Preview: Blades of Fire brings joy to blacksmithing but not much else

Blacksmithing is quite a commonly seen side-task in RPGs, but very few have implemented it in an engaging way. Either you go the Skyrim route of simply gathering the ingredients and pressing the “craft” button, or you make it more like Kingdom Come Deliverance, where it’s an actual minigame, but one so tedious that you’ll want to do it as little as possible.

Admittedly, after spending three hours turning an iron rod into a half-decent-looking bottle opener, I can confirm that the tediousness is realistic, but there’s no way you’d get me to do that in a video game. Enter Blades of Fire, a game where smithing is a central mechanic. There’s no finding legendary swords as loot in this game – if you want a weapon, you’ve got to make it yourself.

Thankfully, Blades of Fire’s smithing minigame is one of the best I’ve ever played, as it forces you to consider the challenges of smithing in a way that apes realism without the monotony.

When smithing a weapon, you’ll get a white line indicating the outline of your blade and a row of bars representing the shape of the blade. You must pick your spot to hammer on these bars; the ones you strike directly will get shorter, but the ones around the edges will get longer, mimicking how striking a heated weapon pushes the metal along the blade. You have to wrangle these factors by determining how strong you’re striking, at what angle, and at what width, all of which shape the blade in different ways.

Getting the bars in line with the white line will increase the quality of your blade – up to four stars – which will determine how many times you can repair your weapon before it’s permanently broken. To stop this from being a long and boring process, you have a limited number of strikes you can make before the higher quality tiers get locked off, meaning mastery of the system is about learning how to manipulate the metal in the fewest possible strikes.

It’s a great balancing act with a high skill ceiling – I made a fair few weapons while playing the game, and one three-star creation was the best I managed – which is good because you’ll be doing it quite a lot, as weapon durability isn’t exactly generous.

Once you have your weapons, you’ll be heading out on an adventure to defeat a powerful witch who has turned all the steel in the world to stone – except yours because you have special smithing powers. It makes for a pretty standard adventure that hinges on three different styles of combat: Slicing, Stabbing, and Blunt damage.

Enemies have different armor types that change what type of damage is most effective against them, and thus what weapon you should be using. Some weapons, like warhammers, can only do blunt damage, while something like a sword or spear can switch between slicing and stabbing at the push of a button. This combines with a directional attack system where each face button attacks from a different angle, letting you target specific body parts that might be more vulnerable than others.

This system makes for a couple of fun boss encounters, but those are few and far between, and once you’ve got the hang of the combat, the standard enemy encounters quickly stop being fun and you start to feel the drive to just run through everything – especially as they don’t give you anything particularly valuable for defeating them. Plus, even the boss encounters start to run out of steam eventually, as I faced the exact same mini-boss three times in quick succession, and that lack of variety carries through to the standard enemies.

This isn’t helped by the game’s use of soulslike elements. Anvils are its version of bonfires where you can forge weapons and rest, at the cost of respawning all of the enemies, and when you die, you drop whichever weapon you were wielding at the time and must retrieve it. It’s also keen on never giving you any direction, and the world design makes that more of a frustration than an opportunity for exploration. Often, characters will just name a location a single time and expect you to know exactly where you need to go next, which is simply no good in a brand new world where I’m not familiar with anything.

The lack of explanation isn’t limited to just your next objective either, as the game’s tutorials don’t adequately explain its systems. The finesse in the blacksmithing minigame is great, but so little of it is explained, with the tutorials not covering what most of the button prompts actually do. There is a very limited amount of joy to be found in experimenting with them, but not enough to justify a complete lack of tutorials in that area.

It leaves Blades of Fire in a tough spot. Its central smithing mechanic is a lot of fun, with a great deal of customization when creating your weapons and a fun minigame that really challenges you. However, the combat and world design didn’t engage me at all during the three hours I played, which doesn’t make me optimistic for the full experience.