So Many Birds! – Final Girl – Terror From Above Review

I’ve never seen the classic Hitchcock thriller, The Birds, but I’m very familiar with the trope!

Some birds are just creepy.

They sit and watch you. Crows can recognize you, which can be good or bad depending on whether you’re a good person or an asshole to them.

I think it’s the eyes.

Terror From Above is the first vignette for the now-classic (in my opinion, anyway) solo game franchise, Final Girl, and it has to do with sinister clowns.

No, you dolt, I mean birds! That’s why I’ve been talking about birds so much already!

Yes, this vignette is full of birds.

It was designed by series creator A.J. Porfirio with artwork by Vladyslava Ladkova and published by Van Ryder Games in 2021.

Vignettes are designed around a new killer, using a location from a feature film that you already have.

So you can’t just have the Core Box and be ready.

Thus, this review will be shorter than the rest!

Don’t all clap at once.

The Birds are a different type of killer for a couple of reasons.

First, they do not move. Instead, they spread.

Part of their Killer Action is the Spawn Birds symbol (the bird foot). However, if a Terror card has the killer move, that also spawns birds because they don’t actually move after you or victims.

Instead, you roll two dice and then choose one of them. That’s the number of birds that spawn.

The other die is the location they spawn in.

If there are already three birds in a space, then you distribute the others in spaces connected to that one that don’t also have three birds.

The default killer action is to attack and then spawn, so that gives you a round to deal with the birds that just came out.

That’s because birds will only attack if they’re in your space (though they do go after victims first, but in a twist, you can use reaction cards to protect victims as well as yourself) or if there are three birds in a space where victims are.

I had plenty of turns where there were no attacks because neither of those conditions were met.

However, the birds keep spreading.

THEY KEEP SPREADING!!!!

One of the ways to lose the game, in addition to the normal “you run out of health” method, is if all spaces on the board have three birds on them so you can’t place any other birds.

At this point, you’re overrun and you still lose.

How do you win?

As usual, there is only one way to win, but it ain’t by killing birds this time.

I mean, you do need to kill some to prevent yourself from being overrun.

When you have rescued enough victims to unlock your ultimate ability, or if there are no victims left on the board (which isn’t a good thing!), then 1-3 special victims come out and are placed in the 1-3 Search areas on the board.

Why 1-3?

You choose your difficulty.

One is easy, two is “normal”, and three is very hard.

These special victims are victims in every sense except that they cannot be killed.

Which actually led to my one win of the three plays that I always do before reviewing a game.

I was doing Creech Manor.

I managed to actually draw both the Helicopter event (there is a one-time only exit space from the attic where you can rescue multiple victims) and the event where any victim who enters the Attic dies.

Kinda hard to rescue victims with the helicopter when they die by just going to the attic!

However, when the two special victims come out, they spawn in the two Search spaces furthest from you and I was at the bottom of the house.

So they spawned in the Closet and the Attic.

They can’t be killed, so the helicopter was a viable option.

And they were both right there!

I still needed to manage the birds, because I had reached the finale which was also kind of easy, though still annoying.

Ok, let’s talk about the finales so I can finish the story.

The finales can be nasty, but Endless Swarm actually isn’t that bad if you have been managing your bird population by rolling lots of 1s (and you know how I love rolling 1s!).

I had Endless Swarm in Creech Manor, where you lose a health if you enter a space with three birds.

As long as I was resting in the right spaces, I was able to get to the two victims, get to the attic, and onto the helicopter to win the game.

It was close!

But it was surprisingly easy because I was able to mitigate my health and there is no attack action in this finale.

Literally, the birds never attack!

So if you’ve managed to keep bloodlust low, you’re sitting pretty because you won’t be losing any more victims.

You just have to keep your health up to absorb the hits when moving.

Of course, the next time I played, on Maple Lane, I died well before the finale even came out.

So go figure.

The other two finales are designed to really swarm you with birds and attacks, because they both have “spawn-attack-spawn” killer actions.

Insurmountable Odds makes it worse by always giving you the bigger number of birds with what you roll, too.

Fowl Aggression is going to make sure you get attacked.

A lot.

Because spawning birds will always go in your space, and they spawn twice!

As for Dark Powers, the birds do have some nasty ones.

And a very short bloodlust track, which can make it very easy to go through the Terror deck by discarding them when bloodlust increases and you’re at the top.

Yep, the Dark Powers are pretty brutal, and it doesn’t take long to reveal them either.

Birdnado didn’t really affect me much because that was the game where I was handling the bird population pretty well.

Losing 3 health because you’re surrounded by birds is…not healthy.

Run For Your Life is just nasty because it doesn’t matter how you’ve been managing birds.

A lot of times, you’ll roll spawn points that are far away from you, and it’s nice because it gives you a little reprieve.

Now, a victim could panic into their path and die anyway.

Then what do you do?

Don’t get me started on They’re Just Waiting to Strike.

*shudder*

As with all other killers, there are 16 Terror cards, but this time they are actually pretty much all variations of a few different ones, as well as a Minor Dark Power (which thankfully never came up in my games because it looks very difficult).

The Bird Wall is hard to get rid of, and means you can’t save anybody unless the space is completely devoid of birds.

I ended up not really killing that many birds, instead going for the “try to outrace them to the end and attack only when I have to” strategy, so killing 5 birds would have been hard!

That being said, maybe that wasn’t a great strategy since I only won once.

The other Terror cards aren’t really that special. Just spawning birds, increasing Horror, and increasing bloodlust.

You have to hope that you included some of the location Terror cards into the mix (there are only 8 of those versus 16 for the Birds, so the odds are that 2/3 of the 10 cards will be bird cards) because otherwise it does get a bit samey after a while.

Finally, let’s get to the one new Final Girl included with Terror From Above.

Melanie gets a lot of movement when rescuing victims, gets some health back, and reduces Horror.

Never bad things.

Her Ultimate works wonderfully against the birds, though, if you can manage your health wisely.

Losing a health to essentially kill two birds is wonderful!

If she faces off against some other killer, it’s also handy to be able to do two damage to that one as well.

Overall, Terror From Above is a nice little addition to the Final Girl universe.

The birds play well at many locations, though I’m hesitant to play them in Storybook Woods because there are a lot fewer spaces on that map.

It looks like it could be easy to be overrun there.

They’re not the most interesting enemy as far as Terror cards go, but I like the mechanics where you are only trying to kill them to manage their population, not for a winning condition.

You may just want to race victims to the exits to unlock your ultimate and get those game-winning special victims out!

I’d say they’re a nice change of pace and if you can pick them up easily, they’ll make a good addition to your Final Girl collection.

This review was written after 3 plays in various locations