Blades Of Fire review - hammer of the gods

Metro

2 days ago

The makers of Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow and Metroid Dread return with an original game that has a very unique system for both using and creating weapons.
Success in any medium can be a double-edged sword, from actors being typecast by certain roles to directors who can only get work making the same sort of films over and over again. It's even worse for video games, with some studios, like Call Of Duty's Infinity Ward, having been working on the same franchise, and nothing else, for over two decades.
Spanish developer MercurySteam isn't quite in that position, but they have spent a significant portion of their 23 year existence making Metroidvania games, starting with the Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow series, before perfecting their art with Metroid: Samus Returns and the excellent Metroid Dread.
It's unknown whether they'll return to work on a new 2D Metroid game for the Switch 2 but in the meantime, they've made Blades Of Fire. It's not a licensed game or something based on an existing franchise but a brand new action adventure that seems to exist purely because MercurySteam wanted to make it, and not because 12 months had passed since the last one. And that alone makes it an intriguing prospect.
There are multiple influences on Blades Of Fire, including MercurySteam's previous work, the recent Zelda games, the work of FromSoftware, and the modern God Of War games. The plot is straight out of Breath Of The Wild, with all the swords in the kingdom being rendered useless by an evil sorceress. You play as a warrior who gains the ability to forge your own weapons, which comes in very handy when everyone else's has turned to stone.
Unfortunately, the plot and setting are bog standard fantasy, and while there are a few interesting wrinkles, such as the occasionally inspired bit of art design, a lot of it could have come from any game in the last decade or so. Even if the oddly proportioned human characters are reminiscent of Lords Of Shadow and the weirder monsters are when the comparisons to Dark Souls et al. seem most obvious.
Being able to forge your own sword is the most unique element of the game and, thankfully, works very well. You have a magic hammer that, unlike with Thor, is actually used for the sort of things hammers were invented for. Not banging in nails but tempering molten steel into various blades and other usefully sharp and pointy bits of metal.
Defeating multiple enemies of the same type eventually unlocks a blueprint for whatever weapon they were using, from spears to swords. The enemy variety is already good but because you know there's a very useful reward for beating lots of the same kind it helps greatly in avoiding problems with repetition.
The blueprint has lots of customisation options, depending on the type of steel you use and the length or shape of a blade – which has a small but measurable effect on things like power and how much stamina is expended when wielding it. Once you've made your choices you have to play a forging mini-game, to try and maximise the amount of time until the weapon becomes useless. This is not easy, or well explained, but after a few hours you begin to get the hang of it, and it becomes surprisingly satisfying.
The problem is that you get the feeling the whole forging weapons aspect was the impetus behind the game getting made, with nothing else being as fully formed in concept or execution. The third person combat is fine, and relatively unique, but it's not involved enough to support a game where there are no other substantial gameplay elements.
Combat is original in the sense that rather than just using light and heavy attacks the face buttons are mapped to what part of an enemy you're trying to attack: the head, left or right torso, or legs. As novel an idea as that is, there's not much more to the combat than that, expect for charged attacks and the inevitable parries and dodges. There are no proper combos and while you do sometimes have to target specific body parts, to avoid heavy armour or attack weak points, the whole concept feels undercooked.
Blades Of Fire is a peculiar game, that flits between feeling impressively unique and disappointingly generic. Some of its ideas are entirely its own, while others, such as the way health potions work and having to collect dropped weapons after you die, are very obviously borrowed from Soulsborne games. More Trending
And yet, the only truly bad part of the game is the terrible map, which is very easily the worst we've ever seen in a modern game. It's purely two dimensional and makes it almost impossible to tell where you are, where you've been, or where you're going. It also seems to be an awkward compromise between not wanting to have a map at all, like a Soulsborne title, and providing only the bare minimum instead.
With a better story and more engaging characters this could've still been worth a recommendation but unfortunately the storytelling is no better than the game's cartography. What Blades Of Fire is left with is a collection of good idea that are never forged into an effective whole.
In Short: A flawed but interesting attempt at a mash-up of everything from God Of War to Dark Souls, but where crafting weapons is often more fulfilling than using them.
Pros: The core business of forging weapons works very well, including in terms of how you get blueprints and the level of customisation available. Weighty combat and memorable boss battles.
Cons: The combat is interesting but too simplistic to sustain the whole game, while the storytelling is bland and cliched. Awful map system.
Score: 6/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC*Price: £49.99Publisher: 505 GamesDeveloper: MercurySteamRelease Date: 22nd May 2025
Age Rating: 18
*Epic Games Store only
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