Well made, but not without flaw
In this Soulslike dark fantasy, you play as Aran De Lira, an exiled swordsman. With a quirky teenage scholar Adso as your sidekick, you embark on a journey to save the world from the mad queen. I really liked the premises and the story, it’s simple but engaging enough to make me want to see it through till the end. I was surprised to see liking banter between Aran and Adso more than I thought I would as well. Also, it’s always hilarious to see Adso super dodging lynch by mob of skeletons from afar (he’s a pacifist, you see).
Blades of Fire is developed by Mercury Steam, who is probably most famous for modern 2.5D Metroid games, and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow series. As such, Blades of Fire too heavily leans on -vania type ability-gated progression-based map design. While most levels are by no means small, they are really tightly packed, designed to be explored from corner to corner. They sometimes don’t make sense from practical standpoint, like The Crimson Fort for example, but they sure are interesting game levels!! It’s really refreshing to see such unapologetically game-ish levels in the days of everything must be hyper realistic. On the other hand, sometimes it’s so confusing to figure out where to go that I legitimately got lost and circled around the entire level on few occasions (turns out, you have to destroy a certain furniture in order to progress, who knew?). And I have to say, the art direction is superb!! It’s rare for me to just stop and gaze at the scenery for a while, it’s that breath taking sometimes.
As for combat, 4-button directional attack and armor system felt intriguing initially. They fit whole forge-your-own-weapon thing that they are going for.
But because you can easily craft a weapon surpass 100% armor rating or whatever the highest armor rating your current enemies possess at any giving point of the game, the system kind of becomes moot. Of course, there are other aspects to the overall mechanics, such as weapon durability, sharpness degradation etc, but once you accept that these weapons are disposable and you will always have more than enough materials to craft (often better) replacements, you won’t really be caring about which parts of their body are vulnerable, or what kind of weapon or stance is more effective to the armor enemy is wearing. At the end, I only had to think about where you hit for few special enemies (and one certain boss) and that’s it. I have to say that it’s kind of wasted potential, bummer.
My biggest issue with the game is its difficulty, specifically how it makes combat difficult. I do appreciate its fundamental design to focus on slower, methodical process of intense duel, and I did enjoy the game’s reactive combat for what it is. Having said that, I got really fed up with how the game presents increasing difficulty, by constantly throwing you 5 or 7 enemies at once, or clamming you into a tight platform with a bunch of elites that can easily knock you off to an abyss by one blow etc. To make things more difficult, the game doesn’t offer any type of ranged attack for bating/crowd control. I just feel that the game is simply not equipped to handle situations like that, it would have benefited if they tuned individual enemy fights more interesting rather than focusing on quantity.
The game is powered by proprietary engine called “Mercury Engine 6”. In the days of more and more developers choosing to ditch their own tech for Unreal Engine, developing on own engine is always plus in my book. But the novelty aside, Mercury Engine is pretty impressive looking. It has all the modern features, such as DLSS/FSR support, HDR, Frame Generation. It also runs well enough that, even without Frame Gen, my rig could easily stay above 100fps all the time. (For reference, AMD 7800X8D, RTX4070, 32GB DDR5, Triple 1080p Monitors)
Lastly, as of July 31, 2026, about one third of achievements are bugged. Just FYI.
In the end, Blades of Fire is well made game but not for everyone. It’s slow, methodical, and it’s very unfriendly, it’s made for very specific kinds of players. Although it sometimes misses the mark, it does what it’s designed to do quite well. If you can get pass some of the shortcomings, if you are fan of Soulslike genre, you would probably like the game. (If you still have doubts, there is demo on GOG you can try.)
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