I love immersive sims. After playing through both Dishonored games more times than I probably should have, I wanted something new. I was considering finally getting around to System Shock or Deus Ex when I randomly stumbled across Fallen Aces.
The first episode felt like a genuine hidden gem. The atmosphere was fantastic, and the city managed to feel both huge and easy to understand. The level design was especially good. Early on, the game practically shows you that there are several ways to reach your objective. As the episode goes on, those options become less obvious, but finding them never turns into a tedious hunt for one specific door or vent.
More importantly, I simply liked being in those levels. They were packed with little things to discover, and I actually enjoyed combing through every room and alley. Fallen Aces made the usual immersive-sim habit of checking every corner feel rewarding instead of compulsive.
That made the first episode ending feel painfully abrupt. Two years later, Episode 2 finally arrived, and I started it with very fond memories of the first one. Then I noticed the camera stuttering and wildly inconsistent performance. I figured it was a new release and the first patches would sort it out. Some of them did: the developers have already fixed a lot of texture, geometry, lighting and performance issues. But for me, the bigger problem was never purely technical. (Update: Camera stutters and barely stable 80 fps remain the same awawawaw)
Episode 2 makes the levels bigger, but many of them also feel less structured. In the first episode, large spaces felt like coherent systems with a clear internal logic. Here, some areas come across as a messy collection of rooms and corridors. Exploring them isn't nearly as satisfying, and I rarely had that old urge to check every corner just because I wanted to see what was there.
The same problem shows up in the level content. Tommy guns, revolvers, bats and other familiar weapons keep appearing, while additions like the taser and chainsaw feel more like occasional toys than meaningful parts of the sandbox. The biggest disappointment is how little the game builds on Fallen Aces' environmental interactions. The first episode constantly encouraged improvisation with the world around you. In Episode 2, that freedom is much harder to find. You can smash a vending machine, throw a banana peel, mess around with a few other objects, and that's about where the experimentation starts to dry up.
It also makes the hideout feel strangely pointless. In the first episode, returning there felt like part of the game's rhythm. Here, it often feels like a loading screen with furniture.
The story doesn't help much either. The comic-book sequences are painfully slow, and the dialogue is often stretched out with awkward pauses. By the end, I was skipping conversations between Mike and his companions simply because I wanted the game to move on. At times the whole thing feels like a cheap noir action movie playing quietly on a TV in another room.
The one area that really stuck with me was the nighttime suburban neighborhood. It has exactly the kind of atmosphere where I could imagine some great Halloween events: a strange house, a hidden basement, a local killer, maybe even a ghost. Instead, the area feels mostly empty and doesn't do much with its potential.
The late-game objectives started getting on my nerves as well. A lot of them boil down to "bro find this, then go there to find that," with very little guidance. That kind of structure can work perfectly well in an immersive sim, but only when the world itself makes you want to keep looking. Episode 1 had that quality. I could spend time there without even caring about the immediate objective. In Episode 2, I increasingly just wanted to finish the current task and move on.
I still recommend trying Fallen Aces, but mostly because of Episode 1. It shows how good this formula can be when the level design, exploration and environmental interaction all click together. Episode 2 currently feels more like an uneven draft of the same idea: bigger and more ambitious, but noticeably weaker in the areas that made Fallen Aces special in the first place. :(
