Spanish game development studio MercurySteam may not be among the most popular video game development studios ever released, but the Spanish team would definitely deserve far better recognition for having contributed much to popular classic series like Konami’s Castlevania and Nintendo’s Metroid. It’s with the latter series that the developer showed its chops the best, creating with Metroid Dread what is, in my opinion, one of the best entries in the entire franchise. Still, MercurySteam has yet to put out that one original game that would put them on most players’ radars.

Is the studio’s first original game in a while, Blades of Fire, the one that will bring MercurySteam its deserved recognition? While its lack of originality probably will prevent it from being such a game, its modern God of War-meets-Souls-like experience makes up for a compelling adventure that fans of the genre can definitely enjoy.

Blades of Fire is set in a fantasy world that feels straight out of the 80s. Long before the story of protagonist Aran de Lira begins, the world was ruled by a race of giants known as The Forgers, who safeguarded its prosperity until the catastrophic war that destroyed civilization. With the threat of complete annihilation looming on the horizon, the Forgers created human beings to take up the fight in their place, granting them the Steel that would allow them to rule the world in their stead. Thousands of years have passed since then, but the Steel gifted to humanity no longer gives them power, as the mighty Queen Nerea has cast a spell that turned all Steel to stone, leaving humanity powerless. Hope, however, is not entirely lost. The son of the King’s Ward Commander Aran de Lira, who grew up together with Queen Nerea and her brother Prince Erin, gets entrusted with a mission of the utmost importance from an old acquaintence from his court days: killing the Queen, and restore the gift The Forgers granted humanity at the dawn of time.

Though the Blades of Fire premise doesn’t sound all that unique or interesting, Aran’s journey to kill the Queen is enjoyable enough, in a straightforward sort of way. As mentioned above, the world design, its lore, which is further developed as the journey proceeds and Aran gets to learn more about the reason why he was chosen for the mission, and the colorful characters that inhabit it are very reminiscent of fantasy movies from the 80s, giving the whole adventure a nostalgic and almost cozy feeling for those like myself whose childhood coincided with that decade.  The same goes for the nearly brotherly relationship between Aran and Adso, a young scholar who accompanies him on his mission, which is meant to mirror the relationship between Kratos and Atreus in the modern God of War games. The relationship develops predictably, but it’s hard not to smile at some of the quips they throw at each other, and how they come to care for one another over their long journey.

Aran and Adso are not the only characters that play an important role in Blades of Fire. Before reaching the Queen, they will meet all sorts of individuals, ranging from some sort of wood witch who’s more than meets the eye, ghosts, and even an undead skeletal child who manages to create a deep connection with the duo despite not being able to speak, and all sorts of villains, ranging from your typical grunts of the Royal Army to the most trusted counsellors of the Queen. Much of their characterization is a little predictable, but this only contributes to the familiar and nostalgic feeling the game evokes, making every individual story decent enough to carry the adventure forward. Thankfully, the familiarity the story and characters evoke doesn’t hold for the entire adventure, as the game features some interesting twists, which I won’t spoil here, that elevate the experience in the end.

Much like the story, the Blades of Fire gameplay clearly wasn’t created to push the boundaries of third-person action-adventure games, but some of the twists it features make it more interesting than one would have expected. As mentioned, anyone who has played God of War and its sequel, God of War Ragnarok, will not fail to see how much Aran and Adso’s journey feels like Kratos and Atreus’ journey in ancient, mythical Scandinavia. Controlling the burly gifted blacksmith with an over-the-shoulder camera, which can be tweaked via the FOV settings to provide a better view, players get to explore a variety of different locations featuring complex design inspired by Soulslike games with shortcuts and alternate paths, treasure chests hiding gems that enhance Health and Stamina once four have been collected, Forgers’ Criptex, which can be used to expand Aran’s blacksmithing capabilities or enhance healing flasks coming with a limited number of uses like in Soulslike games via some relatively straightforward skill trees, and a variety of statues that grant different bonuses, such as enhancements for weapon forging scrolls that have already been unlocked, fights against powerful enemies and so on. Forgers’ Anvils are also found all over the map, providing Aran with bonfire-like checkpoints where it is possible to rest, replenish health and Healing Flasks, repair weapons, and access the Forge where the blacksmith can forge a variety of different weapons.

Despite offering plenty, in my opinion, exploration and traversal are the weakest part of the Blades of Fire experience. While the open-ish maps are rather large, and the Metroidvania-inspired world design makes it interesting to return to previously explored locations, the actual locations Aran and Adso get to explore have a very complex design, which often gets a little confusing. While the in-game map provides some guidance, it’s not detailed enough, so players have to learn each location’s layout to avoid wandering aimlessly. The rewards for exploring locations thoroughly aren’t particularly exciting either, and with so many enemies roaming about, which also respawn after resting, one risks getting killed and sent back to the latest Anvil that has been accessed, minus the weapon equipped at the time of death, forced to potentially frustrating backtracking that adds nothing to the experience. At the very least, each location has some sort of gimmick that separates it from every other, so things do tend to stay interesting.

Even though Aran will have to do a lot of fighting in Blades of Fire, taking enemies down is almost always satisfying, thanks to the solid combat system and the weapon forging mechanics that add a unique spin to the experience. At its heart, the game’s combat system shares many similarities with the stamina-based systems made popular by FromSoftware’s games, with a focus on positioning and reading the enemies’ tendencies to succeed. The stamina system is well implemented with the block, parry, and evading systems, incentivizing rotating between the three options. Dodging and attacking requires stamina, which is only recovered by staying in a guarding stance for a few seconds, so the system not only makes it impossible to mash your way to victory, but also incentivizes considering every offensive and defensive option depending on the current situation, creating a surprising dynamic system.

The Blades of Fire combat system is made even more dynamic by the great selection of weapons and the directional attack system. Instead of going with the regular fast and heavy attack combo, the game features a system that allows players to attack enemies’ arms, head and body to deal damage and target weakpoints, combine fast and slow attacks by tapping the attack buttons or holding them, and work around any defensive gear the enemy may be wearing. This system works quite well with the weapon forging system, which is the gameplay mechanic that defines the experience the most.

Instead of picking weapons from treasure chests or as enemy drops, all Aran’s weapons must be forged. At the beginning of the game, options will be limited to a few choices, but as the adventure proceeds, and Aran kills specific enemies a set number of times, he will obtain weapon scrolls, a sort of blueprint that will allow him to forge a spefic weapon belonging to a different general category like twin dual-wielded weapons like axes and knives, swords, sabers, greatswords, polearms and spears. While the weapons belonging to the same category generally have the same moveset, they have different base stats and possibly different fighting styles which determine the type of damage dealt with attacks – slash, pierce, or blunt. All enemies are weak against some of these damage types, and the interface helps players understand right away which weapon should be used by highlighting different body parts in different colors. With weapons and fighting styles switchable on the fly, combat can get pretty intense and satisfying, as both animations, hitstop, and sound effects make each hit feel impactful.

Using only the base materials available at the start of the game to forge weapons, however, will not get you very far in Blades of Fire. By collecting materials dropped by enemies, new types of steel and wood become available, allowing players to customize their weapons further to empower slightly different playstyles. Want to play more defensively? Use steel for the right weapon parts to enhance the blocking gauge. Want to play the game as if it were Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, parrying every enemy attack and retaliating with deadly counterattacks? Use the right steel to increase the parry window. Want to overwhelm enemies with quick attacks? Use light steel and pick the right parts to reduce the weapon’s weight and increase stamina. As Aran’s combat capabilities, except for health and stamina, whose base value can be increased using the Forgers’ Criptex, are determined by the weapon he wields, this character progression system is considerably more dynamic than your typical action RPG, where respeccing is usually not easily accessible.

With the forging mechanics central to the experience, it’s no surprise that weapons can be damaged and eventually become unusable in Blades of Fire. Each weapon has a durability value that gets depleted the more it is used, or when it is sharpened to restore penetration values, and once it reaches zero, the weapon has to be repaired using materials. Each weapon has a different star rating that indicates the quality, and the more stars a weapon has, the more times it can be repaired. Quality is determined during forging, by completing a minigame that tasks players to align some bars as close as possible to the final weapon’s form, a rather complex minigame that requires players to hit the steel as few times as possible which adds another layer of depth to the experience. Thankfully, the game keeps track of the maximum quality reached for each weapon, so it is possible to skip the minigame and forge high-quality weapons if the player has already done so.

The forging minigame is probably the most complex aspect of the Blades of Fire mechanics, and even so, it is not so complex as to be too hard to understand. I feel this is where MercurySteam has succeeded the most: giving a more realistic edge to ARPG combat without making it too realistic, to the point of turning everything into an unenjoyable experience. This is well highlighted by how even weapon destruction mechanics, which are usually very annoying in most games, are made enjoyable. Besides making players constantly engage with the forging mechanics, destructible weapons are an opportunity to gather a lot of materials at once by offering any weapon with Reputation gained by killing enemies in the vein of your typical experience points, even destroyed ones, to Glinda. This makes sure no destroyed weapon becomes a complete waste, in turn making the mechanics not a problem at all, but an integral part of a gameplay loop that stays engaging, for the most part, for the around 50 hours needed to complete the main quest, though in its relative simplicity, combat starts becoming a little repetitive after 20 hours or so.

Blades of Fire is definitely not winning awards for the best-looking game of 2025, but this doesn’t mean that the game looks bad in any capacity. If you have played the original Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, the visual style will look instantly familiar: both the character models and the environment have a distinct PS3/ Xbox 360 era flair that looks quite good at a resolution higher than those more common during the older console generation. Lacking modern features like ray tracing and global illumination, but even more basic modern features like proper lip-syncing,  the visuals do suffer as a result, but never to the point that the game looks so bad as to be off-putting.

The relatively simple visuals also mean that Blades of Fire should run well on various PC system configurations. In a benchmark session held in Aecides’ Domain’s Doyen Graves area, which features plenty of vegetation and enemies on screen at the same time, the game ran at an average of 122 FPS, 66 1% low at 4K resolution, maximum settings, NVIDIA DLSS with 75% Super Resolution setting and Frame Generation on my machine (i7-13700F, RTX 4080, 32 GB RAM). Without Frame Generation, the average FPS dropped in the 90s range, with some tiny drops into the 40s range that were barely noticeable, so the game doesn’t require Frame Generation in any capacity to reach an acceptable playable state on beefy hardware. The available graphics settings to tweak are fewer compared to other modern games, but that was expected, given the lack of advanced visual features. Dropping them to medium quality slightly improves performance without any significant impact on visuals, so most players shouldn’t have any issue running the game on a modern machine.

Though it’s far from being one of the most original action-adventure games to date, Blades of Fire twists some tried and true mechanics to offer an experience that is different enough to be compelling for most of the main adventure. The sometimes convoluted level design and the straightforward combat system prevent the game developed by MercurySteam from being a masterpiece, but even so, this is a game worth playing for those who have enjoyed the latest entries in the God of War series and want to experience a slightly more gameplay oriented take on the same formula with some Soulslike cherries on top.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

8.5

WCCFTECH RATING

Blades of Fire