Bird Brigade Review

An Ambitious Bird Game With a Rough Early Access Landing

Bird Brigade lets you become a bird — one of over thirty species drawn from a DNA-breeding system capable of producing nearly a billion combinations — and turns that premise into several distinct multiplayer modes: Nest mode, where one team defends eggs while another tries to steal and boil them; Penguin Race and Rooster Race, competitive races for flightless birds; and Exploration, a procedurally generated open-world campaign spanning eight acts with quests and NPCs. It entered Steam Early Access on July 16, 2026 at $6.99 from solo-attributed developer Merkel Games, and its review sample is small and split — one detailed, substantive negative review and one positive-voted review whose own text undercuts the score it carries.

A Genuinely Unusual Multiplayer Concept

Few games build an entire structure around playable birds with this much mechanical variety. The DNA system alone — breeding two birds together for an instant chick, or hatching eggs found in vending machines and incubated in nests — is a distinctive progression hook rarely seen outside dedicated creature-collector genres, and pairing it with combat-racing modes for flightless birds alongside an egg-stealing team objective and a full story campaign is a genuinely ambitious scope for a $6.99 Early Access release. On concept alone, this is a more interesting pitch than most bird-themed games manage.

But the Detailed Review Describes a Game Barely Holding Together

The negative review in the sample, from a player with 6.6 hours logged, doesn't read like ordinary Early Access grumbling — it lists five distinct, specific problems. Joining lobbies with friends reportedly fails roughly four times out of five, requiring repeated game restarts just to find a session. Exploration-mode progress is described as resetting entirely between sessions, with map locations vanishing and forcing a restart from scratch, even though bird levels and unlocks persist separately. Co-op quest sharing is reported as fundamentally broken, crediting neither shared quest progress nor currency between players unless the same player hosts every session. Quest dialogue is described as sometimes simply failing to advance, softlocking mission progress with no fix from relogging. And frame rate is described as periodically collapsing to as low as 3 frames per second, rendering the game briefly unplayable outright.

A Second Review That Reads as a Complaint Despite Its Score

The other review in the sample is marked positive but consists of a single line, in Russian, translating to roughly "There's no online at all" followed by a crying emoji — which is to say, even the review counted as a thumbs-up describes a core multiplayer feature not working. Taken together, the two reviews in this admittedly tiny sample agree on more than they disagree: whatever charm Bird Brigade's premise carries, actually getting a functioning multiplayer session running appears to be the exception rather than the rule at this stage.

The Negative Reviewer Still Sees the Appeal Underneath

Notably, the detailed negative review doesn't read as someone who dislikes the game's design — quite the opposite. They open by saying they "really enjoy flying around as a bird" and appreciate the range of purchasable birds, and close by saying they're aware this is Early Access and intend to revisit it once it's in better working order, rather than writing the concept off entirely. That's a meaningfully different tone than a review dismissing a game as fundamentally bad, and it suggests the underlying moment-to-moment flight and bird-collecting loop has real appeal once (or if) the surrounding systems stabilize.

Visuals Show More Promise Than the Reviews Describe

The screenshots suggest a game with more visual ambition than its current stability might imply — foggy pine forests with genuinely atmospheric lighting in Exploration mode, a snowy nighttime Nest-mode raid with a burning objective and a countdown ticking down, and a colorful, readable UI even across a language barrier. None of this fixes broken co-op quest sharing or a frame rate that reportedly bottoms out at single digits, but it does suggest the art and environment work is ahead of the netcode and quest-state reliability, which is a common enough Early Access pattern — the visible, front-facing parts of a game often outpace the backend systems holding multiplayer together underneath.

An Unusual Request Buried in a Review

One detail worth flagging: the negative reviewer appends a pointed note asking the developer, in any response to the review, to avoid using "hearts, flirtatious emojis of any kind, or text" — a strange enough addition that it's worth mentioning here without being able to verify what prompted it, since nothing else in the available material explains the context.

Verdict

Bird Brigade's pitch — become a bird, breed nearly a billion genetic combinations, and fight, race, or explore across several genuinely distinct multiplayer modes — is more inventive than almost anything else in this space, and even its harshest reviewer describes wanting to come back once it works. But "once it works" is the operative phrase: broken lobby joining, quest progress that resets or softlocks, co-op rewards that don't share properly, and frame rate collapses to single digits are not small Early Access rough edges, they're core-loop-breaking problems, and the tiny two-review sample doesn't yet offer enough counter-evidence to say they've been resolved. Worth wishlisting for the concept alone, but not yet worth buying at full price unless you're prepared to treat this as a very early, very unstable preview of what it might become.