Review Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

AntMag.NET

This week on Fully Ramblomatic, Yahtzee reviews Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn.

There's something strangely meditative about watching the process of game studios popping up, gaining success, expanding, then getting shut down for lack of profitability; it's like living opposite a sunflower farm being tended by a bipolar ex-girlfriend with an electric carving knife. Still, even I didn't expect that the frequency of studios getting shut down would lead to some of them trying to speedrun it. Take A44 Games, for example, whose first game was Ashen, a quirky indie Souls-like that didn't blow my mind, but at least had some new ideas and a unique visual style reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic Playmobil set, and having established their foot in the door, they apparently said, "Okay, now we've got all the vibrant indie energy out of our system; time to start making generically realistically-looking, vaguely AAA-aspirant, middle-of-the-road guff." Flintlock (HRUUH) Siege of Dawn, complete with not only the standard overly optimistic franchise-establishing colonized double-title, but a subtitle that abbreviates to "SOD". All in all, I can only assume A44 Games are called that because that's the size of the piece of paper you'd need to write their future prospects on. (It'd be a very small piece of paper, is the joke. Yes? Good, I'm glad you came with me on that.)

Flintlock: SOD is set in an alternative world where all progress in fashion and technology stopped at Napoleonic times, 'cos it suddenly became terribly important to deal with a horde of undead that was bleeding into the world from Hell. We play a soldier in an army trying to blow shut the door to the underworld once and for all; something goes wrong, horrors escape into the world, a Souls-like ensues. The protagonist - whose name you might've noticed I'm trying to avoid having to say because I've completely fucking forgotten it, and looking it up might expend vital energy I'm reserving for unwrapping the Cadbury's Eclairs on my desk - has to team up with one of the supernatural beings from the underworld in a severely reduced form to fuck up all the other supernatural beings making trouble across the land.

It didn't escape me that this dynamic is virtually identical to that of the two leads of Forspoken, right down to races, genders, and posh British accents, just with the wrist accessory replaced with a cuddly toy, and what with both games being vaguely open world-based combat traversal-focused fantasy action RPGs, I can only assume A44 felt some measures were necessary to avoid drawing comparison to Forspoken, pariah that it is for its quippy dialogue marginally less easy on the ears than a vigorously-applied carpenter's rasp. "I've got it!", said someone. "Let's make our two main characters as boring as possible and get them to read out their lines like they're discussing what shade of beige to paint the downstairs loo!" "Brilliant! I certainly don't regret hiring you from that bus stop outside the dementia hospital!"

The only thing that passes for chemistry between What's-Her-Name and Fox Boy is when after every major boss fight, the boss reveals a damning secret about Fox Boy. "Oh, turns out he's to blame for the undead horde rising in the first place! Oh, turns out he's the god of cream cakes, and is also to blame for us putting on ten pounds!", etc. Every time it happens, the lady gets tokenly mad, then Fox Boy tokenly goes, "I'm sowwy! I'm a bad widdle fox!", and all enmity is forgotten by the time the next scene fades in. You want to know how this character arc concludes? So the fuck would I; my version of the game kept crashing whenever I got to the second phase of the final boss, so I haven't seen the ending. But I don't hold that against it; pre-release review copy, these things happen. The more important takeaway is that on reflection, I decided I didn't actually give that much of a shit.

I talk about games that feel thinly-spread, but this is a pat of butter on a piece of toast the size of a football field. You try getting invested in that; it's like pinning your wet underpants on a spider web. I call the game only vaguely open-world, 'cos the environments are laid out in a linear sequence, but they spread out a bit so a few side-quests can be squeezed in, although I didn't bother with most of them and wasn't the least bit underpowered, so the game's only open-world in the sense that a Snickers in some lettuce is technically a nutritionally balanced meal. And you can go back and forth to previously-completed areas as much as you want if you're incredibly bored, and want to make yourself even more bored in order to break your personal record.

But apparently, not everyone on the design team was entirely clear on the open-world elements; you've got a couple of double-jumps in your moveset to help expand your verticality, and I was traversing the rooftops of a little town area, made it all the way to what seemed very much like the next plot-important door, but it wouldn't open and nothing happened, because it turned out the door didn't open until I'd backtracked to the center of town and stood in a specific spot so my character could say, "Oh look, we're in a town!" Like a slalom skier with injured testicles, the designers seem to have had a flag problem.

It's definitely got a lack of focus problem, as does the combat: you've got a melee attack, you've got guns. Flintlock guns, naturally; it's not called Browning Semi-Automatic: The Siege of Dawn. You use the guns to do Bloodborne-style interrupts of unblockable enemy attacks, but the parrying, you do with your melee weapon, in a substantially less Bloodborne-y kind of way. And either there's something weird going on with the parry, or me and my left index finger are going to have to see a relationship counselor, 'cos I swear it only worked about half the time, whether or not I hit the window. Could be the slight jitteriness of the enemy animations making them harder to read, could be the way the enemies blend into the visual noise of the generic environments, could be the mafia frightener behind my sofa who keeps smacking me in the head when he thinks I'm not paying attention; whatever the case, the combat just never felt right, and yet, I also never ran into much in the way of difficulty walls. Turns out, the gunshot being a reliable interrupt to virtually every enemy attack doesn't give them much of a chance; sure, you need to land four melee attacks to reload a bullet, but come on, you can't melee the guy four times? He's there, you've got a whacking stick. What else you going to do, challenge him to snooker?

All of this - the iffiness of the world design, the whiffiness of the combat mechanics - smacks of a game that chose too large and tumescent a willy than its poor little gag reflex could handle; it needed to pick one or two big toilet bowls to focus on, rather than try to get a little bit of urine into a hundred little cups. I didn't even mention the whole magic mechanic in combat where you instruct your fox pal to nibble the enemy's bum to build up a bar so that in some glorious distant future, we might aspire to doing a special attack that isn't much better than all your other shit, or the fucking game-long side-minigame thing that means every other character you meet is really into collecting Pogs. In short, Bollock SOD loaded down its buffet plate too much, and I know it did because the game feels distinctly shortened, like it had to be cut down when deadlines loomed. There's only, like, four unique boss fights, and one of them gets awkwardly crowbarred into the middle of someone else's chapter because the plot had hyped them up and they needed to be somewhere. The lesson is, ambition is like riding a big horse: it makes you feel powerful, but in the wrong place, it's really going to annoy the carpet cleaning service.

Saltpeter? I hardly know him: Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw

The last siege of dawn I was at was in the pandemic when there was a shortage of washing up liquid