- Title
- Falcon Patrol
- Developer
- Steve Lee
- Publisher
- Virgin Games
- Year
- 1983
- Platform
- Commodore 64 (also VIC-20, BBC, Electron)
- Genre
- Horizontal-scrolling shoot’em up
- Score
- 8 / 10
There are entire books written about Defender‘s impact on the shoot’em up. There is, as far as I can find, exactly one decent piece written about Falcon Patrol, which is a problem because the latter — written by a single programmer for Virgin Games at the absolute peak of British budget gaming — is in many ways the more honest of the two.
The Brief
You are the last surviving pilot of the Falcon Patrol. Your job is to defend six airfields from waves of enemy jets. You fly a Harrier-style VTOL fighter — yes, you can hover, yes, you can land at any of the six airfields to refuel and rearm — and you scroll left and right across a stretched-out desert horizon engaging the enemy in air-to-air combat.
If that sounds simple, that’s because the appeal of Falcon Patrol is in the texture, not the brief.
What Makes It Special
It’s a game where the smartest move is, very often, to land your plane and walk away.
Falcon Patrol does three things that most arcade-derivative shoot’em ups didn’t bother with. First, fuel and ammo are real, finite resources. You will run out. You will need to land. The landing sequences are a small ballet of throttle control and patience that nothing else on the C64 in 1983 was attempting. Second, the AI jets actually bomb the airfields. Lose all six and the game ends. You’re not racking up score in a vacuum — you’re defending something.
Third, and this is the bit that’s still surprising forty years on, the game has a cadence. Waves get harder, fuel pressure mounts, airfields are gradually picked off if you don’t actively defend them, and the moments where you screech in to land on the last functional strip with a wing on fire are some of the tensest sequences ever rendered in MOS 6510 machine code.
The Tech
Falcon Patrol is one of those C64 games that ran circles around the rest of the format because Steve Lee simply understood the hardware better than most of his peers. The two-way smooth scrolling is buttery. The sprite multiplexing during big formations is invisible. The collision detection is rock solid. There is no flicker. There is no slowdown. In 1983. From one bloke.
It’s also an early demonstration of why the C64 was the right machine for action games of this kind: the SID chip’s raw engine drone, the punchy explosion samples, the way the screen briefly inverts on a kill — that’s the C64 doing what Spectrum and BBC could only dream of.
The Sequel Problem
Falcon Patrol II followed in 1984 and is, regrettably, a slightly worse game. The first one’s purity got buried under added features (smart bombs, helicopters, more enemy types) and the magic balance between fuel, ammo and territory was lost. Skip the sequel. Play the original.
Verdict
Falcon Patrol is one of the great unsung British budget games. It is what happens when a programmer takes a US arcade blueprint, strips out the bits that don’t matter, and rebuilds the rest around resource management and pressure. Eight out of ten — losing two only because the visual variety thins out in the late game and the difficulty curve doesn’t quite earn its final waves.
But for forty minutes of the most underappreciated arcade design on the C64, you can’t do better.
- Pro tip: You can shoot enemy bombs out of the air. You probably should.
- Pro tip: Hovering over an airfield draws enemies to it. Patrol on the move.
- Where to play: VICE emulator, the C64 Mini/Maxi, or the browser version at commodoregames.net.
8 / 10
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