Blades of Fire

BLADES OF FIRE doesn’t quite manage to bring the heat

By Kerry Brunskill

Blades of Fire doesn’t do itself any favours pairing Aran, its rugged action hero with godlike powers, a tragic past, and a broken heart, up with a much younger sidekick he insists on calling ‘boy’ and ‘kid’ far too often – but cracking through the Kratos of it all reveals a game that’s trying to leave a more exploration-heavy mark on the cinematic action genre. These are places to be savoured, not slaughtered.

The game truly believes that taking the time to explore its rustic fantasy locales, poking around sandy ruins and enormous crumbling castles instead of rushing from one waypoint to the next, is the heart of the experience. So much so that the game defaults to the hardest difficulty setting, the only one that doesn’t allow me to bring up a convenient ‘go here next’ map marker whenever I’m feeling a bit lost. And for a while, it’s magical.

There’s always some out-of-reach place I can’t help but wonder how to get to close by, and every small deviation off the beaten path seems to hold some shortcut or stat boost. Everywhere I go looks gorgeous, whether covered in snow or sand, or blood, and I did enjoy entering new areas just to see what gorgeous vista I was going to be treated to next.

Attacks with the heavy weapons feel wonderfully weighty

ONE MORE THING

Actually trying to progress through these areas is another matter. The first dozen or so hours contain not one but two hours-long ‘drag the NPC around if you want to get anything done’ gimmicks, one of which revolves around a crying child. Pushing further on only leads me to an endless parade of increasingly frustrating and flimsy roadblocks, the game making me stand right in front of the one thing/gate I needed to activate/ unlock to move on… just so it can explain why it [in]conveniently isn’t working right now. Too often I was sent off to gather several key items split across multiple unrelated zones first, or had to retrieve something I used once in a completely different location, hours ago, for the sake of a single barrier. Not even free fast travel, available at any of the sensibly-placed rest/repair/forging anvils scattered around, was enough to soften the repeated hammer blows to the game’s pacing.