In December 2018, A44 Games released Ashen. With a striking art style, gorgeous atmosphere, and great combat, it remains an indie gem of the soulslike genre. Now, five and a half years later, the team is back with Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn, which is a much bigger soulslike than the small adventure Ashen.
Flintlock is set in a land populated by corrupted gods and their undead armies. You play as Nor Vanek, an elite member of the Coalition army (aka the good guys) attempting to lay siege to the city of Dawn. Unfortunately, after a failed attempt, you find yourself separated from your army buddies and tasked with retracing your steps. Along the way, you discover a mysterious fox-like companion named Enki.
With Enki at your side, they reveal new details about the world as you journey through the lands of Kian to defeat the gods once and for all. During this journey, you regroup with your coalition forces as you attempt to complete the task and end the siege.
This premise forms a simple but enjoyable main story that carries you through Flintlock’s 20-hour adventure. The first two acts (which make up a large portion of the game) have a brisk pace, but unfortunately, it’s abandoned in favor of a quick 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 group continues on as if it never happened – amplifying that feeling that the game’s ending feels rather rushed.
Despite the great voice acting and performances, we never really got enough time with the game’s allies, aside from Enki. We didn’t learn much about them or grow to like them through meaningful side quests, except in one case. While we were given a bit of history with Nor, we never really got the sense that these characters had known each other for ages.
Additionally, they mainly serve as vendors to upgrade your weapons and gear and seem pretty underutilized. We have the feeling that at one point there were bigger plans for them and the ally system in general.
Given how much narrative is involved in Flintlock and the lack of a satisfying conclusion, this is definitely a disappointment. What saves Flintlock is the combat and traversal. In practice, there’s not much here that you haven’t seen before. Flintlock is a typical Soulslike game, though it’s not as punishing as most games in the genre. Dubbed “souls-light,” the game dials down the punishing difficulty you’ll find in other titles and has a more forgiving flow.
She also lacks a melee weapon, a pistol that can be used to interrupt attacks, or a ranged musket that can be manually adjusted and aimed at enemies from a distance. With the dodges and jumps from “Black Powder”, she can also double jump and quickly dodge to the side to evade attacks while parrying and blocking enemy melee strikes.
At first, we found the combat feel to be a bit lacking, and we struggled to get into the rhythm of trying to mix up dodging, blocking, and parrying. However, after unlocking some upgrades for Nor’s gear and new skills, the game started to get a lot better.
This is largely due to the fact that we’ve unlocked upgrades that increase the speed at which enemies’ stun gauge fills. When that stun gauge is full, it allows you to perform a finishing attack, instantly killing them, or destroying an enemy’s armor (which can make them incredibly resistant to damage).
Once we had these upgrades that allowed us to quickly fill the stun gauge, as well as use Enki’s combat abilities that also involve filling that gauge, we had a lot of fun fighting our way through hordes of undead. Stunning them with just a few hits and finishing them off with a melee or ranged critical attack is great. But it also seems to be the only way to play Flintlock in an enjoyable way, with a distinct lack of flexibility when it comes to playstyles and choices.
Getting around is just as fun. Nor and Enki’s Rift Journey lets you fly across the entire map to find secrets and skip areas. It’s the most innovative and exciting thing about Flintlock, and we wish the game was built more around this traversal, rather than using it primarily as shortcuts across the map. Rift travel has a great sense of momentum, and it really shows off Flintlock’s visuals – which can be breathtaking at times.
Taking down mini-bosses and main bosses are both satisfying moments, and these areas had a nice sense of progression as we progressed through the semi-open maps, completing quests and heading towards the next fight with God.
The combat isn’t perfect, there are weird and sudden difficulty swings throughout the game, and some attacks aren’t well-announced, making it hard to figure out when to parry or dodge them. We also found ourselves stuck and caught in an attack we’d avoided multiple times, which was frustrating.
As with almost every aspect of the game, Flintlock has a few imperfections that stand out. Killing enemies frees up large cities and towns. Unfortunately, there’s rarely anything to do in these areas other than buy outfits for Nor that all visually look the same or play Sebo, an in-world minigame that feels forced in rather than properly developed or fleshed out.
Additionally, Nor’s weapon and rifle upgrade system feels rather rudimentary and unsatisfying, relying solely on reputation (the game’s main currency that you earn from defeating enemies) to improve rarity and deal more damage, with nothing more. The inventory screen also gave us the impression that we’d find dozens and dozens of melee and ranged weapons. But in our playthrough, where we completed all the side quests and explored every area, we only found three melee weapons and a dozen ranged weapons (rifles and muskets).
The ability to bank the reputation you earn in combat and accumulate bonuses, provided you don’t get hit, is a nice new feature that adds a great sense of risk and reward to the game. But when the upgrades you’re spending that reputation on aren’t very satisfying, there’s not much reason to take the risk.
All of this makes it seem like Flintlock originally had a lot more going on, and that these systems were much more developed than they are in the final product, having likely been cut back as the game was expanded and delayed multiple times over the years.
Conclusion
By the time we rolled the credits, that was the feeling that left us. While we found more enjoyment in the last two-thirds of Flintlock than we did in the initial intro and opening zone, we couldn’t help but feel disappointed by Flintlock in almost every way.
It’s still a competent action RPG to have fun with, and the pieces of the experience have been well-sewn together – Game Pass is a great way to experience it. However, so much here feels underdeveloped or half-finished that Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn was probably most damaged by its ambition when the project was in its early stages. Now, in July 2024, when the game releases, we feel like the ammunition in the development room has simply run out.