Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, at its core, borrows from a lot of other games that are, for lack of a better term, more successful in their execution. That being said, there was never a time in my experience with Flintlock when I thought I would rather just put this game down and play them. There is something charming at the heart of Flintlock that sort of grabs you and pulls you through, and I’m not sure what it was exactly as the game had many flaws on display from the opening moments.
When at its best, there are new and interesting ideas of display that really help to deliver a unique, if not always quality experience. Of these ideas I would even say other developers should take note of, and even use them in their own games. When al was said, at the height of my fun, I was expecting to give this game a 7 seven and shout from the rooftops it was worth your time, maybe on sale but still. I still plan to do that but my experience ended with a game-breaking bug that, past the midpoint, meant my choices were to start all my progress over or move on. I guess I chose the latter. A shame it ended that way considering how much I was enjoying it, but I am hoping to paint a fair picture of the good and the bad.
It all Started With A Siege
The weakest element in the grand scheme of the game is the story which at best touches on generic and at worst is just hard to follow. You play as a Sapper named Nor who is taking part in a siege as the game starts (see, that’s why they called it that). Now, a sapper was a real position in the army, they were an engineer, but I’m sure they didn’t have as many magical powers. The game chooses to sort of start you in the middle of this conflict and then very minimally fill in the blanks as to why everything is going on. After this she teams up with a Fox god named Enki to, I guess, undo what they did.
All you need to know is that the siege fails except for the fact you and your team blow up a barrier before getting beaten by a boss you’re not supposed to best, releasing the undead and gods on the world. For much of the rest of the game, you spend trying to figure out if the state of the world falling apart is entirely your fault or only partially which even over halfway into the game, I never really got a clear answer. The other lingering question was what benefit doing this had on whatever war I was participating in that we just HAD to do this, again, no real answers.
What we do learn quickly in the narrative is that a god takes over the organization you were part of which becomes the better part of your early journey. The characters kinda touch on how, since this is the only major point in which it matters, the implication is we did something stupid and pointless, but only quick enough to absolve our sins and move on. Hamlets need to be freed in mini outpost levels that are actually pretty fun to serve a constant purpose for the player, a point that his different when you put two and four together.
Thankfully, the voice acting is a bright spot for the narrative, and since there is a lot, it never gets grating. Nor and a close ally Baz tend to have a lot of dialog moments and Olive Grey and (Of Course) Elias Toufexis continue to deliver with each scene. Even the secondary characters also manage to be engaging which is a hard thing to get right even for AAA games.
When The Dead Walk The Earth
At the heart of the game is the Souls-Lite experience of everything being able to mostly three shot you. Where the lite part comes is that these soul elements are blended into a more straightforward exploration experience. The best comparison I can make here is Banishers meets Dark Souls. This being said it will not feel like a Souls game in… almost any fashion outside of just constantly getting wrecked. The game is fast-paced with with a heavy emphasis on traversal. As you level up you get strong buffs to your abilities such as melee damage with more moves being added that give a Metroidvania quality to the world you are exploring.
Adding the fun of exploration were elements called rifts that you will be opening a lot. These will open up these triangular portals that can be traversed to higher locations or just to skip areas you have already fought through. They are very fun to traverse and add depth to the movement that manages to separate Flintlock in a great way from its contemporaries.
All these ideas mixing and mingling together you might feel it’s not going to work but actually, it kinda does, and that might be the craziest part of this AA experience. Going back to areas I had been and getting where I couldn’t actually feel good and getting the chance to teach every enemy there not to mess with me is an added bonus. It also helps that the world design is fun if not fairly pedestrian.
The combat in the game is the Team Ninja icing on the cake as it allows you to string your abilities together fairly easily to develop a flow. This includes a standard attach string and counter moves but diversifies from there. Instead of a heavy attack, you get Enki a fox-like god who helps you. He can attack that doesn’t hurt enemies but he builds up a secondary bar that allows you to perform a finishing move, or tear armor away from enemies. This mechanic works in conjunction with the fact there is no stamina gauge very different ways to gain the same effect as Souls games, wearing your enemy down.
The worst aspect of combat, at least for me, was the rifle play, which continues the comparisons in combat to a Team Ninja game. Aiming is unruly and the power seems inconsistent at best. It also has a headshot mechanic that is very hard to guide to actual completion and rewards you with one of the grossest (not in a good way) animations I have ever seen to indicate you have hit the headshot.
You will find multiple weapons throughout the game but for the most part they all feel the same. Starting with the lead character’s axe, Nor, weapons like a hammer are slightly slower. That being said, they have a near-identical animation of a three-hit base combo. Furthermore, despite being billed as the weapon to deal with armored enemies it really doesn’t do ‘that’ much more. Sticking with the axe and going to Enki to build a gauge is just as viable, making some weapon selection just feel unneeded. You can also level up your gear by finding materials in the world meaning that even focusing on improving a not great against certain enemies weapon is feels like a more productive use of your time.
The part that I enjoyed most about the game was the twist to the Soul capturing mechanic that Souls fans should be used to. The risk-reward combat has a multiplayer that stacks up every time you perform certain elements of combat. This banks your experience in limbo as you rack up these points then you can redeem your experience with a high percentage to get added experience based on how much you have banked and your multiplier on it. Getting hit causes you to lose that and simply get the base amount added to your overall amount. Of course, if you die you still need to go to where it happened and recollect them so that remains familiar.
Where It All Went Wrong
Even before things took a turn for the worst the game had its issues. Among the biggest was how floaty and offputting the double jump can be. These issues aside though, I could stomach most of the game’s actual glitches. Getting stuck in a wall, accidentally clipping through a wall once, overall some minor aches and pains that can be par for the course. And then something went wrong.
The game only allows you to accept one mission at a time so I took a sidequest and set it as active. The sidequests for the game are fun, if not narratively deep. Most act as an excuse for you to take a left at the fork in the road instead of right. This means you usually end up in a dungeon that is big but off the beaten path. My main quest at the time didn’t have a marker and just told me to talk to somebody but I figured… I’ll do the side quests first.
The side quest requires you to go where the main quest wanted you to go I just wasn’t aware of that yet. I walked up to a gate that was locked and was given the option to open it with the triangle button… Little did I know that this gate was supposed to be the stop point until you continued the main quest. A person that stands guard on the other side is supposed to attack you but he didn’t for me and I just headed forward.
Flash forward to hours later, I had finished my task and had no idea where to go so I wandered around a bit until I backtracked. The way the game checks the main story’s progress is by marking the next objective on the path you are proceeding on. Because at one point I needed to breach a door, and breaching that door was an objective that is only cleared by specifically breaching the door, and I had done so before receiving the objective, I could not finish that checkpoint and therefore could not progress the story at all. And so ended my time with Flintlock: The Seige of Dawn, sour taste and all.
Verdict
The shame of it all was that, up until that point, I was actually enjoying my time in the game. The combat was fast-paced and fun. Exploration had some interesting twists to it even if the world never felt groundbreaking or amazing. Best of all, the risk-reward system for receiving experience is one of the coolest ideas out there. Not to mention the voice acting was a solid part of the experience.
Sure it had its lackluster components as well such as the story that just never grabbed me or those god-awful headshot animations, but the good elements had long since won me over. It’s a shame my run ended the way it did. There is a high chance I return to the experience in the future when the sting wears off, and hopefully, it gets some much-needed patches before then. I wanted Flintlock: The Seige of Dawn to offer me a little more in the end and I just didn’t get it.
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Reviewed For PlayStation 5, Also available for Xbox Series S/X, and Windows PC
Developer: A44 Games
Publisher: Kepler Interactive
Release Date: July 18th, 2024
As the sapper Nor, embark on a journey against undead and gods to save your dying world in this Souls-Lite action adventure game.
PROS:
+Voice acting
+Fast paced combat
+Risk Reward-Experience mechanic
+Fun Traversal
CONS:
-Bland world
-Narrative
-Some bad animations
-Glitch's
-Game breaking bugs
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Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
