Get ready for a grand adventure during the golden age of piracy. Flint: Treasure of Oblivion is a brand new turn-based RPG with real-time exploration. The game is meant to faithfully recreate the world of piracy with accurate elements such as language, outfits, and weapons. Let’s jump in and see if this one is worth our doubloons or if it deserves to be left buried at sea.
This review will cover the following topics:
Story
You play as Captain Flint as he leads his crew on a journey to find a mysterious treasure. You are never short on allies, as Flint is not afraid to convert everyone he meets to his cause. This journey is not like one he has been on before, though. The journey starts to turn on its head as things start approaching the border of the mystical. See if you have what it takes to finish the journey and find the mysterious treasure you are looking for.
Gameplay
There are three main elements to Flint. Those three elements are exploring, managing your crew, and combat. We will start with the exploration part first, which will lead nicely into managing your crew. Then, we will wrap up the gameplay with the combat.
Exploration
The exploration in Flint is a major part of the game. Any time that you are not in combat, you are exploring the environment you are currently in. The exploration is in real-time. This seems to be the norm in most turn-based games right now. I think that is a good thing, though. Why slow the game down when you can leave it open for the player to adventure around as much as they want before the next battle? 
Flint goes one step further, though. There are no objective markers on the map. So that forces you to wander aimlessly until you find what you are looking for. However, if you are in a city, reading all the signposts might help you find what you are looking for. It also behooves you to search every inch of your surrounding area before moving on because there are items and trinkets scattered around most of the locations. I’m not joking about every inch, either. Items are not highlighted as interactable until you are close to them—some you must be close to, or you will miss it.
Aside from finding items to assist you with your next fight, you can also find people willing to join your crew for a chance at a better life or at least the chance at getting some of the treasure you are after.
Crew
At any point during exploration, you can switch over to the crew management screen. From here, you will be able to cycle through four different tables. These include the Exploration Group, Quests, Galley, and Crew tabs. The latter two are the two that you will spend the most time on.
The Galley is where you will spend your hard-earned gold to buy items such as boosts, grenades, healing items, and armor. Boosts, grenades, and healing items are all one-time use in combat. Boost, well, they do exactly that. They will boost one of your character’s stats for a turn or even give them an extra action. There are three types of grenades to slow your enemies down, and the healing items are for patching up or even reviving a downed ally during a fight. The armor provides temporary protection from the first few hits in combat at the cost of one point from one of your stats. It’s certainly worth the cost of not getting killed in combat in the first round.
The Crew tab is where you can see a portrait of everyone who is under your command, whether they are in your current party or not. You can see Captain Flint on the left, as well as his first mate. The other crew members are categorized by their class and rank. The highest ranking is at the top of the list. When you click on someone’s portrait, then you can view their stats, abilities, and equipment.
Leveling
Now, the leveling system is something that makes Flint quite interesting. Leveling up your crew is not done based on experience points, but on the amount of gold, you have paid them. That means you don’t want to spend all your gold in the Galley stocking up on healing tonics and amour. You are going to want to save some to level up the crew.
On the Crew tab, you will see a slider at the top of the screen. You slide it to the amount you want to allocate to leveling and click share. This will distribute the gold amongst the crew, including Flint and his first mate. 
Now, there is no way to allocate how much gold goes to each person, and I wasn’t able to tell if the higher-ranking crew gets a bigger share or not. Thematically, this makes sense. You would probably want to give everyone an equal share to prevent a mutiny. However, as a game, I wanted to give more to the crew members that I played with the most to level them up and not the people I wasn’t even using. Either way, it is a unique system I haven’t really seen before.
What does leveling actually do you say? Well, each level gives the character some points to use, like most RPGs. Now, there are the normal allocations that you would see in any other RPG, like boosting the character’s Strength and Dexterity stats. You can also select an additional ability or level their class ability.
The unique thing in Flint, though, is that you can allocate points to a character’s proficiency die. We will talk more about dice in the combat section, but leveling up the die increases its number of faces. So a six-sided die (D6) would change to an 8-sided die (D8) and then a 10-sided die (D10), etc. Increasing the number of faces can really make a difference in combat.
Combat
Now that your team is fully equipped, paid, and leveled, let’s talk about the combat. There are two different types of combat encounters in Flint. There are large-scale combat encounters and small-scale ones. The only difference between the two is the setup and how many party members will be joining the fight. 
The large-scale fights will have you pick three different teams to engage. Each team will be placed in a different location on the map to start the fight. The locations are not that large, though, so members from each team can reach the other in just one turn. The nicest thing about the large-scale combat encounters is that the abilities that apply to allies will affect all three teams. This also means that team allocation isn’t necessarily that important.
The small-scale encounters are usually four to six crew members with no setup. Otherwise, combat is the same. Once you are in combat, you can see that each crew member starts with two actions. These actions can be used to move or attack. Using items like grenades and healing are free actions. The same goes for abilities.
Movement
There is a nice movement system incorporated into the game. You will see a preview of where the character can move. It also shows you where they will be able to move to with their following action. If you click once, then you can see which spots you can attack at that location. Once you have finalized your decision, you can click and hold to make the move official, and the character will move there. You can then move again or attack someone if they are within range. 
Melee
One of the main forms of combat in Flint is melee combat. Typically, with a sword, but there are also clubs, axes, and other various melee weapons to choose from. Most melee has a range of one space with the exception of something like the spear that has a longer reach.
When selecting a target to attack, you will see a number over their head representing the required dice roll to hit them. Attacking with a melee weapon will cause a pair of dice to appear at the top of the screen. The first is for the character’s proficiency to die.
Like what we talked about in the leveling section. The other is the weapon die. You want these to roll at or above the required dice roll. For example, if the target shows a 4+, that means that you have a 50% chance to successfully hit them with either die if they are both six-sided dice (D6). You just need one to be successful to hit the opponent. You can see how leveling the character’s proficiency die to something like a D10 or D12 would be extremely helpful in making a successful attack.
Ranged
Ranged weapons in the game are quite similar to melee weapons, with a few exceptions. There is no limit on ammunition, but you do need to reload after every shot. Let’s be fair, they are using flintlock pistols and muskets. Pistols only use one action to reload, but rifles require two actions. This means with the standard two actions that most characters have, you can shoot and reload in one turn with the pistol, but you will have to spend a full turn reloading the rifle.
The tradeoff between the two weapons is the range. The pistol only reaches a couple of spaces, whereas the rifle has a significantly longer range. Granted, the farther away the target is, the more difficult the shot. Meaning a higher number to roll.
Cards
Lastly, there are the different abilities and items that you can use in combat. These are represented with cards. You can relax. This didn’t suddenly turn into a deckbuilding game. That’s just how they are represented. There are three different categories. Those are items, individual abilities, and combo abilities. The items are for single use and can be spent at any time.
The individual abilities, on the other hand, can only be used in specific rounds. The combo abilities can only be used once per battle, and the character has to stand next to someone of the same class for the combo to activate. This encourages you to send your crew out in pairs, especially in the larger combat encounters where you will have 15 or more crew in combat. The combo abilities are quite powerful, so using them at the right time can make all the difference in combat.
Problems
Flint has a lot of great things going for it, including some unique systems that I haven’t quite seen before. That doesn’t mean it is without its flaws, though. Here are a few problems that I ran into while playing.
The maps during a combat sequence have a free-moving camera so you can get the best angle when selecting a space to move to or an enemy to attack. Unfortunately, the camera during exploration is locked. This would be fine, but I did run into a handful of times when I could not pick up an item I found due to it hiding behind the foreground of the environment. Allowing the camera to rotate during exploration would have fixed this problem. It would also allow you to see more of the very well-crafted environments that you explore. 
Speaking of the camera. Some of the controls in the game were quite different from what I am used to, and there was no option to change the controls. Rotating the camera was set to the V and B keys, while the arrow keys were what you had to use to pan the camera. I am fine with the default setting being whatever the developers want, but it would be nice to be able to change them to what the player wants as needed, such as using WSAD for camera controls.
Sadly, I also had a handful of problems with crashes while playing the game. There were times when the audio didn’t work when loading the game. So I had to restart. It would crash during a combat scene or cutscene. I even had my saved file get corrupted at one point. Granted, the review copy I was provided was labeled as a “beta,” but hopefully, they get these things sorted out quickly.
Conclusion
Now that we have all that out in the open, is Flint: Treasure of Oblivion worth your hard-earned doubloons? That’s a tough one to answer this time around.
I had a lot of fun playing the game when it worked. Don’t get me wrong. It did work most of the time. There are a lot of really cool concepts in Flint that I really enjoyed. I liked the leveling system and being able to upgrade proficiency dice for each character.
I really liked the heavy RPG elements where a bad dice roll could mean the difference between life and death. However, they added a clever “lucky dice” mechanic that allowed for rerolling the dice if you had a lucky die in your inventory from exploring.
Aside from bugs that I ran into, I still had other things I didn’t like about the game. For an RPG, the game was extremely linear. Other than one map at the beginning, most of the time, your exploration took you simply from point A to point B with nothing but a few items to pick up along the way. There was also the lack of weapon specializations or investment in the crew. They just felt very disposable.
I think that the game still needs a little bit more work and a few more patches. For those of you who are a fan of RPGs and turn-based games, then keep your eye on this one. Wait to see if the developers stay active after launch and address some of these issues. If they do, then this one might be worth picking up if you need a fun new pirate game to play.
A review copy of the game was provided by the developers at Savage Level.
