Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn | Review

Sit Uro, Sit. Good boy

Jesse 'Doncabesa' Norris July 17, 2024Last Updated: July 11, 2024

20 2,109 8 minutes read

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is the latest title from A44 Games, creators of Ashen. You are a sapper, aka a maniac with a pistol and axe that loves blowing sh!t up. The dead have been pouring out of the city of Dawn for years and in a desperate attempt to stop their never-ending onslaught you accidentally release the Gods into the world. Alongside the only decent God out of five, you’ll slice, dice, filet, and blow away hordes of the living, and the dead, and it’s a pretty darn fun time. It’s launching day one into Xbox Game Pass, so let’s break down whether it’s for you.

The world of Kian

Building a new IP is tough. Giving reasons why names are used, how things work, the laws of magic, etc. can feel like a slog if your game is too talky. Flintlock balances introducing us to a new world well. The pace is occasionally relentless with the progression, as this soul-like is far shorter than most others. I completed my journey there and back in about 15 hours with normal difficulty. Yes, even though it’s a souls-lite it has easy, normal, and hard difficulty modes alongside the ability to have infinite HP.

The story begins with your young Sapper, Nor Vanek. A member of “The Coalition”, you are Kian’s last hope. This world has been besieged by the undead for a decade and your fighters are making a last desperate push to the city of Dawn. It is home to the door leading to the Great Below, the realm of the Gods and mortals who have perished. The initial plan goes terribly, and instead of sealing anything you unleash three of the five Gods of Kian on the world. Joined by Enki, a tiny little fox who is also a God, you’ll journey across a couple of decent-sized though not massive maps as you take the fight to these a-hole Gods and rid local communities of their troubles.

Flintlock has an excellent voice cast. Olive Gray, Miranda Keys from the Halo TV show, does a great job of selling Nor as someone full of rage and depth. This is a souls-lite, there are no RPG style choices here for the most part, and Nor and Enki’s interplay throughout the game does most of the heavy lifting for the narrative. Speaking of Enki, this God is a constant presence and catalyst for the story. His journey through the mortal realm and his role in the game’s events was an enjoyable if slightly predictable one. There were a few big revelations that had me say “Ya, no sh!t” at a time when Nor and the other characters were shocked.

Souls-lite Gameplay

Flintlock bills itself as a souls-lite. Combat is fast-paced with tons of movement. The right bumper is your melee attack. The right trigger shoots your pistol, and the left trigger reloads/aims your long-barreled weapon. X uses your currently equipped item, whether that is a health flask or grenade, and Y is used to curse enemies via Enki’s magic. Those curses take multiple shapes based on the crystal equipped, though like with most items in the game, you could beat Flintlock and never see one if you mainline things. A jumps, with a handy black-powder magic-infused double jump, while B is your dodge, and a double press will have you black-powder dash in that direction.

The double jump and powder dash are used a lot in the game’s traversal, which is both fun and frustrating. Flintlock has a lot of clambering and often the game would have my character do a jump onto a marked platform I should be able to mantle and I would instead slide off of it for a second before Nor would finally grab on. A lot of the double jumps would have me not clear it by a few inches and the same loop of sliding to the side before she finally grabs on would repeat. It wasn’t a huge deal but it made platforming feel looser than it should have.

Combat is a typical lock-on focused dance of strikes, shots, dodges, and parries. Enemies have two types of attack, those that can (and should) be parried and those that must be dodged or interrupted via a pistol shot. Learning attack patterns on bosses were not overly complicated, and that held for most humanoid-shaped characters/monsters. There are some spiders and emu-sized birds that were more of a p.i.t.a. than they should have been because their attacks felt like they came out of nowhere. The combat never feels great early on. You need to unlock more moves for it to get there and even then it’s never as tight as I would have liked. The choice to not use a stamina meter means enemies will fight through your attacks, which can be frustrating for this genre.

A key difference in Flintlock is a lack of any type of stamina meter. Nor can attack forever without getting tired. To counter this enemies, especially as you get to the mid to late part of the title, aren’t stunned by basic hits. The left bumper blocks regular attacks and if pressed right before you’re hit is an incredibly powerful parry. Learning when to melee, shoot for interrupts, dodge, or parry was a lot of fun after I realized how “don’t be greedy” Flintlock is. While things can be fast once you unlock more of Nor & Enki’s toolkits you’ll want to take it slow. Losing HP isn’t the only negative when the enemy lands a blow.

Interesting Leveling Mechanics

Reputation is the name of Flintlock’s currency. To earn it you need to kill enemies, which is standard. What isn’t is the currency modifier that builds up as you hit them in a variety of ways, allowing you to cash in on your currency combo by holding left on the d-pad whenever you want. Get hit and all of your modifier is lost and instead of getting 72×50%, you’ll just get 72 reputation. When you die your reputation is left as a giant circle on the ground around the location at which you perished. Getting it back is as simple as running over the ground, no button presses are required.

Reputation is the only currency you’ll earn, though finding Iron, Wood, and Sulfur is needed to upgrade your weaponry, tools, and armor when you’re at a base camp. As you progress through the game, and I cannot stress this enough, do not mainline the story. Search every city, crevasse, etc. on each map. This is the only way you’ll unlock every axe, hammer, gun, grenade, and armor piece. A few are given to you as you play the campaign but know that you need to explore on your own to get the most out of Flintlock. Reputation is used for your upgrade tree as well, and that can get expensive.

There are three upgrade paths in Flintlock, one for melee, one for ranged, and one for Enki’s magic. As you unlock a skill the one above it becomes available and adds to your overall damage for that skill type. By the end of my playthrough, I had all but a few skills unlocked and was doing roughly 35% more damage than I had been at the start of the game. Combining those skill unlocks with weapon upgrades I could easily one-shot enemies that took 4 or 5 swings before. All of the game’s coolest moves are tied to that upgrade system. A huge punch on the ground that does an explosion, heavy swings, parrying ranged attacks, and a lot more all require you to do the surprisingly easy grind of getting reputation and doing side quests.

To unlock more health flasks you’ll need to liberate cities, and the main story only goes through a few of them, so again you’ll need to clear the map to power up. There are Enki tail feathers hidden in places that power him and his curses up, health stones that are the only way to raise your HP limit, and a ton of great content that is easy to miss if you aren’t dedicated to exploring. It’s the most “souls” thing about a game that takes a lot from that series. The level design is basic but well done. I was never awed by a layout or shortcut unlocking but they nailed the vistas as you traveled around. I got the feeling that I was in something far bigger than I knew it to be.

Those Beautiful Vistas

I played on an Xbox Series X in performance mode as well as on PC at 4k Ultra settings. Flintlock looks good when you can see it. Playing on a solid OLED TV the game is way too dark whenever the sun isn’t blazing in the skies above. I had to adjust the in-game gamma settings from 50 up to 70 to keep my eyes from straining to make out details. That led to things looking a bit washed out during the daytime but was worth it. Player models look fine on the console and a bit better on the PC. Nor and the other main cast are of higher quality than most, and the NPCs are a mix of zombies, pirates, barbarians, and knights of varying quality.

I like the art style overall, it’s a different universe weird Napolean theme that suits the themes of the story. My favorite part of Flintlock graphically was those beautiful vistas. Early on you’ll unlock the ability to fly to specific points. Enki can open tears in reality and you can fly between them in a set path. This led to some fun exploration in higher locations that showed off the gorgeous backdrops that had been hidden before. Flintlock seemingly has a good lighting system, outside of things being too dark by default. You’ll get a shift of time of day that changes up the mood of an area. As you come upon a ransacked hamlet it will be dark and red, after you kill the leader there to let everyone move back home it’s bright and cheery. Nothing groundbreaking but it’s well done.

I love Elias Toufexis as a voice actor. His recent turn as Sam Coe in Starfield was excellent and he’ll forever be a legend after his turn as Adam Jensen in two Deus Ex titles. He puts on a slightly British effect here as Nor’s mentor and it just sounds off. He does not sounds old enough for this Captain Picard with a goatee old man. I love the man’s work and if you can get past whatever this accent is he still does a great job.

Other than that the writing is a mix of solid for the main story and extremely “video game NPC dialogue” for the rest. When you’re walking around town the same, far too loud, voice lines will hit every single time you go by certain NPCs and it started to drive me crazy. The music is an odd mix of classic sounds and modern instruments. It’s almost dance-hall sounding during boss fights and while it threw me a bit at first I ended up digging it during the fights against the Gods. There aren’t a ton of boss encounters in the game, so having some banging tracks when they show up was a benefit.

Bug-wise I had the game crash on me twice on Xbox early on, but that stopped after they fixed a reviewer’s worst nightmare. Some Xbox titles that are played anywhere refuse to let you play online or on the Microsoft Store on PC at all. That was fixed well before the embargo and after that issue, which will never bother anyone but those of us reviewing it early, I had zero issues in the game. Nor would get stuck while platforming for a second or two, vibrating like a 9.0 on the Richter Scale, before popping out of that spot. It happened four or five times but never got me stuck to the point that I had to reload my save.

Wrapping Things Up

Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn is a lot of fun if you engage with all of it. At first, I was flying through the main quest before I slowed down and explored every inch of each map. Once I made that change I went from enjoying my time to loving it. It’s not the tightest game out there, but it has a lot of great ideas that come together for a package well worth experience.