KILL. ALL. GODS.
God, what an impression the marketing for Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn made. The latest effort from Ashen developer A44 Games, Flintlock ticks a lot of boxes. A striking art direction and tone established from the jump, a beloved indie studio shifting gears into AA scale with yet another riff on the Soulslike genre, and a cute fox creature with mascot-sized ears by your side. But between ideation and execution, something comes unstuck in Flintlock.
We pick up with the world of Flintlock some ten years after the Door to the Great Below was breached and the Dead spilled forth into the land of Kian, a war-torn country perpetually on the brink of collapse but somehow managing to teeter. The game follows the misadventures of Nor Vanek, a Sapper (some kind of specialist soldier) for the Coalition (some kind of coalition formed to fight the Dead) after she and a small group of mates inadvertently unleash a pantheon of cruel, if incredibly stylish, gods into Kian.
Much of this is clumsily established in the opening half hour, which has a sort of rapid, in medias res feel to its opening that never reverts to an earlier state to help you find your legs. It’s a flurry of proper nouns and character names and relationships that fails to establish a sense of place or even basic emotional investment in the world, before the cut to title card and the game can begin in earnest, as a wounded Nor is rescued by the above-mentioned mascot fox, Enki.
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Enki and Nor don’t have much in common, what with one being an immortal God of death and the other a scrappy war orphan hellbent on killing the Gods, but the two quickly form an accord and set forth across Kian to dispose of Enki’s colleagues. It’s a dynamic that is ostensibly ripe for character drama but Flintlock relegates the development of their relationship to off-screen conversations and humdrum walk-and-talk segments, neither of which offer much insight into the two’s unlikely friendship.
It’s unfortunately emblematic of the kind of incuriosity that plagues Flintlock, especially as the actual act of killing all the gods is a fairly homogenised melting pot of systems and beats. Nor is set loose into humble open-zone maps, a crisscross section of mountain paths, caves, and settlements, to hack and slash her way through hordes of the Dead while gathering resources and currencies for her various armaments, skill trees, and collectables. You’ll find colour graded gear for your different equipment slots, magical crystals to change Enki’s passive and active abilities, and just generally feel as if you’re playing a video-game-arse-video-game.
There are flashes of brilliance layered into this pastiche though. Flintlock’s combat loop is overly familiar and sporadically sloppy, Nor’s Sapper training allowing for a flurry of light and heavy blows with the requisite parries, status effects, and ranged pistol options. But overlaying this is the game’s wonderfully spiteful Reputation multiplier, an escalating percentage booster applied to accrued experience that gets higher the longer you avoid damage. But get whacked, even once, and you lose the multiplier and only the baseline exp is added to your pool.
It’s sick, a genuinely fun and thrilling addition to the Souls-adjacent action combat formula that is only truly undone by that sloppiness mentioned earlier. Flintlock’s combat is ultimately best enjoyed on lower difficulties where the game’s loose understanding of parry frames and animation priority can’t hurt as much, but too often you’ll lose your hard-earned Reputation multiplier due to the unpolished and unreliable collision of camera, hitboxes, and poor visual communication.
Elsewhere Flintlock dabbles in verticality with exploration bolstered by Rifts, ethereal portals that Enki can whip you up to in a flash and then project you out of for more Rift hopping or platforming. Nor can also lob some Godly-gunpowder below her to jump higher or propel herself forward, which in tandem with the Rift leaping, can lead to some brief bursts of fun. Combining these tools can lead Nor to hidden treasure spots and the occasional shortcut but despite a considered set of traversal tools, there aren’t many places to actually go in Flintlock.
Kian is frequently gorgeous to behold, a kind of geographically Frankensteined fantasy land of Middle Eastern, New England, and New Zealand influences. This approach gives Flintlock a stunning array of vistas and landscapes to play in, with the mid to late-game offerings particularly of note. Though no matter how fantastical the land is, exploration is never truly enticing as finagling Nor over rooftops and cliffsides is frequently awkward and beyond the stray side quest, there’s not much incentive to get her anywhere other than the golden path.
With the notable exception of Flintlock’s wobbly combat fundamentals, there isn’t much in here that is experience-breaking so much as consistently underwhelming. The cultural touchstones used to give Kian life can lead to some truly inventive visual touches as you explore settlements and discover increasingly gaudy armour sets, but when it all loops back into fairly rote, poorly communicated fantasy storytelling and limited exploration, no amount of aesthetic shine can catch the eye for long enough to sustain investment.
There’s a moment toward the end of Flintlock where Nor and Enki are having it out about the highs and lows of their time together. A half dozen Gods slain along the way, secrets revealed, cool new axes upgraded, and the land of Kian mapped and liberated. The two are heatedly trying to decide who will undertake a risky final step when Nor declares that despite everything, Enki is now a Sapper first and a God second.
But then, and even now, I still don’t fully understand what a Sapper is.
