Blades of Fire is a blacksmith game from Soullite from Metroid terrace developers

You place a steel bar, warm white in places, on your anvil. You decide exactly where on the piece of melted metal that you want to hit. You incorporate your hammer into the precise direction to handle the steel. Finally, you hit. You hit again. Prudent, powerful. You warm the steel. Metal changes change. You find the perfect angle. You hit again.

The blacksmith in video games is, most often, a question of pressing “A” near the anvil. Most of the time, you don’t even look at a kinematics, you simply develop an iron or 50 dagger. Enough level, you then go to the enchantment table and leave. The blacksmith is simply a man and / or a creature to sell all the weak weapons on which you fall, and his job is reduced to anything more than a button.

Fire blades change this. This is the first game I played to adopt a drilling approach first of the gameplay. The system is complicated but surprisingly intuitive, and once it has “clicked”, you will forge incredible weapons in no time. Even the rhythmic forge of fable cannot be an anvil.

Forge a sword worthy of Mordor

“Before having anything [else]We knew that we wanted a strong link between the forge and the fight, “said the CEO of Mercurysteam Enric Álvarez in a real forge in Leatherhead, in the United Kingdom.” This guided us throughout the process. “

The forge follows a bar system. You must correspond to a series of bars – they look like a long bar graphic or an equalizer – to a winding horizontal line. A single large sword can force you to balance the bars at a similar level; A straight line. Something more complicated, like a flambege, could be a complex wave form.

Each hammer strike moves the bars. The area you hit will be flattened and the metal pushed on the sides. If you tilt the hammer to push to the left, the metal will be pushed in this direction. If you adjust the strength of your blow, you will push less metal. And, of course, the colder the metal, the more difficult it is to handle.

The more you reach this horizontal wave form, the more your weapon is attributed, and each of these stars is a chance to repair your weapon.

“We almost took it as a challenge for ourselves,” says Álvarez. “Are we able to build something like that?” He said that the forge mechanic was an “incredibly difficult” task, and the team tested “countless prototypes” until they reach the bar system in the last match.

“This intimate relationship between you and your weapons was a very interesting concept.”

Aside from the mechanics, Álvarez and his team wanted to nail the feel to forge. If you do more than just press “A” to make a thin blade, you also need the forge of the gods to look at the room.

“We wanted something that allows you to feel the sweat of the forge,” he says. “And you can see how the billet, strike after strike, gets the shape of the weapon. We wanted to give this feeling to the players because it is a game where you create your weapons, you use them and they die in your hands. So, this intimate relationship between you and your weapons was a very interesting concept that we wanted to explore and develop.”

The degradation of weapons stands its head

There is a deterioration of weapons in the blades of fire, but it has a completely logical meaning. When the forging your weapons is such an intense process, it is natural that the game encourages you to engage with this system. But here, degradation is as deep as forging.

It is not a breath of the wild system where your sword breaks into pieces. Each blow will cause a little less damage to your weapon. If you stab, the point deteriorates. If you cut, the sides will degrade. This forces you to change your style of play, to move between your available weapons and to keep the fight fresh at each meeting.

There is a point (very well intended word game) for the individual aspects of each weapon. Enemies will be weak for certain weapons, or even simply specific attacks of certain weapons. A goalkeeper with a heavy fat on a padded shirt can be sensitive to sword cuts to their arms, but the attacks on their body will have to be pointed punches with the pointed end or the crushing blows of a heavy warhammer in order to penetrate the thick armor.

Thus, combat controls must be a bit different from most games. Instead of hitting the right bumper to attack or spammer square, you use the four front buttons to attack in different directions. X balances an uppercut, damaging your opponent from below. The square swings of your left, in their right. The triangle is a blow from above. Circle, you guessed it, attacks their left side.

This complex iteration of soul -shaped fights based on physics was “the only option”, according to Álvarez. “With the forge and with the accent put on the edges and the geometry [of weapons]”, He explains:” If the enemies do not give you reasons to use one or the other … “, it takes place, as if to say:” What is the point?

The result is an intelligent tactical fight, adding a layer of complexity that never seems overwhelming in the heat of the battle. A large red outline tells you to change your weapons. Amber probably means that your weapon is degrading. Green is to go. You know, like traffic lights. But it is not distracting. It’s like a real -time chess match where your opponent is a kind of orc and checkmate leads to beheading.

“It’s like a mechanical watch. It is made up of hundreds of parts, but until you put the last one, it does not work.”

All the elements of the fire blades complement each other. The systems are intelligent, everyone encouraging you to get involved with the following. It is a technical way to describe an incredibly engaging game loop that always lets you want more. Is your precious halberd breaking in the middle of a fight with a toxic treeman? Find another attack route or return to the forge and try again. Do you continue to lose against a troll in regeneration? Make sure to use your best materials for crafts (there are 15 different types of steel that have an impact on the qualities of your blade).

Exploration is brilliant, with a myriad of shortcuts through the smallest cities. Find wooden statues that reward you with new parts to forge weapons with – a different handle or pommel. Even the rest mechanic of dark souls (an anvil instead of a joy fire) does not feel old, because each enemy you beat work to unlock a new plan of the weapon they transport.

Giant beetles and regenerating trolls

I want to take advantage of this opportunity to shout the dark fantastic designs in blades of fire. From the troll in regeneration that I mentioned earlier, which turns to Stone in order to fill his health, at the Hutcarab, a huge beetle with a house on the back, this game is liberal of all the corners of the fantastic cannon and gives them its own rotation.

“We are longtime fans of Frank Franzetta and films like Excalibur by John Boorman,” explains Álvarez. “All this fantasy excites us. You cannot imagine how satisfactory it is to tackle this long and complex development.

“But creating a world in which you like to be, there is a paradox, because it is extremely painful. During most of the development, you do not see it, you do not feel it. It is like a mechanical watch. It is made up of hundreds of parts, but until you put the last one, it does not work.”

And the world is brilliant too. Aside from the captivating monsters, the NPCs you meet are exceptional. Dark, funny, well designed, they have everything in perfectly formulated shovels. The Aran protagonist is the only disappointed of the first three hours. I know that video games often opt for the protagonist of “Blank Slate”, but I would prefer an emotion or a reaction to the story that takes place around him rather than a vacant look. There is a lot of room for narrative and emotional growth in this story of monsters and curses; And I’m going to get involved in any plot that revolves around the regicide, whatever the bland.

Despite my scruples with Aran (even his name is generic), Blades of Fire is a competent soul with an incredibly polished game loop. That said, I still think of these days of mechanical depth after playing, impatient to return to the forge and to try a new approach on a delicate enemy. It is not the game I expected from the team that brought us a metroid terror, but its in -depth blacksmith, its new version of the fights and the dazzling fantastic world makes me excited to explore more.