Frozen Flame

The game was provided to us by the developer/publisher, thank you!

Frozen Flame is an open-world survival RPG set in the fantasy world of Arcana. Covered by a curse, you are someone capable of utilizing primeval magic that has the power to shape the destiny of the world. Fight in third person combat as you explore the land and encounter countless enemies. But that isn't all, you'll need to build and craft your way to survive the eternal winter. Of course, you are not alone either. You can be joined friends to survive together in local or dedicated servers. Can you survive the harsh land and come out on top?

Frozen Flame is an EARLY ACCESS game, so performance could get better as time goes on. This will be marked as a First Look until then.

As of right now, I see both some positives and negatives and if I could give a game half a star, I would consider this a 2.5. Frozen Flame can achieve 30 FPS on medium settings, but this only sticks for around 50% of the time. The other half tends to drop to 24-26 FPS or even down to 20 itself. The game has a lot of weird spots where some work perfectly fine, but back up a couple steps and bam, 20 FPS. There are also some oddities like putting on a glowing hat which will tank framerate and if you take it off in the same area, it will go back to normal.

I also tested uncapped at lowest resolution and there are still some areas that can't quite make it even with the full power of the Deck. This could have been a random bug, but it happened multiple times.

Frozen Flame also offers DLSS, but no FSR 2.0. I believe FSR implementation can really help give the game extra leeway that it very much needs on the Steam Deck. For an open-world early access title, this is a great step in the right direction in terms of performance. Hopefully, we can see more optimization further down the line which will help this game perform up to at least 30.

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

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