more roosts and asserts their dominance over certain areas of the city before building their nest to try and raise some eggs. Unsurprisingly, most of these missions are flight tests, often taking the form of timed challenges where you need to fly through every ring on a path, collect a certain amount of feathers or fish, keep pace with a fellow bird, or just make it through to the end of an area. Flight challenges can take place in the openness of the city or beneath it in the subways and catacombs, the difficulty scaling to the point you will need a mastery of the flying controls to survive. Every mission is graded on a three star scale based purely on your speed of completion, and the stars are unforgiving even if you get the movement down well. You will need to move at incredible speeds to earn three stars in the later missions, holding the trigger to move fast and hitting the air vortexes or speed markers in rings to get pivotal boosts. So long as you hit one star in a mission you can move on, but the mission immediately ends if you get below that. Getting a good rating is only important outside of that for unlocking the challenge missions, but none of them are particularly unique in design, just often transplants of mission types into new areas with stringent timers and difficult obstacles.

There is another mission type that starts cropping up once you unlock your screech attack though, and that would be the battle missions. Here, the goal isn’t just to fly well, but to also take down things such as crows, vultures, or even other players in the game’s multiplayer mode. You’re often tasked with protecting someone other than yourself, and in multiplayer there’s a rabbit both teams battle for possession of that could mean you are protecting a teammate or getting defended by your allies instead. Either way, the combat is pretty straightforward, your attacks about positioning your vision to launch the screech attack to instantly wipe out any foe it hits. Thankfully, you don’t have to rely on keen eagle eyes to spot them, as their wings trail red and there are usually a few other indicators to help you figure out where they might be. Smart flying and your sonic shield will mean you’re at very little risk against the game-controlled birds and their sonic screeches, although multiplayer and more hectic missions will often have the screen flash red to show you’re in danger a bit too often. Human opponents will mean you’ll face decent opposition, but a lot of the single-player missions are more about taking down all enemy targets before time runs out or the eagle you’re protecting gets hit. Computer-controlled birds pack some extra tricks to make them harder like wind traps, but there still aren’t any hard-hitting foes even in the final battle of the game.

 

The focus in Eagle Flight is certainly on the flying, but the game has very little idea how to make that more than just the central mechanic. The missions repeat the same goal of staying on a flight path and the combat missions are pretty basic, the game trying to make them more difficult not through the actions you’re doing but the time in which you have to do them. If you choose to just fly about Paris instead of engaging the short story, there are a few collectibles like features and salmon you can pick up while you explore, but it isn’t a very engaging task. Eagle Flight is counting on your enjoyment coming from the sensation of flight, it just lacks the creativity to push beyond the inherent thrill and freedom found in flying around as a bird.

THE VERDICT: Eagle Flight feels like it could serve as a good baseline virtual reality experience. The VR headset allows it to immerse the player in the act of flying around Paris as an eagle, and while there were some allowances made to make it a game more fun than realistic, it does deliver on making flight easy and enjoyable for the player. Where it falters is in its difficulty in giving the player more to do than just flying about a detailed environment, its missions repeating the same structures too often and relying on strict timers as their form of difficulty rather than making the actual activity the challenging part. Having such tight control over the sensation of flight is incredibly satisfying, but the playground to do it in doesn’t test it properly or engage the player enough to make them want to stay for a long visit.

 

And so, I give Eagle Flight for the PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. There’s an inherent wow factor to virtual reality games that can make the act of flying incredibly satisfying, but trying to make Eagle Flight’s experience feel right came at the price of substance. Eagle Flight’s flying hits that mark well and its version of Paris is large enough that you can amuse yourself for quite a while just moving about in the air. Eventually though, you’ll become accustomed to that basic action, and Eagle Flight’s problems arise as it fails to give you much to do outside of some of the most standard flight challenges you can think of. They are fine enough in small doses, but they can’t really sustain the game as you become accustomed to their structures over time as well. Over time, as virtual reality games are made into meatier experiences with more content, Eagle Flight will seem somewhat quaint for relying so much on the joy of its controls as its primary draw, but that doesn’t mean its efforts in simulating flight well and giving you a beautiful area to fly through were wasted.

 

While there are some virtual reality games that feel more like virtual toyboxes than games, Eagle Flight has the structure of a video game and a sensation unique to VR. It’s an accessible introduction to the potential of the technology, but the game design doesn’t give the player quite enough to do with the special gift of flight.