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 .

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