"Blades of Fire: Exclusive First Look"

When I sat down to play developer MercurySteam's latest project, Blades of Fire, I expected a return to the studio's Castlevania: Lords of Shadow roots, updated with the modern stylings of God of War. An hour later, I thought I was playing a Soulslike, albeit one where all the stats were in my weapons rather than an RPG character sheet. By the end of the three-hour hands-on session, I realized both of those observations were simultaneously true and false: this is a game that is unmistakably built on well-worn ground, but the unique arrangement of both its borrowed components and new ideas results in a fresh and interesting approach to the action-adventure genre.

While it's not exactly a clone of Sony Santa Monica's work, you'd be forgiven for assuming as much at first glance. With its dark fantasy world, heavy-hitting strikes, and third-person camera that stays close to the action, Blades of Fire has much in common with the Norse era of Kratos' journey. There are certainly even more parallels that I could talk about: across a demo that took place during the game's opening hours, I explored a twisty, treasure chest-laden map with the aid of a young companion who helped solve puzzles. Together we sought out a woman of the wilds who lived in a house mounted atop a giant creature. It can sometimes feel a bit too familiar, especially when you also factor in the many elements pilfered from FromSoftware's library, including anvil-shaped checkpoints that, when rested at, both refill your limited health potions and respawn enemies.

All of this familiarity is filtered through a world that has an air of 1980s fantasy about it. You can imagine Conan the Barbarian easily blending in among its incredibly buff soldiers, while a bunch of orangutan-like enemies bouncing around on bamboo pogo sticks wouldn’t look out of place in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Even the story has a retro vibe; an evil queen has turned steel into stone, and it’s up to you – Aran de Lira, essentially a blacksmith demigod – to kill her and restore the world’s metal. Despite these old-school charms, though, at this stage I’m doubtful the story, characters, or writing will prove that compelling – it’s all incredibly video game-y, akin to the many forgotten stories of the Xbox 360 era.

Like many of those games of yore, Blades of Fire's best accomplishments appear to be mechanical. It boasts a combat system rooted in directional attacks that makes use of every face button on the controller. On a PlayStation pad, tapping triangle aims for the head, cross goes for the torso, while square and circle swipe left and right respectively. Through careful reading of an enemy’s stance, you can use these attacks to break through defenses. A soldier holding up a blade to protect their face, for instance, can be overcome by aiming low and skewering through their gut. The impact is wonderfully squelchy, with thick trails of blood erupting from the wounds you inflict.

There are occasions when this system really shines. The demo’s first major boss, a slobbering troll, had a second health bar that could only be chipped away after dismembering the beast. The limb that’s lopped off is dictated by your angle of attack, so I could use my right-hand strike to detach its club-swinging left arm, quite literally disarming my foe. Even better: you can cut the troll’s entire face off, leaving it blind and aimlessly flailing until it can regrow its eyes and continue the fight.

Compared to most games, your weapons demand a huge amount of attention. Interesting wrinkles like this can be found in many of the combat staples. Rather than automatically regenerate, your attack and dodge-fuelling stamina gauge must be manually restored by holding the block button. But despite these new ideas providing Blades of Fire's combat with a distinctly different edge, the general tone of battle is undeniably Soulsian. Attack pattern recognition and slender dodge/block/parry windows are very much the name of the game here, and there’s the same sense of risk and reward – even if the punishment isn’t quite as severe. It’s enough to trick your brain into reaching for FromSoft muscle memory, but that sadly won’t save you here: the directional attack system demands a very different control map, the safety of blocking repositioned to the left trigger.

After rewiring my brain to remember that none of the face buttons can be used to dodge, things began to click. The unique approaches gradually took center stage over the Souls of it all, and I soon found the combat to be refreshingly different. Core damage dealing is elevated by a smart weapon system that allows you to wield your bladed armaments with different stances, either slashing with the sharp edge or thrusting with the pointed tip. As with the directional system, you’ll need to assess your enemy (as well as some useful HUD prompts) to determine which method is most effective.

Blades of Fire Screenshots

9 ImagesIf the title didn’t give it away, your weapons are the very heart of Blades of Fire. And compared to most games, they demand a huge amount of attention. Edged weapons dull with repeated use, meaning each successive strike deals a minuscule less damage than the last. That all adds up over time, so you’ll need to use a sharpening stone to replenish your weapon’s blade. That, or switch to a different stance; the edge and the tip wear down independent of each other, which contributes to the sense that these are tangible items affected by your fighting style.

As with Monster Hunter, you’ll learn to make space to sharpen your sword mid-fight. But every weapon has a durability meter that continually depletes, no matter how well you care for it. When your weapon inevitably shatters, you can repair it at an anvil checkpoint. Or you can melt it down into its raw materials to begin crafting anew in what is undoubtedly Blades of Fire's most significant and distinguishing innovation: the forge.

With your weapon design complete, you must then physically hammer out the metal on an anvil. To say MercurySteam has created an extensive weapon crafting system is an understatement. Rather than find new armaments in the world, every weapon’s life begins here in the forge. It starts with the choice of a basic weapon template, which Aran sketches out on a chalkboard. From here you tweak and modify. For instance, when designing a spear, I adjusted both the length of the pole and the shape of the spearhead. Each decision is reflected in the weapon’s stats; a longer pole increases the spear’s range, while the shape of the head dictates if it’s more proficient at slashing or piercing. Different materials affect weight and that in turn changes the weapon’s demands on your stamina pool. All this lends the sense that you are genuinely crafting your weapon. You even get to name your creation.

Most crafting systems would end there. In Blades of Fire, this is only the halfway point. With your design complete, you must then physically hammer out the metal on an anvil. This is achieved via a remarkably involved minigame in which you control the length, force, and angle of every hammer strike. A curved line across the screen represents the ultimate ideal, and with each blow of the hammer you attempt to arrange a series of vertical bars, akin to a graphic equalizer, to match the shape of that curved line. Overworking the steel will result in a weaker weapon, so the aim is to recreate that line in as few strikes as possible. Your efforts are rewarded with a star rating; the more stars you attain, the more often you can repair your creation before it permanently breaks and is lost forever.

I really love the idea of the forge and how it introduces a skill element to what is typically a menu-driven system. But even after several sessions at the anvil, I found the minigame frustratingly obtuse. There didn’t seem to be a clear connection between the areas that I struck and the resulting shape of the metal. Hopefully some improvements, or simply a better tutorial, are implemented before launch – it would be a shame for Blades of Fire's most interesting feature to be marred by irritation.

The idea at the heart of the forge is something that goes way beyond the boundaries of a three-hour demo session. MercurySteam wants you to feel deeply attached to the weapons you create and carry them with you for the duration of your journey – a journey the developer claims will be “no less than 60-70 hours.” As you explore the world and find new metals, you’ll be able to reforge your trusted swords, axes, hammers, and spears to enhance their properties, ensuring they’re always suitable for new and more difficult challenges. This relationship between you and your armaments is emphasized by the death system; upon defeat you drop the weapon you were using and respawn without it.

It’s another mechanic inspired by Dark Souls, but built on a different, arguably more meaningful bond: lost souls can always be replenished with more killing, but a brilliant sword you’ve built a connection with is irreplaceable. Luckily your dropped weapons will remain in the world permanently, so your only challenge is to find a way to recover what you lost. I look forward to seeing how this plays out over the entire campaign, and if any kind of backtracking will reunite you with weapons from a dozen hours ago that you can reforge and rekindle your relationship with.

It’s unsurprising to see MercurySteam adopt multiple ideas from Dark Souls and its siblings. That’s partly due to FromSoftware’s seemingly irreversible impact on action games, but also because Blades of Fire is something of a spiritual successor to Blade of Darkness: a relic of the early 2000s, it was developed by MercurySteam’s founding members and is considered (by its cult following, at least) to be a precursor to the Souls series. In many ways, those developers are simply picking up from where they left off, implementing the advancements made by other studios during their time away from the genre.

As I played, I could feel the gravitational pull of all of MercurySteam’s apparent influences – the brutal combat of this project’s decades-old predecessor, the innovations of FromSoft, and the world design of God of War. But as much as those ideas are clear to see, they fall short of defining the studio’s latest work. Rather than craft a Soulslike or a God of War-like, those firmly established systems have been reinterpreted as part of a larger canvas of ideas. Blades of Fire has a recipe of its own that successfully distances it from any of its obvious gaming touchstones.

I do have some misgivings – I’m unsure if this fairly generic dark fantasy world is up to the challenge of supporting a 60-hour adventure, and within three hours I’d fought the same gatekeeping miniboss three times, which makes me question the variety on offer. But the demonstrated depth of relationship between your forged blades and the foes you face has me totally intrigued. In a time when complex and, frankly, obtuse games like Elden Ring and Monster Hunter have become mainstream hits, I think Blades of Fire has the potential to contribute something fascinating to the scene.