Blades of Fire hands-on: Embrace beauty and brutality in this crafting-focused brawler
4.27.2025
By Francisco Dominguez, Contributor
Our preview session introduced Besacarr Hamlet, a small village perched on a scenic mountainous precipice. Its paths are lined with delicate red flowers winding between mound-shaped wooden buildings whose rooftops have long been covered in moss. But its dramatic red hue is a more recent feature, and not one bestowed by the ruby-tinted rays of the sun sinking beneath the horizon. As I arrive, the hamlet is illuminated by dozens of the settlement’s mossy thatched roofs, all ablaze at the hands of an evil queen’s raiding party. Beauty and brutality, a thrillingly effective combination.
As Aran de Lira, a disgraced nobleman in exile on a reluctant quest for vengeance, I haven't come to play the savior; I’m merely passing through, with waifish assistant Adso in tow. My only goal: kill Queen Nerea, who cast a magic curse condemning the world to life without steel so her forces face no opposition. Thanks to a sacred hammer bequeathed by an abbot who died attempting to deliver it to him, Aran is the sole exception to her magical rule. He bears a mysterious grudge against her, but a vast distance lies between this starting location and a confrontation in the Queen’s court.
Magical mystery, not wizardly waypoints
As you’d expect from the only devs who can claim to be the true “Metroidvania” studio—to date, nobody else has worked on both series that gave the genre its name—there’s no linear path, objective markers, or smears of yellow paint to guide the way through the hamlet. Exploration is both a necessity and its own reward. I wander through the hamlet’s sloping streets, stumbling into locked buildings’ side entrances and hidden caverns, gauging every dead end on the map while dispatching hostile troops.
Aran’s a taciturn figure; not uncaring, but prone to keep his many secrets close. He has this in common with the game itself, which delivers plot points with the same air of cautious mystery as its exploration. His companion Adso is more explicit, never pointing the way, but offering a reliable source of knowledge. (The developers learned the pitfalls of impatient NPCs elsewhere. Tire of him, you can banish him to camp at will). His copious notes on the world and his ever-growing bestiary help flesh out the world’s details in an enjoyably effusive style. He won’t lift a finger in combat, however. That’s a task the scholarly lad leaves to Aran’s broad shoulders.
It's a good thing he’s more than up to those combat duties. In our in-depth interview with the team, the art director told us that Blades' character designs and broader world owe a debt to the lush fantasy art of Frank Frazetta and his iconic artwork for the Conan the Barbarian novel covers, and that’s mirrored in Aran’s muscular frame. Out of his many regrets, skipping leg day isn’t one of them.
Skirmishes with a succession of guards wielding swords, polearms, and even fire-brimming maces teach me the nuances of Blades of Fire’s combat. There’s a major deviation from the usual "Soulslike" repertoire of stamina-driven light and strong attacks, dodge rolls, and parries: Each face button on the controller prompts a different directional attack. When a leather-armored soldier advances, one of the “Queen’s Dogs”, their best defense is guarding their body, so I aim blows at their vulnerable sides. Armed with a weighty polearm, my favored opening move is a charged blow to the head of an unsuspecting enemy—a gambit that often ends fights in that single strike, their decapitated head rolling to the floor.
In this mystical fantasy world of blacksmith gods and witch queens, magic is all around, whether it’s in the surreally unrecognizable animals, the luminous particles that hang in the air, or the ghostly woman who shyly vanishes each time you sight her. Unfortunately, this means your foes aren’t just ranks of burly men in heavy armor. As I come to a waterlogged back entrance, an elemental being springs up from the ground. At first my sword suffices before its exterior mutates, and now my cutting edge uselessly bounces off of it. Switching back to my polearm seems to work better; carefully rolling away when it sinks beneath the water to burst back up from the ground from a new location, I gradually wear it down.
After shoulder-barging through a damaged wall, I chance into a cavern with an enemy that renders my polearm or slow-charged attacks practically useless. The Athanatoi Marauder flickers out of invisibility before unleashing a chain of double kukri attacks. Its onslaught has me holding my guard, struggling for an opening. With my polearm no use, a series of swifter sword slashes help me survive the ambush.
This series of encounters make one thing clear: My strategy and weapon have to shift on the fly. Clicking the analog stick tells me if my current weapon and stance are effective or would result in significant damage reduction, and helps me find the right areas to target. Some lessons only come from experience, however. For instance, you can’t spam roll indefinitely, as the stamina cost certainly sees Soulslike habits die hard. And just like Conan, the ways of magic are for others; there are no unlockable magic spells or all-powerful scrolls. Aran must rely on his brawn, his wits, and—most importantly—his steel.
He who smelt it
At first, I was equipped with a modest armory; just the abbot’s sword and my own crude polearm. After dispatching enough soldiers to unlock a blueprint for their weapon and collecting the necessary materials, I head to the nearest anvil waypoint to construct my very first blade.
Forging in Blades of Fire is a crafting system and minigame all in one. Forge scrolls give you the blueprint to unlock one weapon type, taken from seven different weapon families—all melee, for this is sword and sorcery, not crossbows and curses! The first type you’ll unlock is the army sword, which you can tailor to your own requirements. You select the blade’s base metals, the shape of its design, the size of its guard, and the heft of its pommel. Each decision alters not only its damage output in both piercing and slashing stances but also changes its durability, attack speed, stamina cost, and its ability to maintain an edge.
It’s a daunting web of decisions that emulates the tradeoffs a true blacksmith must consider—the devs previously told us how they sought to replicate the true qualities of metalwork, down to a metal’s ability to hold a sharp edge. This is a world without steel—your weapons are hard won, never stolen from the grip of defeated enemies or found idly discarded in treasure chests. They can only be forged by you. As weapons deteriorate and eventually break forever, I had to become familiar with this cycle of retiring or recycling old favorites and forging new memories with new weapons.
With my blueprint etched in chalk, it was now finally time to smelt my steel and put the hammer of the gods to its intended purpose. A minigame determines the quality of my blade. My success is scored with a grade that defines how many times the weapon can be repaired back to its full durability. This is done by hammering steel into the desired shape, precisely tuning each hit as you go. First time around, I get two stars out of four—room for improvement! My new sword, named "Umnhavho" by the game’s generator, offers a vast upgrade nonetheless.
Fending off Trolls and Warmongers
Returning to Besacarr Hamlet more confident in my combat skills and with much better equipment—especially after finding four stamina gems for a helpful upgrade—I walk up to an abandoned carriage that lies between myself and a gate to an undiscovered area. A troll emerges from within as it explodes into a cloud of splinters.
Judging by the longswords already lodged in its back, this giant beast is battle-hardened, and its range of moves and hefty health bar swiftly confirm my first impression. The best I can manage is a single stab before backpedaling to escape the reach of its club’s wild swings before sidestepping balls of its own hastily expelled excrement and—just as unexpected, if marginally less disgusting—a ranged attack that vomits a flood of live fish my way.
A grueling exchange ensues. Eventually, when finally dazed, a charged attack on either side mutilates one of the beast's arms. When I repeat the trick, I gradually, oh so gradually, come out on top, left with zero health flasks, a sliver of health, and an urgent need for a shower.
Other elite enemies soon followed, such as the Mayhem Warmonger guarding a path towards a large red castle with his giant warhammer, which I’m keen to forge for myself when I can finally slay ten of them. Despite his size, which is reminiscent of Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2 (with a more potbellied figure), he manages to outmaneuver me by leaping to deliver unblockable hammer strikes followed by sneaky backroll attacks that punish attempts to strike too eagerly after dodging the first time around.
The first time I faced this foe, he defeated me. I evaporated into a cloud of molten metal and reappeared at an anvil, minus the weapon I’d used, which remained lodged in place where I died, a memorial to my own rash impatience. Like a demoralizing bloodstain run in Dark Souls, the notorious sprint of shame, I trudge back and fetch my weapon before resuming the fight.
Once he goes down, my way is barred by a sigil which, according to Adso, needs the aid of a Master Forger, a rare human with a mystic connection to the giants who created the world aeons ago. They’re rumored to live in a nearby swamp, and I begin to suspect I'm headed in the right direction when I discover a path out of the hamlet past yet another Warmonger, the village giving way to rocky paths, steep slopes, and encounters of an equally steep difficulty.
Here I face a horde of reanimated skeletons, who combine with even more marauders for a challenging fight that leaves me dearly missing the initial pondering advance of the queen’s soldiers earlier in the preview. Between this and the close-by outpost containing several guards and yet another Warmonger guarding a dye to customize Aran’s outfit, I'm really put to the test.
By this point, I’ve acquired the means to forge a spear—low on damage, but with excellent reach and speedy thrusting attacks. It's a useful option but not my preferred one, at least until I find better metals—the high-grade noble steels I rarely found here—to grant higher damage in the full release.
Flights of fantasy
At last I come to the gate to the swamp, magically barred shut. Fortunately, Adso’s books hold the answer in the form of an incantation. As he’d earlier needled the comparatively unlearned Aran for his pronunciation of a feared necromancer’s name, when the gate doesn’t initially respond after his incantation, the brawny warrior can’t resist teasing Adso by asking if he’s sure he’s said it right. He spoke too soon. The gate glows, then opens to reveal an old woman foraging for mushrooms who curses you both for a pair of nosey parkers before scurrying off into her cottage.
She kicks the floor, saying it’s time to get moving. Her cottage agrees, then does so. A titanic insectoid body emerges, showering Aran and Adso with soil as the woman—clearly the Master Forger we were looking for—now towers above from a great height.
“What? First time with a hutcarab?” She goads the pair with this quip as the colossal scarab beetle opens its shell and her mobile home takes off into the distance, landing on a rocky outcrop. The game’s cutscenes may be rare, but they leave a strong impression.
And the demo ended there, whetting the appetite with that bold flight of fantasy. If the world that awaits is as weird and inventive as that final scene, Aran’s path to vengeance is set to be a strange and eventful journey well worth seeing through to its dramatic (and probably regicidal) conclusion.
Blades of Fire launches May 22 on Epic Games Store.