Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn

Bom jogo, em promoção recomendo.

As much as it pains me giving Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn a negative review, I still feel compelled to voice my honest, unembellished opinion – which is that, with the exception of a few neat ideas and imagery, this game feels like by-the-numbers Souls-lite game and I'm sorry, in 2020s that's not going to cut it anymore. The heart of the game – the combat mechanics – are your standard array of light attacks, hard attacks, dodges, block, parry. Oh, you also have a pistol with limited shots like in Mad Max. How riveting. Bonfires and souls retrieval return under different names. The AI is basic, compensating its ineptitude with high damage.  RPG mechanics are also basic – passive buffs galore, and you also can't customize your character or choose classes. So, even for a Souls-lite Flintlock comes off as quite shallow and barren mechanically. The game is also incredibly static for a 2024 title. Aside from some jars and pots, nothing is destructible. This might be the first double AA title where not even barrels and boxes can be destroyed. Is this that important in the grand scheme of things? No. Does it break the immersion? Absolutely.  I didn't want to say this, but I feel I should – Souls-like games are becoming a great "excusable" niche to create these very basic "strike-dodge-parry" games with maybe a few additional gimmicks thrown in, that, on closer inspection, have nothing much to offer. And if you complain about how basic the combat or RPG systems are, the reply is predictable: it's Souls-like and deal with it. How convenient.  Flintlock's worldbuilding also has severe issues. Fantasy games based on 17th-18th century periods are admittedly rare, but not unheard of (we had Greedfall all the way back in 2019), and this game suffers from lack of consistency, as some others reviewers have noticed – you start in what looks like the world inspired by late 18th or early to mid 19th century (think Napoleonic Wars or even the Crimean War) and the very next level you're fighting knights in chain mail in the ruins of medieval castles. To say it's jarring would be an understatement and shows that the aim of Flintlock's worldbuilding and art design is essentially just to try throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. After all of these working against the game, you NEED the narrative to carry Flintlock and sadly, it doesn't happen. The game immediately drops you in the world without a normal introduction. That's not an exaggeration: the game opens with a short 1-minute cutscene, without any context to what's happening. Just screaming that "the Dead" are flooding from the "Door" and "the Coalition" should stop them. No explanation is given as to who these "Dead" (very original there guys) are or what the "Door" is, who are two characters mentioned – Nor (the player character) and Baz ( a standard fatherly figure still played rather competently by Elias Toufexis AKA Adam "I never asked for this" Jensen). Now I understand that this game had a limited budget of around 20 million, so I'm not demanding some Hollywood intro with advanced motion capture and cutting-edge special effects, but surely, a few more still images with a couple of more lines explaining the basic concepts of the fantasy world is not asking too much, right? Especially when these concepts like "the Dead" (so I guess, they're zombies? Darkspawn from The Dragon Age?) and "the Door" (so a portal to the underworld?) tell you precisely nothing. The very pedestrian appellations for what should be elevated fantasy elements – "the Door" and "the Dead" should clue you in that Flintlock is not exactly going to be the flight of fancy.  And this works with characters too – once you get past their somewhat unique designs (not a lot of Flintlock fantasy-inspired black heroines and magic flying fox gods after all), they fail to impress. Nur is voice acted fine and had potential, but I'm sorry it wasn't realized. And yes, it hurts me to say that whatever minuscule discourse surrounded this game, disliked Nor. for.. other reasons. And they aren't subtle about it – complaining endlessly about how the "evil" Sweet Baby Inc., whose out there killing our beloved games, made this character and how they are going to boycott the whole title.  What an interesting coincidence that these types of complaints always tend to come up when a main character is black or other minority. The "Sweet Baby Inc." worked on this game and you should boycott it" is becoming the dog whistle for... well, you can probably already guess for what. Suffice to say, it's somewhere in the vicinity of  "states' rights and low taxes!" à la Lee Atwater or "inner city thugs". Truly despicable how transparent the whole thing and how low video game discourse has fallen.   All in all, what happened to Flintlock was a shame, because for all of its mediocrity, it was a new IP with some interesting ideas and promise. The game maxed out less than 700 concurrent players on Steam, so it's safe to assume it probably didn't even recoup marketing, let alone the development costs. I didn't like the game and had the opportunity to refund it, but in the end decided against it – I do want to support A44 games, which has shown it has potential with both Ashen and this game. Unfortunately, potential alone is not enough - it needs to be realized. Maybe in the future the experience with Flintlock will give them the opportunity to develop and to crease something truly new and unique. As it stands now, I can't recommend buying this game unless you're not getting your Soul-like game fix and are desperate for anything, even mediocrity.

Honestly such a hidden gem. Nor and Enki are awesome, and so much fun just to run around and fight with because the game emphasises movement and cinematic combat. It's pretty forgiving and maybe not what you'd expect from a traditional Souls-like, which I would say is a positive (unless you just like being punished). I'm probably mid-late in the story right now and with the build I've got, I feel pretty confident just blasting my way through a horde or a boss fight, and as a person who usually prefers a lot of challenge, I still don't care because it really is just so much fun to play. Story, writing, and voice acting are solid. Apart from the regular combat being tons of fun, exploration is heavily rewarded which goes a long way with me. UI kinda sucks sometimes for couch play (tiny text in places). Sebo (this game's 'Gwent'-like mini-game) is incredibly stupid and boring, but it's entirely ignorable and I would strongly encourage doing that. There seems to be some ridiculous incel-fueled controversy over the involvement of one of the writing teams (Sweet Baby), but based on what I've read, they seem cool and worth supporting, so that's all the more reason to play it if you ask me. Anyway, check this game out! I think I got it in a bundle somewhere, but it's on sale for a tenner right now and more than worth it at that price.

The devs clearly needed to play more Dark Souls games before trying to make their own, because they clearly have 0 understanding of how to properly implement dodge mechanics, parry mechanics, block mechanics, straffing mechanics, and so on. I've never seen a soulslike where it is a Bad idea to move, at all, during combat with an enemy. The optimal way to fight just about any enemy is to sit still, let them come to you, let them swing at you, then either parry or shoot depending on if it is an unblockable attack or not (Which BOY are there a LOT of unblockable attacks that make no sense why they are unblockable, they just are because they have a red glow this time) and then hit the enemy once, MAYBE twice for basic enemies, then sit still again and wait. You Cannot play cool, you cannot dodge around enemies because they auto track onto you so you still get hit, you can't even try to get distance by dodging away from an enemy attack because most of their attacks have longer range than the distance your dodge covers, even the double dodge. There also are 0 i-frames on a dodge, meaning if you can't Physically avoid the attack, it is pointless to dodge. Enemy hit boxes are also completely borked, with attacks having much larger hit boxes than the physical attack, meaning you will watch as a sword goes right past you, and you for some reason take damage and get stunned, BUT if you are too far to one side of an attack, you can't parry it, so the hitbox being too large Only works in favor of the enemy. I wanted to like this game, I did, it looked so cool, but the gameplay is worse than the original Lord of the Fallen.

É um jogo OK, hoje em dia dá pra jogar de boa no preço promocional, comparando com GOW 2018 ele se assemelha no combate em baixo orçamento. Eu gostei e recomendo pelo combate para quem tá afim de um jogo barato nesse gênero. A história eu mal prestei atenção mas a pequena raposinha é goat, o combate e chefes foram bons, o parry é divertido principalmente com a arma de fogo, essa foi uma mecânica legal adicionada assim como o sistema de reputação que age como se fosse o dinheiro do jogo. A exploração foi boa e vale a pena. Achei paia que o inventário de armas fica com vários espaços vazios dando alusão de que teria mais de 20 armas de cada categoria. E por que fizeram tantas skins que são só visuais sem dar nenhum atributo em vez de mais armas?? A mecânica de viagem do Enki para atalhos de exploração foi legal mas poderia ser mais usada em combates, dava pra fazer algo legal.

Overall a decent game. Gameplay is fun, story/world is alright, game itself was stable. It has the souls-like gameplay but I feel like comparing this to a souls game is like comparing Avowed to Skyrim. I took my time with the story, exploring a lot and collecting everything I can. Still working on it, but pretty much have the game wrapped up with 12 hours on the board, which I am liking because I want more games where I can pick it up, experience it, then feel like I can move on without leaving anything behind.

Flintlock: The Siege Of Dawn is an interesting take on a souls like play style with some novel mechanics and a fun story line. That being said, it is unfortunately marred by the feel of a staggering lack of development time. While the mechanics of combat are interesting, they are also very unpolished. Hit registration is a 50/50 and weapon swapping is quite clunky. The reliance on equippable items to deal with different enemy varieties leans so far on armour breaking, that only one set of items is really viable if you don't want every boss fight to become a massive slog. In addition to this, the game does not communicate these systems very well. I spent a good hour trying to beat the first boss before someone told me there was a more plausible way to do things. The lack of variety in weapons and armour is also accentuated by the massive inventory space provided to those things. There are only five armour sets in the whole game, yet each armour slot has an inventory that can fit at least thirty pieces. Following on to Major Bosses. The game has three. Technically four if you count the semi-mid-boss before the final one. All of them have really interesting designs, they're all really neat and their combat mechanics are interesting. However there are far too few for a game that got this much advertised scope. Nine Major Bosses would have felt about right, and would have fleshed out the game much more. Additionally, more variation in the minor bosses and some additional optional bosses would not have gone amiss. As it is, at a full run play time of less than sixteen hours, after going back and doing multiple optional areas, the run time feels short. If you were very very good at this game, I think it would be completable in less than four, without speed-running. Story-wise, there's not really much to say. It's short, somewhat bittersweet and honestly kind of vague. The developers have done really well with the general appearance of the game, the NPC's are visually engaging and the monsters are cool and sometimes fun to fight, but there's a constant feel that they weren't given enough time to develop the concept and story properly before they plunged into actual game development, and even that feels heavily curtailed. Overall, I give the game a three out of seven, or a four out of ten if you prefer. And they really should have dropped the "The" from the title. Flintlock: Siege Of Dawn sounds much better.

ออกเดินทางเพื่อห้ำหั่นชำระแค้นเทพเจ้า สังหารทวยเทพให้สิ้นซาก เกมสนุก 8.5/10 มีmod ภาษาไทย ด้วยนะครับ