After 3 hours, I'm impressed by how Blades of Fire smelts Dark Souls and Monster Hunter together to forge high-impact action into twisted new shapes

I wish I loved anything as much as Blades of Fire loved blacksmithing. Forge a weapon in MercurySteam's new soulslike and you'll be treated to several indulgent cutscenes of hot metal being beaten into shape. There's complex stat screens with all sorts of damage tradeoffs depending on what materials you use that'll have a Monster Hunter fan drooling. Then even an odd little minigame where you have to bash your new weapon into the correct shape. And you get to name your new murder toy! I wonder if this studio would have been happier making Blacksmith Simulator 2025...

Ah, but MercurySteam are too fond of brutal combat for that. Bashing together a new polearm is enjoyable, but not nearly as satisfying as bashing it against an enemy skull in Blades of Fire. Fighting is just more fun when you get to name the weapon you engage in it with, and every successful blow has a great sense of impact. This is all about dodging, blocking, parrying, and waiting for a crucial opening. And if you survive all that and rest at a safe point, you'll resurrect all the standard enemies. Sound familiar?

Yes, so far, so Dark Souls, but Blades of Fire's combat has plenty of interesting quirks. If you were planning on hiding behind a shield for this one, bad news, coward, none here. You can block with whatever weapon you're holding, but it's often a mixed success. Fire attacks still do damage, and bigger enemies happily break through your guard with ease.

So why bother blocking at all? Well, blocking here is actually how you restore stamina. Hugging the block button to get back precious stamina after years of being trained to do the exact opposite is jarring, but it's fun seeing MercurySteam forge a soulslike combat trope into an interesting new shape.

This isn't a simple case of light attack and heavy attack, either. Different buttons on the controller change which direction you attack from. This initially seems trivial, until you're fighting soldiers in cramped corridors and your poorly chosen spear swing directions result in a lot of bouncing uselessly off the walls. Swinging a polearm at the right angle to smack multiple enemies is wonderfully cathartic too. You can also switch between slashing and stabbing styles, and it's nice to see so much focus on direction of attack, something I barely think about in other button-mashier combat games.

A Game of Tones

At first, going hands-on, I thought I was in for yet another grimdark fantasy misery-fest. You play as Aran, a mysterious loner on a noble quest to, er, commit regicide. Within the first few minutes an old friend of Aran's gets his throat slit in uncompromisingly gory detail. Cue a depressing walk back to Aran's house where he and his new companion, Adso, mope around being sad. Thankfully, this dour tone is surprisingly short-lived.

The first time I successfully defeated an enemy soldier, my companion Adso excitedly informed me that he'd taken some notes on the enemy. "Well done, lad!" says Aran, who's still fighting several other knights. "I'll read them when I have a moment!" Adso is your constant scribe, enthusiastically putting together an increasingly detailed bestiary of everything you're fighting. The fact he does this while you're still doing all the fighting is an inspired running gag.

"What a disgusting creature! Time to take some notes," he exclaims gleefully, seemingly unworried that the massive troll he's talking about is currently trying to crush us. Instead of justifiably telling him to shut up, Aran's nothing but encouraging of his little companion, and their fun, friendly dynamic is infectious. We'll be happy to spend an entire action-RPG in their company. Any sidekick who suggests making sandwiches if you put the controller down for too long is a keeper.

Tooling Up

The game forgoes levelling up currency entirely in favor of collectable resources, dropped by foes and used to bash together tools that are better at taking them down. Kill a set amount of an enemy and you'll learn the blueprint of the weapon they've been hitting you with. Die, and you'll drop whatever weapon you were wielding at the time. However, you get as many chances as you like to go fetch it, which cuts some of the usual soulslike tension a fair bit.

Monster Hunter is a clear and welcome influence here. There's the focus on resource gathering, having to constantly sharpen your weapon during combat, and the borderline fetishistic cutscenes of weaponry being forged, which are just as indulgent as all that cookery in Monster Hunter Wilds. It's a perfect fit for a game that forces you to engage with bringing the right tool to the job.

Lock onto a foe and the UI will tell you whether what you've got equipped is going to work. Green? Go ahead and hit 'em. Orange? Not ideal, but you'll still do reduced damage. Red? You might as well try fighting them with a broken toothpick. Muddling through an area because the hammer that would be the ideal weapon is lying broken in your inventory annoys. But it's all worth it when you finally craft a nasty spear that's perfect for taking down enemies that once gave you so much hassle.

Weapon degradation is a tricky mechanic to get right, often leading to a lot of frustration. But I like how Blades of Fire encourages you to use a wide multitude of murder tools rather than just clinging onto one weapon for the whole adventure. The prospect of having to take down sixty weaklings so I can learn how to forge something is a bit too MMO grindy to my tastes, but the reward of a nasty new claymore to play with after takes the sting off a bit.

Standard enemies are the usual fantasy-medieval fare: soldiers, soldiers with spears, soldiers who look like they were raised on an all-steroids diet and have massive health bars too. Far more promising are the supernatural foes which start popping up. That aforementioned troll's habit of throwing up his fish-heavy lunch over you is delightfully gross. There's also the excellent War Axe, a soldier who appears to be made of water, who constantly cheats by petulantly descending into the ground. More of these please!

There's some clever takedowns of the bigger enemies, too. Get that troll's initial health bar down and the beast will merely be stunned. You have to use this crucial moment to chop off a significant chunk of it. The direction you're attacking from becomes absolutely vital here – why chop off its right arm when we can go for the face? Ah, but that's how I made the unfortunate discovery that, even after I decapitated it, the troll still had plenty of fight left. The battle took a pleasingly chaotic turn as the headless troll blindly lunged for me while I tried to desperately finish it off properly.

Really my only issue is that a soulslike this interesting has been given the rubbish name Blades of Fire. That's the kind of generic forgettable title you'd give a game you were putting in the witness protection program. Pity, because MercurySteam's forge-obsessed followup to the career high of Metroid Dread is otherwise looking very promising.

Blades of Fire isn't the only soulslike we've enjoyed. I've played a billion soulslikes and Lies of P is officially the best one – now I want FromSoftware to steal from it