Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn proves itself a perfect example of what an AA game can be. A shorter experience focused on telling a compact story, with combat just good enough to propel you to credits. It doesn’t offer a particularly compelling story and combat has a very specific flow to it, actively punishing anyone who attempts to deviate from it, but when you play by its rules it feels quite fun.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn
Developer: A44 Games
Price: $40
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), PlayStation 5, and PC
The game was played via an Xbox Game Pass subscription for review
The story follows Nor, a Sapper who fights against the dead invading the world, and her new pal Enki, a god. While Nor hates the gods for killing her surrogate father, she reluctantly teams up with Enki to take down the gods who have invaded, looking to stop the invasion of the dead once and for all. It plays on the tropes you would expect for this type of story, with our heroes discovering they have more in common than they originally thought. It’s not particularly fresh or interesting, but it also takes a backseat to combat. Where the narrative shines is the world building.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn should be overburdened with exposition. It has a complicated world with a ton of mythology to cover, but it smartly chooses to slowly dish it out over time. All of the table setting for the world is done while you play, giving small bits of information at moments when it makes sense. You slowly learn about the politics of the world, the importance of gunpowder, referred to only as powder, and the strange relationship the humans in the story have with the gods. It’s not a masterclass in worldbuilding, since a lot of the politics and mythology feel surface level, but it’s doled out in a way that doesn’t let you spend too much time thinking about it.
Combat is the star of the show, although it is not without many flaws. It takes a ton of inspiration from soulslike games, focusing on slow deliberate combat, where you don’t have too much room for error. Where it differs is that it has a Doom Eternal-like combat loop. You need to prime enemies using Enki’s curses, so your damage can break their stagger meters. If the enemy doesn’t have armor, you can perform a critical hit that typically kills and if they have armor, a staggered attack will remove that armor altogether. Most of your attacks will come either in between enemy swings, or as follow ups to the two types of parries.
You can parry normal attacks with your weapons and strong attacks with your gun. You can also quickly dodge out of the way, although parrying feels far more beneficial. Your attacks rarely stagger enemies outside of parrying, so you are forced to be more defensive in combat. Trying to brute force enemies quickly reveals that you are meant to parry, and it shows some of the cracks in enemy hitboxes and animations. Both of these aren’t as precise as most games with this type of combat, but the parry system doesn’t require that level of precision. Not having much freedom in combat feels restrictive, but it does force you to use all three tools, your melee weapon, firearm, and Enki curses, which shows off how good the game feels when you play by its rules.
The leveling system does have a fun twist; during combat, you gain the equivalent of souls for defeating enemies, but you bank it before it’s actually added to your total. Doing certain actions in combat increases your multiplier, incentivizing you to dig in and find the flow with combat. You can choose to cash in whenever, but if you take damage, you lose your multiplier, and the points are cashed in without it. With the risk not being too high, it was easy to go for multiple fights without cashing in. While this added another dynamic to combat, at no point did it feel like it was necessary to unlock new skills, with enemies and quests offering more than enough points to regularly unlock new skills. It’s a fun system, but it’s clear that engaging with it isn’t a requirement, which lessens its importance.
The main boss fights in the game require you to use these systems perfectly, although they aren’t too frustrating difficulty wise. Instead, it can be difficult to make much progress on their health bar without landing parries. The first boss focuses on this, using its three-armed design to ask you to execute three consecutive parries, which is also where the game’s combat system clicked.
The level design blends linear levels with a few open-world elements. The levels typically have one clear main path, with a few branching areas, where you complete side quests and find hidden secrets. There are plenty of these in each of the main areas, although the exact amount that you want to complete might be far less. After exploring almost all of the first section, it was clear that the side quests don’t offer much in the way of story and the rewards are typically new equipment. Because the game has a shorter run-time, most of the equipment is different and not better, not offering much motivation to go out of the way to find it.
The shortcut system for traversal also feels like an afterthought in its design. Skulls are spread out throughout each level and when activated they create rifts you can teleport to when close enough. It’s nice to not have to fully redo a section whenever you die, but just having purple triangles all over the environment sticks out in an off-putting way, instead of building it into the environment. There are a few spots where the shortcut is part of the level, usually in the form of a lever and a gate, but the majority are rift based.
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a short romp of a revenge quest, offering a trite story that isn’t overbearing. Its combat has a few unique ideas and does sing when you follow the loop exactly, but the seams show often in the form of imprecise hit boxes and animations. The worldbuilding offers just enough unique elements to be interesting during the game, but not enough to chew on afterwards. It isn’t the most memorable experience, but it’s fun and relatively well-made, offering a quick hit for anyone who enjoys methodical combat.
The Final Word
Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a fun and well-put together action-RPG, with a trope filled story. It isn’t going to blow anyone’s socks off, but this small adventure has just enough going for it and a short enough runtime that makes it worth diving into, especially for people that love focused and methodical combat.
MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
