"...a game about defeating gods that ironically ends up becoming like Icarus..."
PC | PS5 | XBOX SERIES
HOW I PLAYED: Normal Difficulty on a Dualsense Controller via PC Game Pass on an Alienware Laptop running Windows 11 with a Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, and 16GB of RAM. I played at 1440p with DLSS off, most settings on High and a 60fps frame cap.
STORY 13/20
INTRO
The game gets straight to the point and has the player straight into combat soon after a short cutscene showing the world in conflict. The start respects the players time and sets the pace for the game and it's combat straight off the bat. Soon after being attacked by a massive Sphinx-like enemy, who turns out to be a God, you awaken somewhere else with a small fox-like creature; who is also a God. His name is Enki and he will be your companion.
CUTSCENES
Flintlock has shorter cutscenes which are very well polished. Matching fast pasted combat with short cutscenes is a smart move and the developers still manage to give enough information in those short cutscenes to keep the player immersed in the story. It's great when development teams understand the importance of this balance.
WORLD BUILDING
The game is set in a fictional world and the story gives enough information to make the world understood and coherent. There are items like letters to read and side quests to do to learn more about the world and it's tribulations. This is all serviceable to the games smaller scope and narrative. Flintlock does a good job to make the world feel lived in and alive. For example, the NPC's that are around after you clear a Bandit camp create a feeling of life and atmosphere.
OVERALL STORY
The story is engaging enough to keep the player interested, but Flintlock ends as fast as it starts if you follow the story without exploring much. The character and her companion, Enki, speak to each other during some of the games platforming sections, when there are no enemies around. This was a great decision by the developers. Instead of ramming a 2 minute cutscene in the players face, they let you play the game while hearing more details about the story and lore.
GRAPHICS - 11/15
CHARACTER MODELS
I have been following Flintlocks development for almost 2 years now and I was initially drawn in by the weapons and setting of the game. Character Models are well polished and everyone, from the big bosses down to the fox companion, Enki, look stunning. The shine on the armor and weapons has a great finish too.
ENVIRONMENTS
Flintlock pushes visual fidelity and the environments are polished to match, but the areas felt a bit "cut and paste". The water and greenery is beautiful, but some of the bigger structures fell uninspired and didn't show much character.
SPECIAL FX
From the
explosions to the grenades and even down to Enki's magic, all the special FX work was well done and really enhanced the combat. The smoke coming from the Flintlock shots and the shockwave from the heavier cannonball gun are all impressive. The animations for combat are quite detailed and lengthy and this makes combat visually stunning to look at but it makes the combat feel quite stiff, or wooden to play.AUDIO - 10/15
AMBIENCE
The game doesn't do a good job enhancing the environments with ambient sounds and the audio sometimes seems like it may be bugged with the distance of something going on far away but sounding like it's closer.
BOSS MUSIC
Most bosses have their own music and each is well done. The songs don't really add much intensity or excitement to the fight, though.
SOUND DESIGN
The sounds of the weapon swings and gun shots are all great and Enki's attacks are of the same quality too. The voice acting is good, with a lot of great performances. PERFORMANCE - 7/10
FRAME RATE
I had a lot of stutters and frame dips in my playthough and I will put this partially on my laptop's ability, but I have seen other players mentioning performance concerns so I do not believe this is all my laptops issue. I think Unreal Engine is not the best engine to use for a game with fast-pasted combat, but I understand and appreciate the "ease of use" Unreal Engine offers. Below you can see the inconsistency of the frame rate. Some areas it's locked 60fps and other times it's all over the place.
STABILITY
I had no crashes until the final boss fight where I had the game crash twice after defeating the first phase of this boss and the game would load a cutscene. I have seen that the developers told early preview reviewers that the crashing should be fixed by the day 1 patch. So I guess it's not completely fixed, or it's the PC Game Pass App causing my crashes? Also, I did have a couple of bugs where I would fall and die or just be stuck for a bit and I did see a couple of random enemies have their AI break and just stand there while I attacked when they landed on an angle of a ledge.GAMEPLAY - 22/40
CONTROLS
The controls were well designed with the amount of weapons at the players fingertips. I feel like the responsiveness of the character was not up to speed for what the enemies were doing. Especially with encounters of multiple enemies that is almost unavoidable to get hit and dealing with multiple enemies was a nightmare. Picture this: You are facing 3 enemies and are locked onto one
and you kill that one enemy. Then the game changes the lock on to a
barrel further away instead of one of the 2 enemies right next to you
actively attacking you. Extremely frustrating.
MECHANICS
In Flintlock, when you kill an enemy you gain "Reputation", or "Rep" for short, but you don't earn it straight away, it's held in limbo on the left middle of the screen (shown in the photo above) where you can get a bonus amount of Rep, depending on what type of moves you execute while you play, but as soon as you get hit you loose the bonus amount and bank the base amount. Alternatively, you can bank the Rep, plus the bonus, at anytime and reset it yourself. Now, I completely understand what the developers were going for with this system and I bet it sounded great in a board room. But in practice, it just adds a lot of frustration when you get hit by something "unfair" and the system just ends up being ignored. Also, the game has a Parry, for normal attacks, and then enemies "unblockable" attacks could not be parried. So for those attacks you can use the flintlock shot to stun them. Which on paper sounds fine, but the issue is the game has so many different mechanics its trying to push and they don't end up meshing together all that well and generally feel quite clunky in combat. I feel like combat could of been better without the parry at all. But were the developers worried about the combat being too much like Bloodborne? Surely not.
PACING
The most consistent part of Flintlock is its pacing. From start to end, a solid ride of fast paced combat and story. The game respects the players time, albeit short, but short doesn't mean bad. You balance upgrading your abilities, weapons and armor with your earned Rep and collected materials; such as iron, wood, and sulfur.
UI/UE
I almost like the UI too much, its great. The only two issues with it is the menu on controller takes way too long to move the cursor around to select things. A small gripe, but an annoyance none-the-less. The second issue was with the map, namely how a waypoint outside of the menu/map only states the direction of the waypoint. And sometimes a waypoint is 50 metres west of me, but I have to figure out to go 50 metres East, then 50 metres south, then 100 metres West, then 50 metres North to get to that point.
BOSS QUALITY
This is where the heavy animations of the combat were really showing their downside. The story bosses are all just frustrating, except for the final boss which is painful and honestly poorly designed. Making a boss fly up, out of view, then crash back down was a bad choice which doesn't make for a fun or enjoyable fight. The same boss also teleports around next to you halfway through a combo of attacks. There was a time when I got caught and locked between the front legs of the final boss, who had teleported to me, and attacked the ground I stood on. Now this is obviously a bug, but I have to judge on what is here and not what the game may become in the future. Overall, the bosses didn't feel enjoyable to overcome.
ENEMY VARIETY
Considering the games length there is an amazing amount of variety in the enemies. It's a shame that so many of them were frustrating to deal with, and not in a sense of too hard, just that they either had too much health or having to deal with multiple enemies at once was not enjoyable at all.
GAMEPLAY VARIETY
There is some amount of build freedom in Flintlock. There are a lot of abilities to unlock and enough weapon choices to have two quite different encounters with some of the later bosses depending on what build and strategy you decide to utilise.
REPLAYABILITY
Flintlock has no Challenge or New Game Plus modes, nothing can be missed in a single playthrough and there are no alternate endings, so the game doesn't give the player a reason to replay the game. OVERALL - 63/100
FAIR
Flintlock: Siege of Dawn has so many different ideas which failed to mesh together and make a memorable game. It feels like a bad mash up of a Ubisoft open world, God of War 2018's bosses and combat, but also some Dark Souls and Bloodborne elements slapped in there too. There is nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other games and building off of those tried and tested ideas, but sometimes things do not come together in a finished product. Flintlock was a disappointment, and it's sad to see. I have followed this game for a long time and hoped it was a great AA game, hopefully their next game will land better.
Developers: Please do not make combat so animation heavy. Pick fluidity over visuals in combat.
TL;DR 63/100 (Fair) - Flintlock is a game about defeating gods that ironically ends up becoming like Icarus by trying to be like so many different great games at once and fails to land anything very well at all.
PICK UP FLINTLOCK: THE SIEGE OF DAWN HERE:
2 Comments
Very well done review. I would say one of the most in depth reviews I have seen. I can see this is done wit passion and would just say keep it up the review is done perfect
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