In December 2018, A44 Games released Ashen . With a striking art style, beautiful 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 , a soulslike that is much bigger than the small adventure that was Ashen .
Flintlock is set in a land of corrupt gods and their undead armies. You play as Nor Vanek, an elite member of the Coalition Army (also known as the good guys) who attempt to lay siege to the city of Dawn. Unfortunately, after a failed attempt, you are scattered from your army buddies and tasked with finding your way back. 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 travel through the lands of Kian to defeat the gods once and for all. During your journey, you will regroup with your coalition forces as you attempt to complete the task and end the siege.
That premise forms a simple but enjoyable main story that carries you through Flintlock’s 20-hour adventure. There’s a solid pacing in the first two acts (which make up a large portion of the game), but unfortunately it’s abandoned in the third act in favor of a quick conclusion. During the transition between acts 2 and 3, a major plot point is resolved in about 30 seconds and the group moves on as if it never happened – furthering the feeling that the game’s ending feels somewhat rushed.
Despite great voice acting and performances, we never really get enough time with the game’s allies, save for Enki. We didn’t learn much about them or fall in love with them through meaningful sidequests, except in one case. Despite hearing about their history with Nor, we never really got the sense that these characters had known each other for centuries.
Additionally, they largely serve as vendors to upgrade your weapons and gear and feel quite underutilized. We get the feeling that there were bigger plans for them and the alliance system in general at some point.
Considering how central the story is to Flintlock and the lack of a satisfying conclusion, this is definitely a disappointment. What saves Flintlock’s experience is the combat and traversal. In practice, there’s not much here that you haven’t seen before. Flintlock is a typical soulslike, though not as punishing as most games in the genre. Dubbed a “souls-light,” the game dials back the punishing difficulty found in other titles and has a more forgiving gameplay.
She also has no melee weapon, a rifle that can be used to interrupt attacks, or a ranged musket that can be manually zoomed in and aimed at enemies from afar. With ‘Black Powder’ dodges and jumps, she can also double jump and quickly dodge to the side to avoid attacks while parrying and blocking enemy melee strikes.
At first we didn’t find the combat to be great and we had a hard time getting into the flow of it while trying to dodge, block and parry. But after we unlocked some upgrades to Nor’s gear and new abilities, the game started to feel a lot better.
This is largely due to the fact that we unlocked upgrades that increased the speed at which enemies’ stun meters filled up. When that stun meter is full, you can perform a finishing attack, killing them instantly or stripping away an enemy’s armor (which can make them incredibly resistant to damage).
Once we had those upgrades that allowed us to build up the stun meter quickly, along with using Enki’s combat abilities that also involved building up said meter, we had a lot of fun cutting through hordes of the undead. Stunning them with just a few hits and finishing them off with a flashy critical melee or ranged attack feels great. But it also feels like the only way to enjoy playing Flintlock, with a distinct lack of flexibility when it comes to gameplay styles and choices.
Traveling around is just as fun, too. Nor and 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 had been built more around this traversal, rather than using it primarily as shortcuts around the map. Rift Travel has a great sense of momentum, and it really shows off the visuals in Flintlock – which can be stunning at times.
Defeating both mini-bosses and main bosses is a satisfying moment. These areas felt like you were making progress as you worked through the semi-open maps, completing quests and heading to the next battle with God.
The combat isn’t perfect though, and there are some strange and sudden swings in difficulty throughout the game, and some attacks aren’t telegraphed well, making it difficult to know when to parry or dodge. We also found ourselves getting clipped and caught in an attack we’d dodged a few times, which was frustrating.
As with almost every aspect of the game, Flintlock has a few other imperfections that stand out. As you kill enemies, you liberate large towns and villages. Unfortunately, there’s rarely anything to do in these areas other than buy Nor some outfits that all look the same or play a game of Sebo, a mini-game in the world that feels more shoved in than well-crafted or fleshed out.
Additionally, the upgrade system for Nor’s weapons and guns feels rather haphazard and unsatisfying, simply using Reputation (the game’s main currency, earned by defeating enemies) to upgrade rarity and deal more damage, with nothing more to offer. The inventory screen also gave us the impression that we’d find dozens and dozens of melee and ranged weapons. Yet in our playthrough, where we completed every side quest and explored every area, we only found three melee weapons and about a dozen ranged weapons (rifles and muskets).
The ability to bank the Reputation you earn in battles and stack up bonus amounts if you don’t get hit is an interesting twist that adds a great sense of risk and reward to the gameplay. But if the upgrades you’re spending that Reputation on aren’t all that satisfying, there’s not much reason to take the risk.
It seems that Flintlock originally had much more to offer and that these systems were much more developed than in the final product. It is likely that the possibilities were scaled back as the game was expanded and delayed several times in recent years.
Conclusion
By the time the credits rolled, that was the overwhelming feeling we had. While we enjoyed the last two-thirds of Flintlock more than the initial intro and opening sequence, we couldn’t help but feel let down by Flintlock in almost every way.
It’s still a competent action-RPG that’s fun to play, and the pieces of the experience are sewn together quite nicely – Game Pass is a great way to try it out. 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 days. Now, in July 2024, when the game launches, we’re starting to feel as if the dev room simply ran out of ammunition.