MercurySteam holds the rare distinction of having worked on both the Metroid series and the Castlevania series. A true master of the Metroidvania (search-action) genre. So when the Madrid-based developer gets the opportunity to forge their own destiny with a new IP, what did they make? An action-RPG with some elements of a soulslike.
Huh?
But unlike other soulslike-adjacent action-adventure/action-RPGs, Blades Of Fire doesn’t want to be pigeon-holed as merely another “SoulsBorne” title. Rather, the developers have shaped, bent, and forged something incredibly unique. Rather than make another FromSoftware-shaped blade, MercurySteam forged Blades Of Fire into a “Soulsian” adventure like no other, despite the cover of the proverbial book looks bland and uninteresting at first sight.
Presentation
And let us first talk about this said cover of the book, shall we? With a name as generic as Blades Of Fire, and characters that look well-designed yet says nothing as well as what looks to be another ye olde medieval fantasy world, it’s hard to get excited about this game at first glance. It may as well blend into the many B-grade fantasy books on the bookstore, or sit among the many “Eurojank” B-games that, while charming, made with passion, and perfectly enjoyable, just doesn’t have that mainstream appeal.
Protagonist Aran De Lira and his young companion Adso just don’t have the rizz. They look and sound fine. But this duo feels like a first draft of a more compelling adult and teen dynamic. They have banter, but I don’t feel the chemistry. Is Aran being patronising or is he genuine with his compliments to Adso? And is Adso egging on Aran’s old yet muscly build is him just him joking about or from a place of animosity? I can’t tell. They just start ribbing each other on hour one, too quick if you ask me, but by the late game, it does come all natural. The voice talents of the cast, especially the villains, do an amazing job with the script they have.
The characters move and animated so lavishly well. The way Aran lunges with his spear with a forward hop, one-handed to pierce an enemy’s head, the way he slice-and-dice with a twin-axe, and the hefty swing of a polearm where he even bounces the hammer on the ground before letting it rip really sells how masterful of a warrior he is. And with the game’s combat being a core aspect, it better be. And the developers deliver.
While the environment’s art direction is more of the usual realistic medieval fantasy, it is done so with aplomb. MercurySteam uses their on in-house game engine, the Mercury Engine, and it looks just as good if not better than a typical game with realistic artstyle powered by Unreal Engine. And without the texture pop-ins, too. It loads a little slow compared to the instantaneous load times we might expect from a 9th-generation console game, but bearable. The lighting, the textures, the weather effects and the objects look believable and with many screenshot-able views. There’s also a good amount of destructible objects, and the little critters that scuttle about gives the world some nice liveliness.
The game is surprisingly gory, enough to make YouTube videos demonetised due to how it depicts dismemberment, but the gore doesn’t last long. Aran will pick up some blood and goo stains, but everything else is just in-the-moment. When combat ends, the corpses and viscera fade away.
On base PS5, Blades Of Fire has no graphics settings, it doesn’t need it. The game runs a rock-solid 60 FPS (as my eyes perceive) in most cases. You can get the frames to drop if you just kite all the enemies that can spawn in one room, of course. But if you play like how the game is intended to be, you won’t see any dropped frames.
some of the UI elements are a little too small, I need to squint to see some of the icons and numbers, with no option to embiggen them.
The music is interesting. It didn’t grab me hard, yet I can feel its presence. A lot of flute-y medley that sounds evocative but at the same time says nothing. It’s good background music when you’re exploring or in combat, as the game has the right music to set the right tone. More intense orchestra when you’re slashing and dashing against enemies, as compared to more soothing sounds when you’re in your happy place, the Forge Of The Gods, as you cook up a new weapon. I’ve even hum along to the litty ditty in the forge throughout my playthrough.
Blades Of Fire’s presentation doesn’t stand out as much as it aims to be. But it’s certainly way above good, just short of greatness. An attempt is made here to deliver a AAA-style look-and-sound but it’s just not quite there. This just makes this game more of a hidden gem down the line, because it’s more successful in the gameplay department
Gameplay
In Blades Of Fire, you play as Aran De Lira on a quest to kill the Queen who have turned steel to stone as well as sowed chaos through the kingdom. And in order to do so, he is bestowed the gift of a Forge Hammer, which allows him to be still be able to make steel weaponry and be the remaining few that can fight back this evil force. Alongside Adso, he’ll be journeying through this medieval fantasy world to fulfill to slay that Queen.
The main selling point of Blades Of Fire is this forging mechanic. Sure, some games offer the ability to create and craft weapons, but Blades Of Fire makes this a rather involved process with quite the level of depth. The mini-game where you have to strike the iron to a specific shape is more complicated than it looks, but like most aspects of the game, as long as you think intuitively on how things would actually work as it were in real life, it’ll work that way. So maybe don’t just hit the iron straight, hit it at an angle to push the materials to one side. It’s a satisfying epiphany when you figure out there is a method to how to forge weapons. Mercifully, you don’t need to engage in the mini-game every time you craft the same weapon type, but there is ample reward for getting a five-star (and beyond) weapon forged at least one time.
The same weapon can be customised in fascinating ways. You can make a long polearm with a big hammer head for those big hits, but swinging it around will take ages. So why not make a stubby little hammer that swings rapidly (but hits weaker) instead? Or mix and match the parts and see how the specs line up.
Again, you can use real-life intuition to figure out how a weapon would feel in the hands. Like how weapon weight balance work. Make it top-heavy and it will deal more damage, but the ending animation of those attacks will take longer compared to a bottom-heavy weapon which strikes fast but takes its time during wind-ups. And since you’re blocking attacks with the weapon at hand, a bottom-heavy weapon naturally have more stats for blocks compared to a top-heavy one. And the materials you use to craft the weapons will determine where the weight goes, and how it’s balanced weight-wise. This is some peculiarly nerdy stuff I didn’t expect when engaging with the weapon forging mechanic. This is not just about making the numbers go up.
And it’s in these weapons where you would see the only number stats in the game. Aran doesn’t have gear slots, it’s all about the weapons.
What’s even more wild is that weapons degrade. Weapons with sharp ends will lose its edge so you need to sharpen it up from time-to-time, Monster Hunter-style. But they also have limited durability. If you break that weapon, it’s gone. They can be repaired, and that will be using up materials, as well as one of the stars on the weapon you forged. So that’s the incentive of getting all the stars when crafting weapons, so that you can use them for longer.
Granted, I never faced that much of weapon degradation anxiety as you would expect a regular Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild player would encounter. Blades Of Fire is much more forgiving, and signposts this a lot so you can work around it to not cause too much tension. The game wants you to forge multiple weapons, you can have 24 in total at a time, four of which you can change to without pausing the game. Keep some weapons, the ones you use rare materials with, for tough fights and bosses, while use regular ones to clear the path during regular action-adventuring. On Iron (normal) difficulty, it won’t stress you out, but just enough to have it linger in your mind. It will make you think a bit more before committing to a weapon to forge and use. Resources to craft weapons seems very limited at first, but by the end-game you will be stocking them in the hundreds if you play carefully.
I do wish that that you can preview how the material used will impact the appearance of the weapon when forged, as well as a stat sheet that shows what material and parts are used to make said weapon once it’s in your inventory. A way to save multiple blueprints of weapon configs would be nice too.
But what about the rest of the game? That’s another aspect Blades Of Fire impresses. It’s being described as an action-adventure, and with the setup being an adventure where an adult and their younger companion travel the world, you can easily make a comparison to God Of War (2018). But it’s not an RPG, as previously stated, as the game don’t have you go buildcrafting unless it’s the weapons you’re talking about. You don’t have levels and experience points for Aran, though you can find permanent upgrades to his health and stamina.
That being said, this is surprisingly has soulslike elements. Huh?
Blades Of Fire never described itself as such, but it would be silly not to call what is obviously a Soulsian foundation. Levels spiral upwards and downwards with hidden paths and shortcuts that opens new, shorter path loops. Enemies respawn when you rest at checkpoints. Limited health consumables that replenish when rested. A corpse run mechanic when you die (you drop your equipped weapon, but it won’t be lost forever if you die again and not claim it). Stamina governs how much you can attack. Fall damage. Plus, you can’t even jump unless it’s a contextual button prompt.
But MercurySteam are not interested in making a soulslike. They understand the subgenre, but have twisted and smashed these ingredients to a different form of their liking, creating this a Soulsian action-adventure game.
Combat feels remarkably different. Targeting specific limbs is a feature, but rather than do it like The Surge where you can lock into different limbs, Blades Of Fire just gives you four attack buttons, each for four specific parts (left, head, right and body). All on the controller’s face buttons. This also means that enemies are all humanoids.
But how do you control the camera then, something you have to manually adjust at all times in a soulslike? Blades Of Fire, being the chad that it is, just made a camera that auto tracks ridiculously well. Even if you’re not locked on to a target, it smartly centers to where that one enemy is and zooms out if needed, like when an attack covering a floor is being triggered, or you’re facing a large group. You can still control it manually, but the camera is so good at framing the action that I don’t feel worried at all about not having my thumb on the right stick.
And then there’s the combat feel. There’s a good amount of hitstops when you hit or get hit. Landing big blows feels satisfying and looks cool. The camera panning down and zooming in at a dutch angle when you do a heavy attack is such an inspired choice. The combat pace can be slow and orderly or chaotically fast. You can be constantly dodging over and over, or be patient and bait for those sweet, sweet, parries. And it’s all down to what weapon you use and how you forged them. Fast weapons can do combos, and there are specific combination of strikes that links better and faster, a true combo if you will. You can opt for heavy strikes instead, leaving you vulnerable during the startup but with the right weapon, it can be uninterruptible, allowing you to land that big hit even if enemies stab you while at the end of that swing animation. You can make a weapon with more forgiving parry windows, or just tank attacks with a long enough block bar.
That said you’re not supposed to go fully oonga-boonga. You replenish stamina quicker when you hold the block button. And when you’re out of stamina, you face a worse fate than not being able to do any action, you do those actions much, much, slower. Blades Of Fire can feel like a more straight-forward action game in how simple the combat can be, but it will do its best to limit you from simply mash buttons for the sake of it and not engaging with the systems.
Being an action-adventure game, the adventuring aspect of Blades Of Fire holds up well, though not as faultless. Locations are designed so that it gives you that overwhelming feel where the place gives the impression of being huge and will surely get lost in the vastness of it all, only for it to feel smaller and discernable as you spend time combing the area. There’s a good sense of pace to the adventure, as Aran and Adso make their trek to each new location, with a good number of biome changes. And each location has a good sense of place. You can picture in a less-bleak time, the hamlet that you start it is bustling with people. The Crimson Fort feels like a properly equipped castle first, a level in a video game second.
The main problem I have with the adventuring is that more often than not, I get lost. The early game is fine, as it lets you roam about before pointing you to head to the critical path. But there will many instances where the critical path isn’t that obvious, and you have so many paths opened up you’ll end up just going in circles, head scratching where on earth is that one path the you haven’t gone already. The Crimson Fort has two instance of this I faced, where the one thing I need to head to to progress is just right there, but for one reason or another I missed it. Remember to dodge roll and smash destructible in the corners, folks, and when in doubt, try jumping down a hole.
The game has a button in the settings screen that can point you where your next objective is, but that won’t solve all the issues. The levels in Blades Of Fire are layered in multiple floors, so having an icon on a 2D map can only do so much.
And it’s funny how this option is buried under the options menu. You have a dedicated button that you can press to remind you of what’s your current mission, but the thing Aran and Adso say are too general instead of what I expect them being specific hints of what is the immediate thing you should be looking for.
To spice up the adventure, there are some gimmicks that can appear in certain locations. And these are both fascinating yet also frustrating. The idea of being stalked by reappearing mini-boss is wicked awesome, but it gets diminishingly less awesome as you continue to be stuck on not knowing where to leave this haunted castle while being chased around. Two mechanics, one that involves closing a coffin and another involves a projectile that can teleport you somewhere else, has too short of a timing window which leads to prolong frustration of not being able to complete this one simple thing. If the Blades Of Fire aspires to be a cinematic video game, these rough edges needed to be sanded down.
The runes, and other gimmicks not mentioned here are fine, welcome additions.
That being said, Blades Of Fire is really good at giving you tips on how to fight better. Enemy fighting styles, tips on beating them and weapon characteristics are chronicled well in Adso’s notes, so the game doesn’t want to be all obtuse like a soulslike would.
So is Blades Of Fire a soulslike? Or is it not? To me, this feels like halal bacon. Proper bacon is made out of pork, obviously. But there are bacon that uses halal meat as an alternative and is then prepared to replicate the taste and feel of bacon. And in some markets, halal bacon is called by some other name to disassociate it from pork. Something like chicken strips.
It’s ironic saying this, given how that country of Spain produce some fine pork products, but billing Blades Of Fire as an action-adventure title despite having this Soulsian flavour is like turning chicken into bacon and calling it chicken strips, but we all know it tastes like bacon, sort of.
But rather than doing this for dietary reasons (I don’t think there’s a big population of gamers who prohibit themselves from playing soulslikes), MercurySteam made this because they can. They understand that genre, but decided hey, we can make one without just copy pasting everything.
It would be funny if it turns out this is actually a case of putting a circle peg into a square hole and miraculously fitting, rather than that elaborate food analogy, but that’s how I come to reason why Blades Of Fire turned out like this.
And if you’re so far disappointed that the makers of a Metroid game and several Castlevania games didn’t make a Metroidvania, well, the good news is, there is a hint of Metroidvania in here. You can’t clear a level 100% in your first go, expect to backtrack and revisit the locations when out of sudden you have to get this macguffin for one reason or another. The game even hides all the collectible count until you beat the game, to force you into just experience the adventure as it is first. You can come back and clean up later, when the game lets you do so.
Overall, I find Blades Of Fire tremendously fun. Even with its roughness as I waste hours going around in literal circles, the combat mechanic hard-carries it, the forge mechanic is a proper X-Factor that gives this game something others don’t and the allure of exploration is tempting and rewarding.
Content
Blades Of Fire has proper girth in it, content-wise. I rolled the credits by hour 40 of my playthrough, and I still have some clean up needed doing. The game really wants you to go collect them all, so even after the credits roll you’ll still end up playing a bit more.
The game front-load its content, so expect the later locations to be slightly smaller in size. But the fact that there’s about 10 or so different levels, across multiple biomes, with a good amount of enemy variety, and 35 different weapons types, should tell you that Blades Of Fire won’t bore you with its gameplay content.
The story content, however, isn’t quite up to snuff. It’s not that its terrible, but it does feel mediocre. Very one-note good versus evil story with a few expected twists here and there. It makes a good attempt, but if you played your God Of Wars and other prestige cinematic video games recently, Blades Of Fire won’t meet that bar. But it’s not schlocky bad.
I’m saying this from a point of view of someone that haven’t done everything to see everything I need to make an opinion of the story. I’ll update this bit when I eventually do see all of the story has to offer.
Personal Enjoyment
Playing Blades Of Fire for the first time was a shocking surprise (wait a minute, chicken strips are just halal bacon?!) and once the aftershock is gone, it still find ways to surprise me.
I just love getting lost in the world, and yes I do mean that literally. For all the complaints I have about the game not properly showing you the critical path, just going around and beating up enemies with my perfectly crafted weapon of choice is exhilarating. It fizzles by lap 10 of going round and round, but that feeling of exploring the unknown and slowly making a mind map of where everything goes is fun.
And the combat hits a sweet spot for me. It’s punishing, but there are many ways to alleviate my skill issue and power through the toughest of fights. Forging the right weapon with the right specs and using it for the right enemy feels perfectly rewarding. All that hard work in the forge is worth when you can one-shot the most annoying of enemies.
Blades Of Fire doesn’t do everything perfect. The story’s not quite there. The leading lads aren’t as charismatic and loveable. The game keeps hinting about the choices I should make but I don’t know if made any decisions and if they have affected my playthrough in some ways. There’s one scene in the game that made me scared to death because for a good while I thought I lost my save in a game where there is only one autosave slot (devs, PLEASE do something to stop players accidentally start a new playthrough).
Yet, I just want to keep playing it. I want to see every nook and cranny. Get all the weapon parts. Tinker with new weapons. And yeah, the weapon degradation bit hasn’t caused me any anxiety on normal difficulty.
I never played a MercurySteam game. And if I was just a gamer who only see the marketing for this game I don’t think I would’ve bought Blades Of Fire, honestly. But man, there’s something in here that’s really fun. The fact that they took the long way round to make a sort-of soulslike but not leaning on that formula as its selling point is one massive flex. These folks cooked up something special.
Plus, you get to forge and dual wield a keris in Blades Of Fire. I didn’t expect to see Malaysia and Indonesia’s traditional instrument of death and cultural symbol to be in this game, but I’m proud to see it here. Aran could pass as a beefed-up Hang Tuah as portrayed by M. Nasir, come to think of it.
Verdict
Blades Of Fire is a Soulsian adventure like no other. It blends the elements of a soulslike in such a refined manner that one can experience it simply as an action-adventure game. The story and cinematic aspects could have been better, and the world exploration can lead you astray if you don’t play with a guide in hand. But the combat is exceptional and the weapon crafting system gratifying.
Blades Of Fire has all the makings of a cult hit. But it certainly deserves to be more than just that.
Played on base PS5. Review copy provided by 505 Games.
Blades Of Fire
Blades Of Fire is a Soulsian adventure like no other. It blends the elements of a soulslike in such a refined manner that one can experience it simply as an action-adventure game.
- Presentation 8.5
- Gameplay 9
- Content 8.5
- Personal Enjoyment 9