Solo dev behind unique city-building game is “trying not to fear the reviews” as it launches against genre titans: “Whether it’s loved, or not, it’s my life’s work”

“For whatever idiosyncratic faults, there will never be anything like it again”

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Tomas Sala, the solo dev behind the upcoming Bulwark: Falconeer Chronicles, is preparing for his extremely unique take on city builders and strategy games to launch against a pair of that space’s most established names.

Calling Bulwark a city-building game is pretty reductive - the official description of it as “an open-world builder” is probably more apt - but it taps into the same spirit of resource gathering and expansion that powers all thebest city-building games. Yet while the spirit is the same, the mechanics are not.

Bulwark asks you to effectively paint the connections between various resources and your outposts. You don’t directly spend resources to construct buildings - instead, you sculpt out pathways, building spokes between the hubs of your civilization. You can try it out for yourself with a demo available onSteam, and if you’ve got any interest in strategic building games I think it’s worth a shot.

But launching something unique can be intimidating, especially for a solo dev like Sala. “Two days until Bulwark and I’m trying not to fear the reviews,” he says onTwitter. “This is as original and innovative a game as I can make, there is nothing like it. For whatever idiosyncratic faults, there will never be anything like it again. So whether it’s loved, or not, it’s my life’s work.”

Seems like Ubisoft dropping a new settlers game tomorrow as well.Can one innovative #indiegame stand against two builder/strategy giants stuck in the past? Also for all journalists in my mutuals. Isn’t that the angle to cover #bulwark you were looking for?It’s on!. pic.twitter.com/iH4hoEgPzkMarch 25, 2024

The game is set to launch on March 26 - the very same day thatUbisoft’s reboot of The Settlers comes to Steam and strategy titanParadox Interactiveis going to publish the Civ-style 4X title Millennia. “Can one innovative indie game stand against two builder/strategy giants stuck in the past?” Sala asks in anothertweet.

If the “Falconeer” in Bulwark’s subtitle sounds familiar, that’s because of Sala’s previous project, The Falconeer, which was basically to Star Wars: Rogue Squadron as Bulwark is to SimCity. That is to say it’s also a very unique take on the spirit of a classic genre. Both games are set in the same fictional universe.

To survive as an indie dev, “I must reuse everything,” Sala said as he pivoted from an aerial combat sim to a hotly-anticipated city builder.

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Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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