Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (2024)

I always kind of knew this game existed and I finally got around to playing it because it was leaving gamepass, but I decided to drop it around 4.5 hours in, which from what I can tell is about halfway through the game. I think there could have been something good here, but in the end nothing really comes together that well.

To start with the thing I think was the best, the combat isn't terribly unique, but it is good, when it works. 90% of the time it feels way too jank, the lock on doesn't go from dead enemy to new alive enemy, the parry and then attack after parry feels weird, the dodge feels weird, and just the 1 2 3 4 of the attack combo doens't feel right. There's also the whole mechanic where the fox god like death attacks enemies and it like takes off their armor or something but it feels like an extra thrown in gimmick. There were certain times though where it came together and felt decent, but usually it just felt clunky.

Movement almost feels good, but once again jank comes into play. I like the double jump and the powder dash, but the way the flips work and the way ledges are very wonky and sometimes the character grabs on to them and sometimes they don't and sometimes it is very weird animations was frustrating. The world is also so large and open but the actual traversal is so painfully slow, even with the triangle things that pop up sometimes, but the triangle portals are usually for backtracking not forward trecking, and the sprint speed is just soooo slow compared to how open and empty the environments are.

When it comes to the story, idk, it like exists. Nothing about it at all was interesting and the enemies that show up, besides the one big boss I fought, were painfully generic.

I think at best this game could be like an 8/10, if things were cleaned up and just made to feel better, but they way it stands from the amount I played, there was just nothing special or good that makes this game really worth playing in my eyes, at best something is just ok, and at worst they aren't necessarily bad but they are frustrating. Solid 5/10.

Gameplay was really fun, movement was awesome, a lot of freedom, big maps to explore, some secondary missions and really fun combat.

You really feel powerful and are able (almost) to do whatever you feel like.

Took me 12h with every secondary mission and everything explored. I think it was definetly worth it! I recommend everyone to give this game a try.

Some advices from my experience would be:

• Play with controller (keybord is just bad)
• Play on high difficulty. On normal i was able to clear every boss on 2/3 tries. So if you want some challenges, move up that difficulty :)

I vaguely remember seeing something about Flintlock a few months before it came out. I remember thinking that it looked kind of cool, but then I forgot about it. Fast forward a few months, I'm listening to The Besties podcast, and Justin McElroy is talking about Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn. He talked up the movement as a selling point, and when I realized it was on gamepass, I decided to give it a try.

Flintlock is set in a world that I feel should have a lot more lore than it really does. But anyway, the dead are pouring out of this big pit, and the living have joined forces to avoid joining them. You play as Nor, a sapper in the Coalition army. In reality a sapper is a combat engineer with jobs such as bridge-building, mine clearing, and demolitions, but in Flintlock, they seem to be basically Jedi Knights, at least in terms of how much people revere them.

When Nor leads a daring raid into the heart of the Dead invasion, she accidentally releases a giant evil god and teams up with a nicer, tinier god to stop him. Nor as a character I found a bit endearing. She's very determined, a trait that I like my PCs having, makes me feel more immersed in the story, but she herself feels a bit half baked. Kind of like the world, I feel like there's a lot of history with her that we're not privy to. She mentions at one point that she had been a "trapper" which I almost misheard as "sapper" and I was like "Yeah, Nor, I KNOW." She and Enki, the little bird/dog god of death are a decent par, though. I would say together they make one passable protagonist. There's one kind of effective side mission where they light funeral pyres for fallen soldiers.

The gameplay, though. The main thing about Flintlock is the combat. Ax in one hand, gun in the other, mix in a long range rifle, and an occasionally grenade, and that's kind of all of your equipment. Enemies spice up the encounters sometimes needing specific types of damage to down them, like armored enemies which need to be stripped before they lose acceptable amount of health. There is an upgrade that allows you to parry with the pistol, which, like, the game is kind of over once you get that. Gunshots interrupt enemy attacks anyway, and being able to get a parry off if you get the timing right just makes it maybe the best powerup in the game. Bosses fell before me like easily parried children. So I guess just children.

The final boss, though, is a FUCKING NIGHTMARE. He's huge, does a lot of damage, and jumps around like a jumping spider wearing Moon Shoes. On top of that, he has two phases, and completing the first phase doesn't start you off at the start of the second phase if you happen to die. I don't think I'd care as much if not for the fact that you're stripped of some powers in the second phase for story reasons.

Overall, I was impressed with Flintlock, even though I don't think it will really stick with me. It's kind of a Double A game. An impressive amount of effort was put into a small package. I'd like to see a sequel.

A fresh setting and effective dialogue writing combine with the mechanics of a fast, physical action RPG, with numerous offensive possibilities. The combat system based on blades, magic and projectiles is immediate and fun, above all because the challenge level forces you to face each battle carefully without reaching the heights of difficulty of a classic soulslike, while it is pleasant to explore this large but not dispersive with the aerial maneuvers of its protagonist.

If one-on-one battles allow me to admire real dances of death, I do not find the same good sensations in battles against multiple enemies. The sense of progression remains satisfying until the end of the campaign despite the limited variety of weapons, armor and rivals to defeat, while the few boss fights do not differ much from the conflicts with the classic enemies of the open world. However, the currency system based on a multiplier is absolutely promoted: this is the real idea that makes the game enjoyable until the end credits, minus its rough edges.

Flintlock passes 500k players.

Good for them, Flintlock is a ton of fun, a really wonderful smaller sized indie Souls-lite from A44. And I can’t help but once again plug Kepler Interactive because, so far, I’ve been impressed with the games this indie dev owned co-op has put out. Tchia (Awaceb) was one of my favourites last year and Ultros (Hadoque) and Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn (A44) are two of my favourites this year. Even games I didn’t fully jive with, such as Scorn, are still impressive for small devs. I know there’s no one answer to the AAA woes of the world, but it’s nice to see an Indie co-op make a mark on the industry.

Solid souls-lite, but with fun combat and very difficult bosses. It took me like 30 tries to beat Dukmar until I learned you can use the Flame Cannon to stagger his Kamehameha wave.

There are a few nitpicks I have over the game, but none so dire as the fact that the framerate was terrible for me. It was the same situation when I played Senua's Saga. Not sure if it's my computer or just AA games in general.

Anyways, there's a solid foundation here with fun combat, a cool world, and badass protagonists one of which is a fox god. It's also nice to play a short-ish action game that won't suck up months of my life.

Maps with fun verticality, a great combat mechanics with an excelent rhythm of melee and firearms, fantastic risk/reward systems and a novel aesthetic inspired in the colonia era make this soulslike something special. It's not perfect and you can tell it's not a high budget product. The story is not the best and has some rough edges, but I really enjoyed my time in Dawn killing gods alongside Nor and Enki.

You can read my full review in spanish in GamerFocus.

It's a shame that some assholes are review bombing it on some aggregation sites because... because they're fucking racists, that's why.

This is a very small problem, but I wish this wasn't dropping in five weeks. Partially because I'm really into it and want to jump right into the full game immediately, and partially because I suspect my demo save won't transfer over to the launch version. The reason the latter bothers me is because the demo is quite big, and there are a lot of areas to explore that don't seem to be gated, and there doesn't seem to be a limit to what I can unlock skill and gear wise. If the game was dropping months, or a year from now, I could forget about it and start all over. But starting over in only a few weeks isn't quite as appealing, and it kind of makes me want to drop the demo instead of trying to explore further and/or beat the next boss.

I know, I know, I could easily solve this by not buying it at launch. But I so want to. That's why it's a very small problem.

On another note, I've seen a couple outlets covering Summer Game Fest classify this as Eurojank largely because it's published by Kepler Interactive. I think that's interesting for a few reasons. One is the obvious, that A44 is from New Zealand, and not Europe. But let's put that aside and say Eurojank transcends geopolitical boundaries. Well in that case, the demo isn't particularly janky. Actually it's quite polished. It looks gorgeous, runs smooth as butter, feels great to play and I haven't run into a single bug.

So if Flintlock isn't functionally janky, is it just Eurojank by association because Kepler typically publishes Eurojank? Well, of all the Kepler published games I've played so far, which include this demo, Tchia, Ultros, Scorn and bits of Pacific Drive, I haven't found any of them janky. In fact, my experience of all of them was that of polished works, even if I didn't love all of them (Scorn wasn't as enjoyable as I hoped and Pacific Drive is a cool concept but I didn't like the survival elements enough to jump from the demo to the full game). Now, I know at least one person who played Pacific Drive and ran into bugs, but I'd say that my personal experience of Kepler published games has been that of polished works that are doing interesting things. So why call things Eurojank if they aren't really full of jank? And if Kepler largely publishes pretty polished games (in my experience), can they really be called a Eurojank publisher just because they are based in Europe?

And then there's the fact that publishers are not the ones developing the games. They publish which means marketing, distribution, etc. Even if Kepler had a few janky titles under it's belt, are we really going to slap that label on everything they publish given publishers are not developers? It seems like a fairly useless and even potentially misleading form of categorization that gives publishers more credit for that which devs create than they deserve.

Long story short, this ain't no janky game! I hope that's true for the launch version, but so far I'm impressed.