Blades of Fire is a solid action game with frustrating gameplay that glued me to the chair for hours. The game is a love letter for anyone who has spent countless hours playing PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 games. If you have played the Castlevania Lords of Shadow, the game will feel right at home, while most of the game does work, the gameplay fumbles more than a bit, enough to annoy the overall experience. Here’s our review of Blades of Fire: A Bombastic Action Adventure in the Saggy skin of a Souls-Like.
Immersive World With Vibrant Colours
Every landscape paints a sorrowful picture of the city that once roamed with humans but is now engulfed by demons. The sound of the game also carries the game on its shoulder; the game plays quite a healthy selection of music that hums a medieval rhythm, making the adventure magical. The game also offers a good level design, with interconnected areas and shortcuts that are always satisfying to discover and unlock. I have spent countless hours exploring new shortcuts and looting treasure chests hidden throughout the map.
Blades of Fire didn’t hold my hands for too long, as it quickly threw me into the gameplay a few seconds into the intro. The very first thing you will see is the lush greenery of the world, the ambience, the trees, and the water, all merge well together to create the feeling of a world that is alive. While it may not seem much, a beautifully crafted world yearns for your time, as it hides many secrets that demand exploration. Nearly every one of the explorations ended with some chests or beautiful vistas that made the world more magical than before.
Playful Cast of Characters
All side characters and bosses in the game are brimming with personality. Each boss is created with a unique design and dialogue, and music that matches their persona. But the main character is as bland as toast: it reminded me of Talion in Shadow of Mordor. While the main protagonist does play a key role in the game, the banter he shares with his sidekick or any other character or bosses is painfully dull. The dark tone of the story is rarely present in the banter between the main character and his sidekick during exploration.
The dialogue and voice acting felt very dull until the game showed its list of antagonists for the story. This is where each villain stole the show, every time they appeared in the game. In every scene, they were a million times more interesting than our main character. It is a bad sign, but I did end up rooting for the evil guy in every cutscene. The gravitas of each boss shown in the cutscene is very well crafted by the team.
Tedious Mission Objectives
Blades of Fire has no objective marker for quests, so I ended up running around the map to stumble upon the proper entrance. It was annoying at the beginning, but it got worse in the middle of the game, where the game hands you an escort quest. The idea of doing an escort quest in a Souls-like action game, where one wrong move could lead to your death, was not the game’s best idea. Here, I ended up running around the entire map with a hostage on my back. If I manage to die, then the hostage will get taken away, you will have to rescue the hostage and hope the next door you open is the proper route.
Most of the game revolves around fetching stuff, which takes Blades of Fire from any Souls-like game. Most of the missions in Blades of Fire can be seen in games such as Darksiders, Hunted: Demon Forge, Enslaved, Ventica, and so on. The objectives are always pairs of three items or four to open some locks or power up a golem. The game will want you to do a lot of backtracking to fetch an item from the previous areas. This can get frustrating as you are progressing in the main quest, but the game will want you to go back to previous area zones and find an item in a massive area.
While you can turn on the objective marker in the Esc menu, it didn’t work for me. I tried turning on the option, but I kept getting the same reply, “Option not available.”
The Souls-Like That Shouldn’t
The charm of the game, from the visuals to the combat, feels like an actual action RPG game from the late 2000s. The Souls-like aspect of the game hinders the game from ever evolving into a fully formed action game. The camera is way too close to the player, like we see in games such as Resident Evil or God of War (2018), so you are less aware of what is going on around you. The God of War reboot in 2018 also shared the same problem of the camera being too close to the character, but at least they tried to make up for this weakness by setting up visual indicators around Kratos to inform of enemy attacks.
But in Blades of Fire, no such indicators are present to indicate the enemy attacks, so you would always need to move to your side, hoping not to get hit by an attack from the side.
Health and magic upgrades are all scattered throughout, which further implies the game should have been an action hack-and-slash game instead of a Souls-like game. Blades of Fire has no RPG stat boost by investing XP or level-up points. Taking this element out removes the hook of upgrading the characters, which hurts replayability.
The same can be said about the story; it also plays like an action game. Here, you are also going through strings of cutscenes until you reach the final area. The game also comes with two different endings, the true ending locked behind finding collectibles. You must collect 13 pieces of stone to reveal the true ending, just like in Arkham Knight after collecting all the Riddler trophies. This would’ve been great in New Game + with an incentive to unlock better quality weapons with tougher bosses.
Gameplay One Step Ahead. Ten Step Back
Just like Bonfires in Dark Souls, here we have Anvils scattered all throughout the world, acting as a resting point to heal up. But unlike in Dark Souls, where the process of healing up was quick, here, you must sit down and rest for 15 seconds to replenish your health and all of your health potions. Imagine after a gruelling battle with the mobs, you found a bonfire. That doesn’t cut it, you have to open up the menu in the bonfire and choose rest to restore health, which has a 15-second loading screen. This massively hinders the pace of the action; many times, I just ran through the next area without resting at the ‘bonfire’. I just didn’t want to sit through a loading screen, I would rather die to a boss that will spawn me at the bonfire with all my health potions.
I wanted to make changes to the keyboard control, but the game doesn’t offer me to do it. That is a frustrating mechanic that doesn’t allow the player to change the control layout to work in their favour. The combat feels good to execute, every blow from the polearm hits like a runaway train on enemies. But most enemies get stunned after a single hit, but repetitive hits don’t stun them. Hits from a heavy attack from a heavy weapon should leave the small-time enemies stunned, but almost all the enemies will hit back. This hurts the crowd control aspect of the gameplay, as you must pick enemies one by one.
Broken Blacksmith Flawed Weapons
The concept of defeating enemies to craft their weapon is a fresh take on the weapon-smithing mechanics. If you manage to take down huge trolls, not only will you get pride of accomplishment, but at the same time, you will learn their weapon and be able to craft it. This is one of the best weapon implementations I’ve seen in video games. While you still need crafting materials to craft the weapon, the process of learning by killing a set number of enemies is one of the best game designs of Blades of Fire.
The game’s Blacksmithing mechanic is an innovative idea for crafting weapons, but the reward for mastering it is abysmal. Each time you make a weapon via Blacksmithing, you must play a mini-game. If you are good at the minigame, the weapon will get four to seven stars. Stars here represent the number of times it can be repaired. This leads me to point out the worst feature in Blades of Fire, which is the weapon degradation.
The game goes even further to make the entire system of weapon forging tedious for the first ten hours. When you use a weapon, you will lose durability and sharpness, sharpness is crucial to deal damage. The more you use a weapon you will lose both sharpness and durability. But the game allows you to regain sharpness by pressing R to repair. If you repair the weapon, it will take a huge chunk of the weapon’s durability and transfer it to sharpness, which means the chance of the weapon breaking will increase by 80%.
Most of the encounters in narrow areas, where your weapon will 95% of the time hit the walls than the enemies, a hit to the wall also decreases your weapon durability by 10, if you have a weapon quality of 250, you will lose 10 points every time you hit the walls around you. When the durability turns 0, the weapon will break, becoming unusable for combat; this will happen multiple times in the gameplay. As you can imagine how it is frustrating to lose a weapon’s damage dealing and its durability after taking out a number of 10 or 11 enemy mobs. Here, even mastering the Blacksmith minigame does nothing, since the durability loss stays the same for one-star to seven-star weapons.
The weapon degradation happens so quickly, leaving the stars on the weapon feeling meaningless. At first, my initial thought was that the stars could lead to adding more durability to a weapon, but the game had other ideas. After reaching the end of the playthrough, I can say that I have spent most of my in-game time in the forge and crafting a weapon rather than using it on the battlefield. I just skipped many fights unless it was a boss arena or part of the mission objective. I didn’t want to waste my weapon’s durability and sharpness to kill enemies, since they only drop bits of crafting materials upon death.
Another hindrance comes in stamina, when you upgrade your weapon, you will block some of the stamina bar when using that weapon. But the only way to put up a decent fight in later areas of the game is to have a high-damage weapon; here, you are left with no choice but to craft a high-damage weapon while locking 60% of the stamina bar. So, whenever you are using the weapon, you are using 40% of the stamina bar. This is a baffling mechanic that further incentivises people to play safe.
Conclusion
Final Score: 6/10
What Works
- Combat can be addictive
- The story is pretty decent
- Breathtaking vistas
- Amazing boss fights
What Doesn’t
- Quick Weapon degradation
- More action-heavy than common Souls-like games.
There are many aspects of Blades of Fire that look appealing on paper, but execution falls flat. A huge chunk of the game is playing with the gimmick of creating your own weapon and repairing it. But as you make progress in the game, the weapon will last a bit longer by crafting from high-end materials. When you are starting out in the game, prepare to see a lot of broken weapons, which is a good ten to twenty hours of the game. If you can push through the initial phases of the crafting system, the game will offer a pretty decent story with some amazing boss fights.
