Blacksmith Master Early Access Review- A Delightful "Numbers Go Up" Game that Works Well on Steam Deck

A copy of Blacksmith Master was provided to us by Hooded Horse. Thank You!

Note: Blacksmith Master's content and performance are subject to change throughout early access.

Blacksmith Master entered Steam Early Access today, and we were fortunate enough to get our hands on an early copy to see what the game is all about, as well as how it performs on the Steam Deck. So let's take a look and see if this is your next obsession!

Blacksmith Master - Gameplay Impressions

As the headline stated, Blacksmith Master is very much a "numbers go up" game, there doesn't seem to be anyway to "lose" the game, as it were, and you're pretty much always expanding, hiring new people, and earning more and more profit, resulting in more expansion and progression. This is how Idle games hook players, and Blacksmith Master is close to an Idle game.

So if you were after a challenging management game, Blacksmith Master might not be the game for you. But if you like constant progression, a somewhat relaxed playing experience, and watching that gold pile stack up, you'll be in for a treat.

That said, Blacksmith Master isn't as brain-dead as your usual idle game. While the blacksmiths you hire will be fulfilling the orders, it's still down to you to accept the orders, and you will have to build and plan your shop/smithy to be as efficient as possible to earn that sweet, sweet gold.

Eventually, you'll get assistants who can carry your items around the shop and do other miscellaneous tasks to free up your blacksmiths to focus on creating items. Then, you can get cashiers, which open up a whole new part of the game.

Once you have cashiers, you can start to place shelving in your smithy, at which point your smithy will become a shop. You no longer have to sell to just merchants. You can also sell on the fly to passers-by who will come into your shop and pick up items you've laid out for sale. This reminded me of Recettear, a game I hold dear, and I enjoyed this extra mechanic. Blacksmiths must also be told to work for the shop rather than for merchants' orders, so you must plan your production line accordingly. Assistants can also be told to restock shelves instead of fulfilling merchant orders.

After that, you will unlock Lumberjacks and Miners, allowing access to your resource supply, instead of just paying gold to restock the wood and metal used by your blacksmiths. At this point, Blacksmith Master reaches the height of its complexity. It's not enough to overwhelm, but plenty will keep you busy and more to manage to get the most efficient setup.

Gathering raw resources from the forests and mines opens up the new production line for refining wood and ores, and more assistants are being hired to transfer goods from your warehouse to your smithy. This ensures the game gradually deepens in its gameplay loop, so you aren't left with a shallow experience.

On top of all that, your staff will level up from doing their job, allowing you to increase their skills and thus work faster. You'll also gain points to spend in the research tree from each item created, allowing you to unlock new aspects of the game, perks for your smithy/shop, and new items to craft. The whole thing is one giant serotonin booster, and you're rarely going 30 seconds without some new unlock or upgrade to check out.

Blacksmith Master is nothing special visually. It is stylized in a low-poly visual style, which is fine and helps the game run on lower-end systems, which is never a bad thing.

Blacksmith Master isn't a micro-management game; once you've hired your staff, it's quite "fire-and-forget", you just need to keep an eye on whether your workers are producing enough wood/metal items and switching them between the production lines if either lags. But I don't mind that. Sometimes it's good not to have to manage everything, and Blacksmith Master feels like a solid and oddly relaxing game to play on the go.

You can control one of your Blacksmiths directly if you want to take a more hands-on approach. Although the mode feels a bit more like a gimmick than anything, as before long, you'll have tons of blacksmiths in your smithy, and the one you're controlling won't contribute much. I tried it out to see, but after a few minutes, I left the mode and never returned to it.

Blacksmith Master - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Blacksmith Master supports 16:10 Aspect Ratio resolutions, including 1280x800, so the Steam Deck has no black borders. Sadly, the game lacks controller support, so you need a custom controller layout. The default Keyboard (WASD) + Mouse layout works pretty well, but you may want to adjust a couple of controls, especially if you want to play in the 3rd person mode.

As for performance itself, the game does run quite well, and GPU use stays relatively low, even on the highest settings, which I recommend you stick to. However, as you get more and more staff, the CPU usage will keep rising. By the time I had around 30 staff working for me, holding 60 FPS wasn't possible, so I'd recommend you play this game with a SteamOS framerate limit of 40 FPS. Not only does it save battery life, but it also ensures a stable experience, even later in the game.

Keeping the Frame Rate locked to 40 FPS lowered power draw to around 13- 15 W, so you can expect a good 3 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED, and at least 2 hours from an LCD model, depending on what stage you're at in the game.

As a side note, when putting the Steam Deck into standby and resuming gameplay, the audio became crackly, meaning I had to restart the game to get the audio working again. Hopefully, this can be fixed, as this is the kind of game you will go in and out of standby to pick up and play.

Final Thoughts

Blacksmith Master takes the good parts of idle games, the constant progression, and the never-ending alerts that you are advancing and gaining in ability. With new features unlocking for the first few hours and plenty of flexibility in designing your Smithy/Shop, there's still a reasonable amount of depth here. The game is still in Early Access, but seeing the amount of content on offer is pretty promising.

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