At first glance, Blades of Fire reflects on the golden days of action-adventure, hack and slash titles similar to Darksiders. A big, bulky character with massive hands swinging for the fence, demolishing everything in its path. Bringing the main character, Aran De Lira, to a modern hack-and-slash of precision. It’s more than your usual hack and slash: timing and parrying play a vital role in surviving the adventure.
A Promising Journey
The story of humanity rests in the balance and sees our protagonist, Aran, learning the old ways of the Ancient Forgers and learning the ways of the steel to overcome the Queen. Queen Nerea is ruling with a stone fist as she turns the Ancient Forgers steel into stone and turns them against humanity. The story is certainly intriguing, but it is set up so quickly, it felt rushed. Within minutes, I fought enemies, was handed a forging hammer, sent to the forge, gained a boy companion and off to kill the queen, all in the manner of 15 minutes. Everything happened so quickly, it felt incredibly rushed with very little set up to explain the breakdown of the story. Who is Aran? The sudden addition of my companion Adso. Why do I have this forging hammer, and who is Queen Nerea, and why is she, after all these years, turning everything into stone?
This is where things began to break apart, one hammering hit after another. Being sent to the forge to help gain new gear, forging your next weapon with a mini-game. Though it could have been a nice way to forge your weapons, I couldn’t get the feel for it and it felt frustrating. I liked the idea in concept, but felt it lacked proper execution.
Pulling Too Hard With Inspiration
It becomes instantly apparent that Mercury Steam loved the God of War reboot with Kratos and Atreus as we play their similarly chosen heroes, Aran and Adso. Though not fully realized as well as Kratos and Atreus, you can clearly see the inspiration that they were going for, but, wasn’t able to achieve that connection and meaningful purpose. Though Aran and Adso are not father and son, the similarity between the titles is unmissable. Aran, a fatherly figure, is suddenly given the task of a son-like companion to aid him on his journey.
The combat was a standout, with Blades of Fire changing the usual formula of using your typical bumpers and triggers to impact combat. Using the face buttons on my Xbox controller with X initializing my left side attack, B for my right side, Y overhead and finally A as my low attack felt very refreshing. Facing different foes, changing your weapons to be the best course of action to face each different opponent and learning how to attack each enemy was fantastic. The more you fight a particular enemy, defeat 60 Flamberge, would have Adso recording notes about the Flamberge and allow you to take those notes back to the Forge and craft that particular weapon of the Flamberge. It would have me looking for a certain enemy of choice because I wanted to craft their weapon. I loved this feature as I would look for resources and certain enemies while out on my journey, becoming more than just having to fight another round of enemies, there was a purpose.
Why The Annoying Companion?
Adso, a boy learning his craft. Not a fighter, but one of magic and puzzle solving that will help Aran throughout his adventure to the Royal Palace and finally help with killing the queen. You can send Adso back to camp if you find him overbearing. As is noted in the tutorial, if Adso becomes “annoying” you can send him back to camp…Then why make him annoying at all? Companions can often make or break a game. Though Adso didn’t completely break my experience, I often wondered why he was there in the first place.
Blades of Fire felt very much like the AA experience of old. An okay story, with an okay cast of characters that didn’t leave an overall impression of me. It wasn’t a game I was thinking about after placing the controller down. There were certain story beats that were satisfying, but would often lead to a questioning dead end as I was wondering where to go next? Finding a little hooded boy early on and learning a bit of his backstory was cool. But I was quickly left out in the cold wondering where I was looking to take my journey next.
The world of Blades of Fire is there. It’s stunning at times, vast in scope, enemies are interesting, taking care of your weapons has a huge impact as they break down, the story is intriguing, forging weapons is a good idea, but doesn’t reach its full potential. Which is exactly how I feel about Blades of Fire, a good start for what I feel could be a better sequel if it was to reach its full potential.
