In December 2018, A44 Games released Ashen. With a gorgeous art style, great atmosphere, and great combat, it’s still an indie gem of the soul genre. Now, five and a half years later, the team is back with Flintlock: Siege of Dawn, which is a soul much larger in scale than the little Ashen adventure.
Flintlock takes place in a land of corrupt gods and their armies of the undead. You play as Nor Vanek, an elite member of the Coalition military (aka the good guys) trying to lay siege to the city of Dawn. Unfortunately, after a failed attempt, you find yourself scattered by your fellow soldiers and tasked with finding your way back. Along the way, you discover a mysterious fox-like companion named Enki.
With Enki by your side, they discover new details about the world as you journey through the lands of Kian to overthrow the gods once and for all. On that journey, you regroup with your Coalition forces as you attempt to complete the mission and end the siege.
This premise forms a simple but enjoyable main story that takes you through Flintlock’s 20-hour adventure. There is a solid pace for the first two acts (which make up a large part of the play), but unfortunately, it is dropped for a rushed conclusion in the third act. During the transition between Acts 2 and 3, a major plot point is resolved in about 30 seconds and the set continues as if it never happened – reinforcing that sense that the endgame feels rather rushed.
Despite the great voice acting and performances, we never get enough time with the game’s allies aside from Enki. We didn’t learn much about them or grow to love them through significant side quests, except in one instance. Despite being told about their history with Nori, we never got the sense that these characters had known each other for centuries.
Moreover, they mostly serve as vendors to upgrade your weapons and equipment and feel quite underutilized. We understand that at some point there were bigger plans for them and for the allied system in general.
Given how central the story is to Flintlock and the lack of a satisfying conclusion to boot, this is definitely a disappointment. What saves the Flintlock experience is combat and traversal. In practice, there’s not much here that you haven’t seen before. Flintlock is a typical soul, though not as punishing as most games in the genre. Dubbed ‘spiritual light’, the game cuts down on the punishing difficulty you’ll find in other titles and has a more forgiving flow.
There isn’t even a melee weapon, a weapon that can be used to interrupt attacks, or a ranged musket that can be manually inserted and aimed at enemies from a distance. With Black Dust’s dodges and jumps, she can also double jump and quickly dodge to the side to avoid attacks while blocking and blocking melee swings from enemies.
Initially, we found that the combat feel wasn’t great, and we struggled to get into the flow of things as we tried to combine dodging, blocking, and blocking. However, after unlocking some upgrades for Nor’s gear and new abilities, the game started to feel a lot better.
This is mainly due to the fact that we had upgrades unlocked that increased the rate at which the stun meter filled on enemies. When the stun meter is full, it allows you to perform a finishing attack, killing them instantly or wiping away the enemy’s armor (which can make them extremely resistant to damage).
Once we had those upgrades that allowed us to quickly build up the stun meter, along with using Enki’s combat skills that also involve building up this meter, we had tons of fun carving through hordes of the undead. Stunning them with just a few hits and finishing them off with a blazing critical melee or a ranged attack feels good. But it also feels like the only way to play Flintlock happily, with a distinct lack of flexibility when it comes to playstyles and choices.
The walk is also just as fun. Even Enki’s Rift Travel lets you fly all over the map to find secrets and skip areas. It feels like the most innovative and exciting thing in Flintlock, and we wish the game was built more around this traversal, rather than just being a shortcut around the map. Rift Travel has a great sense of momentum and really shows off the visuals in Flintlock – which can be stunning at times.
Taking down minibosses and major bosses are both satisfying moments, and these areas had a nice sense of progression to them as we worked our way through the semi-open maps, clearing quests and making our way to the next god fight.
The combat isn’t perfect though, and there are some weird and unexpected difficulty swings throughout the game, and some attacks aren’t telegraphed well, making it hard to determine when to dodge or dodge them. We also found ourselves being cut off and caught in an attack that we had dodged a few times, which was frustrating.
As with almost every aspect of the game, Flintlock has a few other glaring imperfections. As you kill enemies, you will liberate large towns and villages. Unfortunately, there’s rarely anything to do in these areas except buy a few outfits for As that all look visually similar or play a game of Sebo, an in-world mini-game that feels more shoehorned than properly developed or completed.
Additionally, the upgrade system for Nor’s weapons and armor feels clunky and unsatisfying, simply using Reputation (the main game currency you get from defeating enemies) to upgrade rarity and inflict more damages, nothing beyond that. The inventory screen also gave us the impression that we would find dozens and dozens of melee and ranged weapons. But in our playthroughs where we completed every side quest and explored every area, we only found three melee weapons and about a dozen ranged weapons (guns and muskets).
The ability to collect Reputation you earn in combat and collect bonus amounts, provided you don’t get hit, is an interesting twist that adds a great sense of risk and reward to the game. But when the upgrades you spend that Reputation on aren’t that satisfying, there’s not much reason to take the risk.
It all gives the impression that Flintlock originally had a lot more in development, and these systems were much more developed than in the final product, likely diminishing as the game was stretched and delayed several times over the past few years.
CONCLUSION
By the time we released the credits, that was the prevailing sentiment we were left with. While we found more enjoyment in the last two-thirds of Flintlock than we did in the initial intro and opening area, we couldn’t help but feel let down by Flintlock in almost every way.
It’s still a competent action-RPG that you can have fun with, and the pieces of the experience fit together well – Game Pass is a great way to check it out. However, so much here feels underdeveloped or half-finished that Flintlock: Siege of Dawn likely suffered more from its ambition when the project was in its early days. Now, in July 2024, after the game’s release, we have the feeling that the ammunition in the development room simply ran out.