If you haven’t played Fallen Aces, I highly recommend it whether you’re a dedicated immsim sicko or an FPS greenhorn. It’s Dishonored by way of Dick Tracy: an immediate and stylish neo-noir FPS dripping with pulpy comic art and a tantalizingly interactive goon sandbox. And that’s just the first episode, which launched into early access last year.
Fans have been eagerly awaiting the second episode since then, but a development update on Steam confirmed yesterday that it won’t hit its old release window of “before the end of 2025.” That said, it did share some exciting details, as well as a brief teaser.
Watch On
The teaser shows off a thing of beauty as hilarious as it is genuinely cool: a first-person car chase where the player smokes a cigar, blasts foes with a tommy gun through each window, and maneuvers with one foot on the steering wheel and another on the gas. If nothing else, it seems like the second episode will lean in even harder to the over-the-top comic book action.
The rest of the update shows off some new areas, story comics, and teases Delia, a “fully controllable NPC companion” that responds to commands like “move there,” “stay here,” and “shoot that fuckin’ guy!” It looks awfully ambitious, and while I’m a little disappointed I won’t be able to see out the holiday season with a new goon-filled episode, at least I have the Immersive Sip update to tide me over with some new spritework.
It’s become something of a pattern for New Blood’s published FPS to enjoy extended stays in early access, with Gloomwood in that state since 2022 and Ultrakill since 2020. It makes the games harder to recommend if you like to get through a whole game in one go, but all three stand tall as some of the best old-school shooters around, finished or not. Fallen Aces is shaping up to be one of my favorite shooters in a very long time, so here’s hoping that the second episode is all it’s cracked up to be.
