Flintlock Review
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn Review
In a crowded and competitive genre, there are are two ways to stand out: The hard way and the easy way. The hard way is trying to be a facsimile that is as good or better than the original, which creates a high water mark to be judged against. The easier way is to offer something unique that has the potential to expand the genre in new or interesting ways.
Flintlock does the latter with its crown jewel being the combat system. At the core, there is souls inspiration with an emphasis on timing, but the focus is around three keys elements: melee, black powder and dark magic. All of these three elements combine into a rhythmic and synergistic battle system that is challenging and rewarding. Combined with a gorgeous world and an under explored backdrop and Flintlock makes a case for itself.
Unfortunately, the weaknesses of Flintlock are the little details, polish and refinements that take a good experience into a great one.
Magic and Muskets
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn feels like the first game to truly explore the gunpowder fantasy or flintlock fantasy genre, which is all about magic and muskets. Blending together a universe that existed hundreds of years ago where flintlock weapons were ubiquitous with a dark fantasy world full of magic is where the lines get blurred.
Flintlock ends up being is less of a competitor in the souls genre and more of an entry point with only a few of the souls essentials. A combat system that rewards timing, reputation in place of souls and in place of fires to rest, Flintlock uses stone structures. Flintlock leans heavier into the Action RPG genre as it draws more parallels to games God of War.
Combat, while it does feature timing, requires you to be more aggressive. This is due to how your weapons work and the lack of stamina meter. To gain gunpowder charges and magic, you need to land melee attacks, and you need to focus on all three pillars to effectively dismantle enemies, which becomes more challenging as the game wears on and new challenges arise.
The reputation you gain from defeating enemies, provides a unique spin with a multiplier being added for what type of attacks you use combined with how long you can go without being damaged. At any point you can bank your reputation, but it’s the risk/reward of the system that is tantalizing to attempt a higher reputation reward.
Reputation can be used to expand your skill tree or upgrade equipment back at the caravan. Depending on your play style, Flintlock has three decent sized skill trees that allows you to slightly tailor your experience between magic, gunpowder and melee. We choose to mainly focus on magical abilities, mostly due to it being the only skill tree that provided a ressurection on death as one of the final upgrades.
The UI is very clean, the voice acting is good, the soundtrack has some great moments that showcase its versatility (although sometimes misplaced), and a traversal system that features double jumps, air dashes and flight that made for some stunning and interesting platforming sections.
CONS
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a AA Wolf dressed in AAA Sheep’s clothing, because for every highlight of the game, there was usually some refinement issue or polish issue that truly held it back from greatness. The good news is that these shortcomings didn’t affect gameplay, but they did hamper the immersion.
There is solid voice acting, but the facial animations and character quality outside of the main character felt a little unrefined. It was also frustrating to get immersed in the universe when dialogue heavy exchanges happen between the two protagonists and then you end up in a surprise battle and they keep speaking. It was hard to hear and focus on the plot when bullets and sword are heading your way. Even your companion Enki didn’t have a moving mouth. This might have been a design choice, but it never felt right. Cutscenes tended broke immersion, but there are also cutscenes that feature black and white art with minimal animation and these were extremely well done and should have been used more often than they were. Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
The reputation system that allows you to increase the multiplier was a unique aspect of Flintlock and was a system that rewarded skill, but more often than not, it would be reset due to being attacked from an off screen foe. This would usually be a low level skeleton, who wasn’t there at the beginning of the fight because some of the dead come up from the ground. This led to an experience unintended by the developer as it often felt unfair.
Battling the gods was fun and provided a deeper challenge than the other enemies, but they lacked an epic nature that I was hoping for from gods. The good news is that the final boss was epic in scale, but lacked a great combat design with movement being out of the scope of what the game had trained the player for, which resulted in some very frustrating moments as it constantly felt unfair. This is not the feeling that you want to be left with at the end of the game.
VERDICT
Coincidentally, Flintlock is about challenging gods and this feels analogous to A44 attempting something closer to AAA, which competes with studios that have nearly 500 employees, decades of experience and drastically higher budgets. What separates incredible, genre defining experiences is usually the level of polish and refinement, which unfortunately, Flintlock is a little short on.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn finds itself wedged between good and great. Great ideas with good refinement and execution in a case study that truly exemplifies what separates AA from AAA, although considering at times, the line is being blurred, is a testament to the excellent work and growth from a studio that is clearly on an upward trajectory.