Summary:
- Blades of Fire gives us a classic revenge story that has a personal stake and emotional weight.
- The Forge crafting system provides extensive customization where players can assemble and upgrade weapons from a selection of components.
- The combat is a combination of Soulslike stamina management with specific directional attacks to enemy body parts.
In this review, we will go in-depth about Blades of Fire, MercurySteam’s latest dark fantasy action RPG that has been making the rounds as of late. For the people out there who love Soulslike combat and Metroidvania exploration, this game may be right up your alley. But is the hype warranted, as other people are saying? Let’s take a look and break down the overall experience and other relevant aspects of the game.
Standard Revenge with Mixed Impact
The story of Blades of Fire is on a traditional revenge trajectory. The epic quest follows Aran de Lira, who, as a middle-aged, scarred protagonist, is burdened by his fallen past. This all happens while trying to stop Queen Nerea, who is not only an evil Queen, but has cast a spell that will turn steel into stone. This quest is intensely personal for Aran, one of which is built with loss and regret instead of redemption. And, it is suggestive of the weight of emotion found in The Count of Monte Cristo.
With its promising revenge story, Blades of Fire suffers from being a little messy with its story, which is ambiguous about many of its most emotional moments. Important scenes, especially major boss fights with big bosses, lack payoff due to weak dialogue and seemingly pointless anticlimactic scenes. Even when the game attempts to have emotion, important moments generally lack impact and will leave players unimpressed. Players often feel like the characters are flat, and even the dialogue fails to create emotional connections. Overall, it is hard to become immersed in the game.
Crafting the Perfect Weapon
The Forge system at the heart of the game allows players to craft weapons by choosing components that change the stats and how the weapon looks. This complexity and depth of crafting allows players to experiment with all sorts of different builds and switch out gear based on what situation and combat they find themselves in.
Getting new weapons unlocked was tied to exploration and fighting. If you’ve fought an enemy enough, they eventually drop the blueprints to their weapons. Here is the incentive loop: you fight enemies and loot materials, and upgrade gear. Since crafting is combined with fighting, it’s easy to get a sense of progress and that every fight mattered.
Simple Yet Satisfying Battles
The combat mechanics really have Soulslike roots, but do things differently, so it feels different. Players need to be mindful of stamina consumption, which only regenerates when blocking. The directional attack mechanism uses the face buttons to target enemy body parts, which encourages tactical attacks that can dismember enemies and add or expose weaknesses. Positioning and attack type are key. They encourage many different styles of combat simply through the many types of weapons, all of which have their own attack patterns and damage types.
The fighting is further improved by a “traffic light” indicator that takes into account attack effectiveness. There’s a color that varies depending on weapon level and stance, forcing the player to adjust their style every time. Heavy attacks produce hard-hitting punches with on-screen impacts and timing and precision rewards. Parrying is still a high-risk, high-reward mechanic, as in Souls. Overall, Blades of Fire’s combat achieves a reasonably good balance of accessibility to complexity, making each fight fun and delightful.
Visually Busy, Vertical World
Blades of Fire is heavily Metroidvania-inspired in terms of design, with a strong focus on verticality. This layout creates a visually crowded world and challenges players to visualize in three dimensions when moving about the map, although in a 2D format. The map has layers of vertical floors in tornado-like paths, which makes exploring and returning a more complex process.
The vertical layout is not just for looks, either, as it plays an important role in the game. In these interconnected areas, players will explore upward and downward now, so they don’t have to be a 2D player. However, all that verticality creates complexity in the gameplay. A 2D map struggles to convey fully spatial relationships in 3D. Players can lose their position and become confused about which way to go. This especially held true in teleporting zones between locations and retracing steps when players had poor or no guidance.
Players will benefit from the exploration aspect of the game, even with the navigation challenges in Blades of Fire. The vertical world in the game is filled with materials to craft and upgrades to discover. Players are encouraged to step away from the rush to win and take time to learning the layers of the map, by exploring more of the world.
Conclusion
If you’ve read this far in this review, you probably want to know—Is Blades of Fire worth your time? Well, the short answer is yes and no; it depends on your appetite for tactical combat and deep, detailed gameplay. So if you are looking for a game that is challenging and allows you to flex your creative skills while you’re at it, Blades of Fire is certainly a worthwhile pursuit! We can say that Blades of Fire is a diamond in the rough for action RPG fans looking for something a little different.
