Blades of Fire

Blades of Fire was provided by 505 Games for review. Thank you!

Towards the end of my time at GDC, I had the pleasure of playing some of 505 Games' upcoming titles, and one of them was Blades of Fire. I knew of developer MercurySteam, the developers behind Metroid Dread and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, so I was pretty excited to see what they were going to do next. I was blown away at the time, and I fell in love with the combat and forging mechanics. Now, the game is here, and apart from some rough edges, Blades of Fire is an excellent metroidvania with an addictive combat loop.

At its core, Blades of Fire feels like a metroidvania, which felt different from many games I played. There’s something about running through all the different biomes, going back and forth, collecting new items, and killing enemies to unlock new pathways that felt different than others in the genre. It still has all the core mechanics we’d expect, like winding levels, unlockable pathways that become available after finding an item later on in the story, and vague clues as to where to go next without any handholding. However, the combat systems stole the show and made this game feel so exciting, while also aggravating me to no end.

The actual fighting is quite straightforward. You use different blades in third-person skirmishes to strike them down. Each blade has four attacks that can target the right or left sides of the body, the legs, or the head. These attacks can be light or heavy, while some weapons can switch the attack style depending on which part of the blade strikes the enemy. For example, if you’re wielding a spear, you can either stab enemies with the tip of the spearhead or switch it to swing the spear and hit with the sides of the head. Each has its benefits, like covering a wider range or penetrating more defenses, and it will become very important to note what your weapon can do against enemies later in the game.

This is the best and most aggravating part of Blades of Fire. I loved going up against foes and slicing them with one of my four weapons that I can equip and switch out at any time. Each of the seven types of weapons, with five variants each, feels wholly unique and has its uses, and I found myself consistently swapping them out and trying new blades to see what they could do. It was satisfying to dodge, block, and slice through fodder, making each encounter feel epic. It was hard not to love these moments, and I consistently went out of my way to have more.

Charging up your weapons and striking down enemies in one hit was so satisfying. The sound and visuals of body parts flying off and a cinematic camera angle showing the swing of the blade mixed with blood streaks flying through the air were just wonderful moments. I would go around with my Twin Axes, charging up and slicing arms off, and relished in the powerful weapon I had made.

The bosses and mini-bosses also feel a bit like a souls-like experience, too. It's a lot of reading attack patterns, dodging, and striking quickly in between moments before the next attack hits. Along with your limited health flasks, there's a lot of dodging and management with health that goes down little by little. Not all bosses are like this, but it happened enough for me to feel the similarities.

With how refined combat is, we also have to be aware of our surroundings, and this was the worst part for me. When you swing your blade, it can hit walls or objects that are around you and stop the attack completely. Some combat was in close quarters, which was a nightmare for me. I would sometimes forget to switch to stabbing weapons, and my swing would never land, and I would get bombarded with enemy strikes. You must also manage your stamina, which goes down with every strike and dodge. You can gain it back quickly by holding the block button for a bit, which you’ll have to do very often.

Some enemies also had extra armor on certain parts of their body, which meant I had to make sure I hit their body, which had none or had a weapon with enough penetration percentage. Locking on to enemies gave us info about where to hit, which was helpful, but some bosses could generate armor or swap which parts are covered, and that would almost always screw me up.

As you use the weapons, you will also go through their durability, and they will lose penetration percentage. I thought I would dislike this mechanic since it meant constantly repairing them, but I didn’t mind it. Weapons didn’t wear down as quickly as I expected, and there are ways to repair them completely by either sacrificing durability to sharpen or repairing them fully at an anvil. Repairing fully does take a star away from the weapon, and it does run out, but you can have multiple stars per weapon.

This leads into the second best part of Blades of Fire: Crafting. At any smithy you find on the map, you can teleport to your forge. Here, you will craft weapons using the materials you find worldwide and from killing enemies. You choose a blade, modify it by selecting the parts and materials you’ll use, and hammer it to refine the quality and earn more of those repair stars.

The materials and parts you choose affect the weapon greatly in many ways, so you can refine how you want to use it. You can use lighter materials with longer handles to increase its range and speed while sacrificing damage, or swap it out with heavier materials that can increase damage, slow it down, and decrease your stamina when using it. I love how much customization is possible with the system, and I appreciate that it saves the last combination I used for crafting.

The one part that irks me a bit was hammering it out for those repair stars. Depending on how you hammer it, each weapon can have a specific number of stars that repair it fully and make it good as new, but it only has a limited amount before the weapon is broken forever. This hammering mini-game involves hitting a row of bars and moving them up or down to fill in a specific shape, and I wasn’t a big fan. I did get the hang of it later on through trial and error, and I like that the game will save and auto apply the hammering if you get a lot of stars, so you don’t have to do it over and over, but I found it nearly impossible to get anything over 4 stars.

To get more weapons to forge, you’ll have to find and defeat a specific number of enemies wielding those weapons. For example, you have to kill 60 undead monsters with Twin Axes to get their forge scroll, or 5 giant trolls to get the Trollslayer. It’s a nice system that encouraged me to kill enemies, rest at a forge so they respawn, and repeat so I can get the new weapon. I went out of my way to seek it out so I could try out all seven main types of weapons and forge new varieties to get the ones that will help me defeat bosses.

I especially enjoyed using the Twin Axes and War Hammer to slaughter enemies. The axes can be fast and deadly, while highly durable, making them great for quickly sneaking in strikes between enemy attacks. The War Hammer has a much longer range, while having an optional blunt attack style that doesn't diminish the sharpness of the blade. These were two of my favorite weapons, though I found uses for almost every weapon I forged and still loved relying on my Claymore. I also like that we can name our forged weapons, which helped me connect more to my Twin Axes (HakunaMatata) and Claymore (Gorgonzola).

Regarding progression, there are both health/stamina upgrades and skill trees. You’ll find these in chests scattered worldwide, and exploration will be very rewarding. You can increase your health or stamina with four gems each, while specific items will unlock different skill trees to enhance your health flask and give you the ability to get more repair stars for specific weapon types. There are also statues around the world that, if you show them a specific weapon you have forged, can unlock new parts to forge new weapons with.

As with any metroidvania, exploration is key, and in Blades of Fire, it's very rewarding. Almost every nook and cranny has some new item, chest, or special encounter to participate in. Going off the beaten path almost always brought me to a new health or stamina gem, stone statues that could become difficult encounters, and weapon statues to unlock new parts. No matter where I went in the winding maze of each section of the beautiful world, there was always something to find.

However, I found trying to use the map to help backtrack very confusing. Using a 2D map in a 3D world is hard when there can be multiple vertical floors and winding trails. Every landmark you find is recorded automatically, which I appreciate, but using the map to move around isn't helpful. I even found myself a bit lost when teleporting to another anvil and forgetting which one I needed to go to. I also got lost multiple times, just running around the map, since there are so many pathways.

The way I played the game was on the "Steel" difficulty, but there are two lower difficulties that can also show you an objective marker on where you need to go next. With the type of game this is, the preferred way seems to be with no objective markers, and it does feel rewarding to figure out what to do next. There are tips you can get to guide you in the right direction, but they can be vague and don't point you towards the next objective directly.

Blades of Fire tells a very interesting story, but one that I feel is held back in its delivery. You play as Aran De Lira, who, along with his companion Adso, is on a quest to kill Queen Nerea. She has cast a spell that turns steel into stone, making her enemies powerless to stop her. Now, Aran, who has inherited a special hammer that gives him immense power to forge steel, has to face his past and take her down to save the lands.

It's an intriguing story, and I love the medieval-esque blend with advanced technology in the form of The Forgers. It's also a beautiful world with a variety of biomes that are almost all interconnected, which makes the world feel complete. I was definitely hooked on figuring out what happened and Aran's past, and how he is handling the situation.

However, I just couldn't resonate with the characters much. I was okay with Aran most of the time, but the voice acting in general took me out of the moment. There were many lines that I felt didn't deliver, and on top of that, I didn't really understand why Adso came along. It just felt a little forced since he appeared out of nowhere. I also didn't like some of the people we would meet. While I was fine with some, and I thought others were hilarious, there were a few that annoyed me, like the elderly ghost who forced me to stop and wait for 15 seconds in random places while he tried to remember where we needed to go next and would cowardly hide whenever there was a fight. It was painful.

Blades of Fire - Steam Deck Performance

Blades of Fire is unfortunately not on Steam, so I knew the experience wasn't going to be the best. However, it was better than I expected, and I would consider it borderline playable.

The game is currently only on the Epic Games Store, so we need to use either the Heroic Launcher or Epic Launcher directly to play it. I did try on Heroic first, but I received errors when trying to boot it up. I ended up installing the Epic Launcher directly using NonSteamLaunchers, and it was able to boot up the game just fine. Here's our guide on NonSteamLaunchers and how to get it up and running.

As for the actual performance, it runs quite well in most scenarios. I found many areas at the Balanced (Medium) quality preset that would run at around 45 FPS with XeSS on at 80%. However, there are some bigger areas with more enemies that drop, and running around through levels can lead to even bigger drops. There are some adjustments we have to make, but with them, we can get a near 30 FPS in almost every scenario.

With almost every quality setting at performance mode and XeSS at 65%, we can get 30 FPS throughout almost the entirety of the game, with some very minor drops when running around that can't be felt. The game still looks fantastic in these settings, with sharper visuals than in the lowest graphical settings. There are some hitches every now and then, but they are unavoidable and most likely come from not being on Steam and not having a shared shader cache that Steam games benefit from.

I did compare FSR and XeSS, but I found that FSR has worse ghosting problems that come from swinging weapons, and XeSS just looks a bit better overall. They tend to perform around the same amount, so there isn't much difference other than how it looks. We will also be ranging battery drain from 18W - 23W, ranging from 2.5 - 3 hours on the OLED Steam Deck and 1.5 - 2 hours on the LCD.

I also recommend disabling the framerate limit in SteamOS and using the in-game framerate cap at 30 FPS. This heavily reduces any input lag from Vsync, which is going to be very important for this type of game. Reaction time will make or break some boss fights, so this will maximize it to get the fastest response possible.

This is also one of the very few games I have played where frame generation doesn't feel awful. While there is some slight input lag and stuttering/slowdowns here and there, the game does feel smoother. However, the slowdowns happen more than I would like, but it isn't frequent, and I would consider it playable. I can't recommend it personally since I would rather have a smoother, stable experience, but I would consider it bareablewith frame generation.

Accessibility

You can change the size of in-game icons, whether you hold a button to sprint, auto locking when enemies die or when you're attacking, changing the enemy outline, whether you can damage fauna/wildlife, enable and customize subtitles, change camera shake and bobbing, modify field of view, change sensitivity and inverted controls, and audio volumes.

The game does support 16:10 resolutions and has solid controller support. There are no cloud saves, but there are HDR settings and they do support the OLED Steam Deck.

Conclusion

Blades of Fire is a fantastic metroidvania that excels in its gameplay loop. The combat is addicting and gory, with a solid amount of variety thanks to the weapons you can craft and wield. Combined with the simplistic progression and upgrade system, the experience is easy to get into and difficult to master. There are some little nuisances here and there, like getting your weapon caught on walls and some storytelling woes, but these are worth fighting through to experience this wonderful game.

On top of that, it runs decently on the Steam Deck, even though it is only on the Epic Games Store. It can handle near-stable 30 FPS with low settings, and while it could be improved with a Steam release, it's still a solid way to play it if you don't want to wait for that possibility.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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