If you’re someone for whom seeing the phrase “browser games” evokes images of janky Flash animations and questionable gameplay, you’re not alone. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some great browser-based games over the years—Fallen London is a personal favorite—but even when they’ve been fun, such games have rarely qualified as what you might call impressive.
But! If you do want to be impressed, maybe take a look at a new browser game called Covert Ornithological Operations (or COO for short). The game’s developer, one Yegor Sak, describes it as “a bird [Grand Theft Auto] simulator”, which basically means that you play as a robotic spy pigeon, let loose in a big open world map to pursue procedurally-generated missions and/or generally wreak havoc as you see fit.
The game is set in Toronto, and when I say “Toronto” I mean “the whole damn city”—the playable map occupies nearly 250 square miles, all generated via the use of real-life height and building data. The project’s reliance on such real-life data is one of its most interesting aspects and even extends to the use of ADS-B data—basically real-time air traffic data, as discussed last week and earlier this year—to include the planes over the city at any given moment. (As one might expect, given that you’re playing a pigeon, aircraft are something that you generally want to avoid.)
Another impressive aspect of the game is its striking comic-book aesthetic, generated with extensive use of cel shading. Given that the game is fully 3D, written in JavaScript—Sak went out of his way to specify in a tweet about the game on Sunday that it uses “no game engine”—and seems to be basically all vibecoded, having been “built in seven days by up to 10 parallel AI workstreams,”, you might wonder how it fares in terms of performance.
This is a fair question to ask, and your mileage will obviously vary depending on your system and internet connection. For what it’s worth, my 2024 M4 MacBook Pro struggled to maintain a decent framerate, although I’ll admit I had a bunch of other applications open as well as my browser. My gaming PC, meanwhile, which is by no means a l33t gaming behemoth—it runs a Ryzen 5 5500 and an RTX 3070—ran COO perfectly well. The bigger problem was bandwidth: the game worked pretty well when we tried it out this morning, but by lunchtime it was a struggle to get it to load at all. Word is spreading, presumably.
If you can get it to load, COO is a blast, and there are definitely worse ways to pass a few idle minutes online than dodging cars and crapping on unsuspecting pedestrians. Really the only trick the developer missed here was failing to call the project Untitled Pigeon Game, for which we will forgive him.
