There seems to be a template that a lot of indie devs are following. They have aspirations of developing large RPGs, hoping to elevate themselves to the same plane as the giants like BioWare, Bethesda and CD Projekt Red. Those with their heads about them will look to build out a smaller, tighter experience that shows their capabilities in the hopes of getting the chance to build something bigger. Others try desperately to match those AAA devs blow for blow and are ultimately come off worse for it (I’m looking directly at you Spiders). Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn falls into the former camp and whilst it’s got a lot of potential the overall execution leaves something to be desired. This certainly feels like their application to the world to do more, should you wish to let them.
The Coalition has been fighting off the hordes of the dead for some time now and there appears to be no end to them. You are Nor Vanek, a sapper in the Coalition and one of the army’s greatest soldiers. You’ve been summoned to the front to help out a surge of dead from the Great Below only to be confronted directly by one of your gods: Uru. Defeated, your party seemingly scattered to the winds, you find yourself in the care of Eniki, a minor god who says they’ll help you take revenge on the gods by lending you his power. So you find yourself in a direct war against the gods, with little more than steel and powder to back you up.
Coming to us via the now somewhat dated Unreal 4 engine you can definitely see some of that trademark Unreal feel coming through in the overdone specularity and somewhat dated lighting effects. Still the devs should be commended for the amount of detail they’ve crammed into all aspects of the game: your character’s armor is highly detailed, the levels are well constructed and they’re not shy about using as many effects as they can without dropping the framerate to unplayable levels. The animations are a little on the stiff side however, especially in conversations with NPCs which can be a bit jarring at times. Audio mixing could do with a bit of attention too as whilst most characters were mastered correctly Eniki was always on the quite/soft side which made some key moments in his dialogue disappear behind background noise.
Flintlock is a *shudder* soulslike, marketing itself as somewhere between God of War and Elden Ring. In reality it’s probably only a half step away from God of War as whilst there are elements of the souls combat system here they don’t go much beyond the surface level. Elden Ring, for example, is all about choice and the ability to use a wide kitbag to tackle all the challenges you face. Flintlock on the other hand is pretty limited from that perspective and I honestly did not change my gear more than twice. Flintlock should instead showcase itself as a hack ‘n’ slash or brawler title as that’s far more apt to how the game plays out. I mean sure, there’s areas to explore, upgrade materials to gather and side quests to chase, but the Arkham series has all those things and no one would consider that anywhere near Elden Ring.
I’m getting distracted. Let’s focus on how it actually plays shall we?
Combat is soulslike to a point. Sure enemies telegraph their moves and they’re punishing should you not react properly but in the way they’ve designed the combat it’s more a game of fast paced rock paper scissors. Certain moves must be dodged, others parried and your precious few bullets saved for those maneuvers that you otherwise don’t have the tools to deal with. Enki, your little fox-like companion, also plays a key part in encounters by attacking enemies, binding them and applying status effects that you’ll gain by defeating bosses. There’s a timing element to attacks as well as doing certain actions at the same time can trigger other abilities and effects. Suffice to say there’s a lot to bring together into a cohesive experience and Flintlock gets it mostly right.
The game’s opening hours are definitely not its strongest as like with many games in this genre you simply don’t have a lot of tools at your disposal to use to solve problems. Early on this manifests with trash enemies that are just an absolute chore to beat, something that’s magnified when you’re sent back to the closest camp when one of them gets the better of you. The standard Dark Souls tropes of exploration still apply here, giving you shortcuts that you can use to skip sections once you’ve gotten past them, so you can simply dash past a bunch of guys to unlock a shortcut to completely skip them if you’re finding it a bit too hard.
Further on as you start to improve and get access to more options things improve somewhat, although this is offset by the usual “Just throw more enemies at them” difficulty ramp that is common with this genre. To be sure there’s a wealth of talents dedicated to managing this but you’ll still find yourself getting mobbed more often as you get further on in the game. It’s really only in the game’s final hours that you’ll start to have a build that comes together nicely, giving you a bunch of options to tweak to get the maximum out of your chosen playstyle.
MINOR SPOILER BELOW
Which is, of course, just around the point where they’ll take away half of your abilities for a key part of the fight. Honestly I really hate that, even if it’s not a major part of the fight, it still feels so cheap to just simply take things away from a player. If you must do that you might as well just change that part of the fight to a cutscene, you’ll get the same effect in the end.
SPOILERS OVER
There’s an overall roughness in Flintlock that I’ll directly attribute to this being an indie dev who simply doesn’t have the time to refine it further. As I mentioned before animations are a bit stiff and robotic, making the otherwise beautiful world feel a little off. Interactive objects are always a bit of a challenge to get working properly, with interaction buttons popping in and out of existence randomly. The game demands you use a controller but will weirdly revert to keyboard controls every so often until it realises the controller is plugged in. Worse still it only partially supports the PlayStation 5 controller, something that’s been out 4 years at this point and this then manifests all sorts of weird issues that don’t have a fix. Worse of these is the joystick drift, something that I simply don’t get on any other game (both PC and PS5). A lot of these things are fixable so if you’re playing this a few months post release I’ll hope it’s better.
The story is very middle of the road without much of an emotional impact. To be sure individual performances of the voice actors are great, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a dynamic between any of them. There’s constantly long periods of exposition which, whilst great for worldbuilding, don’t do a whole lot to further the actual story you’re experiencing. Even the side quests, which ostensibly are there to help build out the background of the supporting characters, are pretty surface level and don’t appear to have any lasting impacts or changes to the characters or the world when you complete them. Again, I recognise the challenge that indie devs face with where they need to focus their resources, but I just didn’t find the narrative all that compelling.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a competent soulslike, feeling a lot like a resume for future publishers where they can show they’re capable of delivering a full game that gets dangerously close to some of its AAA counterparts. The worlds are lovingly realised, making the most of the now dated Unreal 4 engine. Mechanically it’s a complex beast, implementing much of what we’ve come to expect from the bigger players in this genre. The combat is competent, starting out pretty weak but becoming much more enjoyable as you get into the game’s final chapters. The narrative leaves a bit to be desired, not really failing per se but just not being enough to really get swept up into. For a first shot across the bow in this genre though I’ve seen much worse than Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn and maybe this will be enough for us to see another title from these devs.
Rating: 7.0/10
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is available on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S right now for $58.50. Game was played on the PC with a total of 10.2 hours total playtime and 42% of the achievements unlocked.
