Desert Falcon is an obscure isometric shooter with an Egyptian theme, released exclusively for the Atari 7800 in 1987.

You play as a falcon, flying diagonally over the landscape, shooting stuff as you go, in a way similar to that seen in Sega‘s classic coin-op, Zaxxon.

Unlike Zaxxon, however, your falcon can land, stop, and even walk around on the ground, which is key to how the game plays, because one aim is to collect items that litter the landscape. Some items give you points, while collecting random hieroglyphs bestow one of ten different “Super Powers” on your falcon (these can be anything from invincibility, to employing a decoy). You actually begin the game on the ground and must pull back on the joystick to take off, which is nice. The falcon’s altitude can of course be increased or decreased by pushing down, or pulling back on the stick.

Avoiding collisions with pyramids, sphinxes, needles, and other obstacles is also a priority, as of course is avoiding collisions with, or the bullets of, enemies. Most enemies fly at you in waves although some come up out of the ground to attack you if you’re walking, so you have to be quick to react to survive. There are four skill levels of play, although all these seem to do is speed up the scrolling (and Expert level is ridiculously fast). If you do manage to reach the end of the stage you then have to fight a boss battle against the “Howling Sphinx”. Beat him and you then get to collect as much treasure as possible in a bonus round.

Graphically, Desert Falcon is pretty good. The scrolling is smooth, and the sprites and backgrounds are reasonably well-defined and colourful. Gameplay-wise: Desert Falcon does provide a bit of a challenge and is fun to play for a while, although it doesn’t have much long-term appeal. Atari 7800 fanatics might try to claim it’s “the best game on the system”, which it is not. It’s not a bad game though and is still worth a play today.