Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Tom Sala, solo developer on Falconeer and now Bulwark, to learn all about how this upcoming strategy city builder stands out in a busy crowd.
Bulwark is unlike any city builder I've ever played up to now, and it's honestly a bit of a marvel that Sala developed the game itself entirely solo. I found myself compelled to ask Sala if he was some kind of genius, owing to the thousands of code, all the art, and gameplay, handcrafted by Sala himself — because that's the sensation I was left with after playing the game myself, and sitting down with him to learn more about how Bulwark came to be.
Bulwark follows the events of flight combat game The Falconeer, after the end of the previous games' main storyline. In the aftermath of the wars of that era, Bulwark takes place some unknown number of decades after the fact. Society, or what remains of it, scratches out a meagre existence ensconced on rocks and ruins protruding from a treacherous and stormy oceanscape. It's your task to rebuild society, essentially, and bring together the remaining factions to find prosperity once again.
Bulwark is a unique and enchanting city builder that is unlike anything I've played previously, and this is one game fan of the genre should definitely put firmly on their radar.
Less management, more painting
There are a lot of things that make Bulwark unique. Whether it's the fact it was developed by a single individual, the simplistic-yet-striking low-poly art style, or the intriguing overarching lore and world — Bulwark is immediately mesmerising taken at face value alone. However, it's when you start playing it and get into its unique management design layer that you realize that Bulwark is actually something quite special.
Bulwark is well and truly unlike any other city builder I've played, and I've played a lot. I've got hundreds of hours in Endzone, Frostpunk, and Surviving Mars, and various others across the spectrum. Whether it's something more chill and relaxed like Cities Skylines or something a bit more stressful and strategic like Rimworld, there's usually something for everyone in this genre, but Tom Sala reckons he's identified a gap in the market.
Fans of city builder games are likely well aware that, often times, some of the best portions of the experience are towards the early stages of the game. Building up your first settlements, getting your first upgrades, and so on. Sala said to me that his plan for Bulwark is to make an entire game out of this "early" phase of the city builder experience. To that end, heavy amounts of resource micromanagement or other minutiae typical of the genre has been thrown out, in favor of near-pure building, but that doesn't mean strategy is completely unspoken for — more on that shortly.
Tom Sala mentioned he was inspired by 3D modelling programs like Maya, instead of other city builders while constructing Bulwark. That's why in this game, developing your city revolves around towers you place and define, and then grow out dynamically, almost like the line tool in MS Paint. It was a bit disorienting at first, my city-builder-brain immediately wanted to WASD the camera around, panning and scrolling with the mouse. But in Bulwark, your cursor travels between your towers, and then you can drag to define roads and other types of platforms. Houses, buildings, defensive structures, and other features then dynamically sprout like a hyperlapsed botany documentary, growing more complex and dynamic as you paint. It's entrancingly intuitive once you adjust your thinking, and immensely beautiful too. It feels as though giving the player freedom to basically paint wherever, overlapping pathways and buildings would create a total hideous mess of bridges and intersecting 3D models, but therein lies the genius here. The paths are generated via a clever algorithm to prevent your creations from ever looking ugly and nonsensical. Sala has effectively turned a professional 3D map editor into an entire game.
Bulwark's structural development system is hypnotically meditative and undemanding, but that doesn't mean the game is completely without danger.
Satisfyingly simple, deceptively deep
Bulwark has a minimalistic user interface, stripping back the reams of numbers and graphs and other trackable items that the genre is typically known for. Instead, Bulwark focuses on the building for the most part, but that doesn't mean you can expect a completely passive experience (unless you're playing on free build mode, that is).
Indeed, the world of The Falconeer is dangerous, full of roaming factions, giant sea monsters. While we didn't see any giant sea leviathans in our gameplay session (yet), there's a lot of depth lurking beneath Bulwark's whimsical surface.
Pressing a button will bring up a resource flow overlay that gives you an idea of how your settlement is being supplied. And that's the primary resource management gameplay here. It's not about waiting for gold numbers to accumulate. Instead, it's about linking resource nodes together, and adequately creating supply chains using a variety of options available to you. You can build roads between towers that serve to automatically supply things like iron and mushroom "wood" to the nearby settlements, which will then automatically generate buildings and populations for your city. The more workers, the more extraction, and then, the further those supplies can be stretched out. If you want to build more towers and create more paths around them, you'll need to adequately source those resources.
In order to do that, you have an airship that serves as a type of cursor when you're not in city building mode. You can guide the airship around the map, and place down remote settlements anywhere on the map, which can then be populated with harbors, and then captains, who can facilitate those supply lines for you automatically.
Supply lines aren't always safe, either. There are rogue factions, "pirate" enemies, and other hazards that your supply ships will potentially face while moving to and from your hubs. To that end, you can also construct battle ships to patrol the supply lines, who will partake in automated battles on your behalf. It's a bit like building your own living diorama, and playing witness to the chaos that will gradually unfurl as your settlement grows into a city, and then eventually a country.
As you grow, independent captains will appear and offer their services. The captains are often from other factions too, and their involvement in your city can increase trade and improve relationships with other nearby nations, depicted by the tree above. You can, of course, reject working with other nations, and seek their destruction and subjugation instead. Over time, you can generate fighters of your own, battlements, anti-air defences, and other combat capabilities that can help you gun for for that "war victory" if you're so inclined. I am very inclined, I must say.
The simplicity of Bulwark's presentation, the minimalism of its UI, and understated visuals hide an unexpected amount of depth. I'm intrigued to find out how deep this ocean world goes.
Bulwark should fly high on your wishlist
Above all else, Bulwark is just mesmerising to play. There's a demo up on Xbox and Steam you can try out right now. It's worth it just to experiment with the game's city building mechanics. It's odd at first, but once you get to grips with it, the hours will literally melt away. Tom Sala hinted to me that he's already thinking about the future of the game should it enjoy strong reception, and truly there's a wealth of ways games like this could grow down the line. I for one would love to see Bulwark become a staple of the genre, since the potentially is well and truly clear here — Bulwark does some things no other city builder does, and that's incredibly special, in market that's more competitive than ever.
Bulwark is launching on March 26, 2024 for Windows PC, Xbox, and PlayStation consoles. You should also check out The Falconeer, by the way.
