You place a steel bar, white hot in places, on your anvil. You decide exactly where on the hunk of molten metal you want to hit. You angle your hammer in the precise direction to manipulate the steel. Finally, you strike. You strike again. Careful, powerful. You reheat the steel. The metal shifts, changes. You find the perfect angle. You strike again.
Blacksmithing in video games is, more often than not, a matter of pressing ‘A’ near the anvil. Most of the time you don’t even watch a cutscene, you simply craft an iron dagger or 50. Sufficiently leveled up, you then move to the enchantment table and go again. The blacksmith is simply a man and/or creature to sell all the weak weapons you stumble upon, and his craft is reduced to nothing more than a button press.
Blades of Fire changes this. It’s the first game I’ve played to take a blacksmithing-first approach to gameplay. The system is complicated but surprisingly intuitive, and once it ‘clicks’, you’ll be forging incredible weapons in no time. Even Fable’s rhythmic smithing can’t hold an anvil to it.
Forging A Sword Worthy Of Mordor
“Before having anything [else], we knew we wanted a strong connection between the forge and the combat,” MercurySteam CEO Enric Álvarez tells me at a real-life forge in Leatherhead, UK. “That guided us through the whole process.”
Forging follows a bar system. You have to match a series of bars – they look like a long bar chart or an equaliser – to a meandering horizontal line. A simple broadsword may require you to balance the bars all to a similar level; a straight line. Something more complicated, like a flamberge, could be a complex waveform.
Every strike of the hammer moves the bars. The area you strike will be flattened, and the metal pushed to the sides. If you angle the hammer to push left, the metal will be pushed in that direction. If you adjust the strength of your blow, you’ll push less metal. And, of course, the colder the metal gets, the more difficult it is to manipulate.
The closer to that horizontal waveform you reach, the more stars your weapon is awarded, and each of those stars is one chance to repair your weapon.
“We took it almost as a challenge for ourselves,” Álvarez explains. “Are we capable of building something like this?” He says the forge mechanic was an “incredibly challenging” task, and the team trialled “countless prototypes” until they reached the bar system in the final game.
“That intimate relationship between you and your weapons was a very interesting concept.”
Aside from the mechanics, Álvarez and his team wanted to nail the feel of forging. If you’re doing more than just pressing ‘A’ to craft a fine blade, you need the Forge of the Gods to look the part, too.
“We wanted something that allows you to feel the sweat of the forge,” he says. “And you can see how the billet, strike after strike, gets the shape of the weapon. We wanted to give that feel to the players because this is a game where you create your weapons, you use them, and they die in your hands. So that intimate relationship between you and your weapons was a very interesting concept that we wanted to explore and develop.”
Weapon Degradation Rears Its Head
There’s weapon degradation in Blades of Fire, but it makes complete sense. When forging your weapons is such an intense process, it’s only natural that the game encourages you to engage with that system. But here, the degradation is as deep as the forging.
This isn’t some Breath of the Wild-esque system where your sword just shatters into pieces. Every blow will cause your weapon to do a little less damage. If you’re stabbing, the point will degrade. If you’re slashing, the sides will degrade. This forces you to switch up your playstyle, shift between your available weapons, and keeps combat fresh in every encounter.
There’s a point (pun very much intended) to the individual aspects of each weapon, too. Enemies will be weak to certain weapons, or even just specific attacks from certain weapons. A guard with a heavy breastplate over a padded shirt may be susceptible to sword slashes to their arms, but attacks to their body will need to be sharp stabs with the pointy end or crushing blows from a weighty warhammer in order to penetrate the thick armour.
Thus, the combat controls need to be a bit different to most games. Instead of hitting the right bumper to attack or spamming square, you use all four face buttons to attack from different directions. X swings an uppercut, damaging your opponent from below. Square swings from your left, into their right-hand side. Triangle is a blow from above. Circle, you guessed it, attacks their left-hand side.
This complex iteration of physics-based Soulslike combat was “the only option”, according to Álvarez. “With the forge and with the emphasis on the edges and the geometry [of weapons],” he explains, “If the enemies don’t give you reasons to use one or the other…” he trails off, as if to say, ‘what’s the point?’
The result is clever, tactical combat, adding a layer of complexity that never feels overwhelming in the heat of battle. A big red outline tells you to switch weapons. Amber probably means your weapon is degrading. Green is for go. You know, like traffic lights. But it’s not distracting. It’s like a real-time chess match where your opponent is some kind of orc and checkmate results in a beheading.
“It’s like a mechanical watch. It’s made of hundreds of pieces, but until you put the last one, it doesn’t work.”
All the elements of Blades of Fire complement one another. The systems are clever, each one encouraging you to engage with the next. That’s a technical way of describing an incredibly engaging gameplay loop that always leaves you wanting more. Your prized halberd breaks in the middle of a fight with a poisonous treeman? Find an alternative route of attack, or head back to the forge and try again. You keep losing to a regenerating troll? Make sure you’re using your best materials for crafting (there are 15 different types of steel that impact your blade’s qualities).
The exploration is brilliant, with myriad shortcuts through even the smallest towns. Find wooden statues that reward you with new parts to forge weapons with – a different hilt or pommel or suchlike. Even the Dark Souls resting mechanic (at an anvil instead of a bonfire) doesn’t feel old, because every enemy you defeat works towards unlocking a new blueprint of the weapon they carry.
Giant Beetles And Regenerating Trolls
I want to take this opportunity to shout out the dark fantasy designs in Blades of Fire. From the regenerating troll I mentioned earlier, who turns to stone in order to refill its health, to the hutcarab, an enormous beetle with a house on its back, this game takes liberal inspiration from all corners of the fantasy canon and puts its own unique spin on them.
“We’re long time fans of Frank Franzetta and movies like Excalibur from John Boorman,” Álvarez says. “All this fantasy excites us. You can’t imagine how satisfactory it is to tackle this long, complex development.
“But creating a world that you love to be in, there is a paradox, because it’s extremely painful. During most of the development you don’t see it, you don’t feel it. It’s like a mechanical watch. It’s made of hundreds of pieces, but until you put the last one, it doesn’t work.”
And the world is brilliant too. Aside from the gripping monsters, the NPCs you meet are exceptional. Dark, funny, well-designed, they have it all in perfectly-forged spades. Protagonist Aran is the only let down from the first three hours. I know that video games often opt for the ‘blank slate’ protagonist, but I’d prefer some emotion or reaction to the story unfolding around him rather than a vacant stare. There’s plenty of room for narrative and emotional growth in this tale of monsters and curses; and I’ll commit to any plot that revolves around regicide, no matter how bland the lead.
Despite my qualms with Aran (even his name is generic), Blades of Fire is a competent Soulslite with an incredibly polished gameplay loop. It says it all that I’m still thinking about that mechanical depth days after playing, itching to go back to the forge and try out a new approach on a tricky enemy. This isn’t the game I expected from the team that brought us Metroid Dread, but its in-depth blacksmithing, new take on Soulslike combat, and dazzling fantasy world make me excited to explore more.
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