Back again for our regular Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both…

I’ve been looking forward to Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn arriving on Xbox Game Pass for a while, even though its mix of Souls-lite action-RPG in a cinematic, magic and gunpowder fantasy setting doesn’t really sound like my thing! Sucker for an explosion and a bit of period god-killing though, and that’s been just about enough to get my money’s worth out of it, albeit maybe not enough to see it through to the end… We’ll see! Anyway, you start out as an alternate Napoleonic-era or thereabouts army field engineer, whose unit unwittingly unleashes a portal to a weird underworld, its gods and an undead army, all of whom you now need to hunt down and send back to where they belong before they make themselves at home. You’ve got a friendly, dog-like god in tow to help out with some magical stuff, while you hand out the pain with a mix of very fluid melee and flintlock-based third-person combat, the tools of which can all be upgraded, together with your own skills. There are loads of systems on the go to support all this stuff but some are more important than others and it’s all relatively straightforward – in fact, there’s not a lot here you won’t have seen before! And that’s the case with the rest of the game too, with lots of God of War and Bloodborne and the like on show without ever quite reaching any of those heights, but it’s competent at worst and generally a lot of fun too, and while that lasts, there’s plenty to keep your eyes and ears happy, a decent enough narrative, some exhilarating set-pieces and yes, explosions and period god-killing too!

Sticking with Game Pass, I did have an hour or so on Capcom’s new Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess too but I don’t need a load of resource management and tower defence stinking up my hacking and slashing, however jaw-droppingly stylish, so I’ll jump to Dungeons of Hinterberg (also recently arrived on the service) instead. It’s so nearly really good too but once again, what’s with all the busywork? In this one, magic has become a real thing at an Alpine spa resort, bringing with it portals to dungeons full of monsters to fight and puzzles to solve and other Zelda-type thrills that the locals have shrewdly turned into a new line in adventure holidays! A bit of graphical jank and endlessly recurring NPCs aside, it’s another very stylish game, with this incredibly vibrant, almost cel-shaded cartoon aesthetic that couldn’t be better suited to creating an authentic but abstract setting. Really is authentic too – if you’ve ever been skiing or whatever in Austria then the town this is set in is spot on! And there’s my problem with the game – the town, and spending more time wandering around it, messing around chatting to fellow tourists and building my “Social Stats” than doing the unique take on dungeon-crawling that brought me here. Thankfully that bit is good though, with simple but decent (and evolving) combat mixed up with dungeon-specific magic you learn before you go in that can be used to wild effect on enemies and some really cool bosses but is mostly going to help you solve what’s usually a themed, multi-faceted, over-arching puzzle for each, and I enjoyed them too. Unfortunately, the rest just wore me down, and left me thinking there’s a thousand other gaming dungeons I can spend my time in instead, without what’s apparently another twenty hours of moping around telling anyone who’ll listen how burned out you are, and getting their inane life story in return. Shame.

Having recently completed Delphine Software’s Another World and Cruise for a Corpse for the first time after decades of just not getting them, I thought it was time for another go at their Flashback this week too! It’s a typically cinematic sci-fi action-adventure-platformer from 1992, although I’ve been playing the 25th Anniversary version on Nintendo Switch from 2018, which you can either play old-school or with remastered sound and visuals, and with a rewind function, which was honestly very welcome in a couple of particularly obnoxious areas near the end, where the awkward controls (and subsequently the checkpoints) don’t quite meet the demands of the combat you need to engage in. Apart from that though, having finally persevered beyond the first few screens after all these years, I’m ready to admit it’s another masterpiece! Turns out it’s not just sci-fi jungles either, but seven varied levels of alien worlds, futuristic cities and dystopian societies, where you’ll need to piece together your lost memories and do something about the threat to civilisation they turn out to contain. Each level is flip-screen, with lots of back and forth around what will become comfortably familiar, self-contained areas filled with puzzles to solve, nasties to shoot and platforms to traverse, and while I think the game does bite off a bit more than it can chew when enemies get more sophisticated later on, movement is a joy once it clicks, and some of the puzzling is sublime, pitched just right so it’s never frustrating but you feel like a proper boss when you do work it out! Top-notch presentation all over too, and the animation is so fluid and lifelike. Not sure what’s changed with me of late to suddenly be into this stuff but I’m glad it has!

I am still having a grand old time with Metal Gear Solid (see last week) too but I’ve gone long with those and I don’t have a lot more to offer anyway, so I reckon that will do us for this week! In case you missed it last Wednesday though, do join me for a look at some old arcade shoot ‘em up classics from one of the genre heavyweights in Psikyo Shooting Library Vol. 1 on PlayStation 4! Then next Wednesday, check back again for an all-new top ten, and one I’ve enjoyed putting together so much… This time we’ve got the next instalment in another ongoing series, counting down my favourite fixed, single-screen shoot ‘em ups Hopefully see you then!

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