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Metro
28-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Metro
Blades Of Fire review - hammer of the gods
The makers of Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow and Metroid Dread return with an original game that has a very unique system for both using and creating weapons. Success in any medium can be a double-edged sword, from actors being typecast by certain roles to directors who can only get work making the same sort of films over and over again. It's even worse for video games, with some studios, like Call Of Duty's Infinity Ward, having been working on the same franchise, and nothing else, for over two decades. Spanish developer MercurySteam isn't quite in that position, but they have spent a significant portion of their 23 year existence making Metroidvania games, starting with the Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow series, before perfecting their art with Metroid: Samus Returns and the excellent Metroid Dread. It's unknown whether they'll return to work on a new 2D Metroid game for the Switch 2 but in the meantime, they've made Blades Of Fire. It's not a licensed game or something based on an existing franchise but a brand new action adventure that seems to exist purely because MercurySteam wanted to make it, and not because 12 months had passed since the last one. And that alone makes it an intriguing prospect. There are multiple influences on Blades Of Fire, including MercurySteam's previous work, the recent Zelda games, the work of FromSoftware, and the modern God Of War games. The plot is straight out of Breath Of The Wild, with all the swords in the kingdom being rendered useless by an evil sorceress. You play as a warrior who gains the ability to forge your own weapons, which comes in very handy when everyone else's has turned to stone. Unfortunately, the plot and setting are bog standard fantasy, and while there are a few interesting wrinkles, such as the occasionally inspired bit of art design, a lot of it could have come from any game in the last decade or so. Even if the oddly proportioned human characters are reminiscent of Lords Of Shadow and the weirder monsters are when the comparisons to Dark Souls et al. seem most obvious. Being able to forge your own sword is the most unique element of the game and, thankfully, works very well. You have a magic hammer that, unlike with Thor, is actually used for the sort of things hammers were invented for. Not banging in nails but tempering molten steel into various blades and other usefully sharp and pointy bits of metal. Defeating multiple enemies of the same type eventually unlocks a blueprint for whatever weapon they were using, from spears to swords. The enemy variety is already good but because you know there's a very useful reward for beating lots of the same kind it helps greatly in avoiding problems with repetition. The blueprint has lots of customisation options, depending on the type of steel you use and the length or shape of a blade – which has a small but measurable effect on things like power and how much stamina is expended when wielding it. Once you've made your choices you have to play a forging mini-game, to try and maximise the amount of time until the weapon becomes useless. This is not easy, or well explained, but after a few hours you begin to get the hang of it, and it becomes surprisingly satisfying. The problem is that you get the feeling the whole forging weapons aspect was the impetus behind the game getting made, with nothing else being as fully formed in concept or execution. The third person combat is fine, and relatively unique, but it's not involved enough to support a game where there are no other substantial gameplay elements. Combat is original in the sense that rather than just using light and heavy attacks the face buttons are mapped to what part of an enemy you're trying to attack: the head, left or right torso, or legs. As novel an idea as that is, there's not much more to the combat than that, expect for charged attacks and the inevitable parries and dodges. There are no proper combos and while you do sometimes have to target specific body parts, to avoid heavy armour or attack weak points, the whole concept feels undercooked. Blades Of Fire is a peculiar game, that flits between feeling impressively unique and disappointingly generic. Some of its ideas are entirely its own, while others, such as the way health potions work and having to collect dropped weapons after you die, are very obviously borrowed from Soulsborne games. More Trending And yet, the only truly bad part of the game is the terrible map, which is very easily the worst we've ever seen in a modern game. It's purely two dimensional and makes it almost impossible to tell where you are, where you've been, or where you're going. It also seems to be an awkward compromise between not wanting to have a map at all, like a Soulsborne title, and providing only the bare minimum instead. With a better story and more engaging characters this could've still been worth a recommendation but unfortunately the storytelling is no better than the game's cartography. What Blades Of Fire is left with is a collection of good idea that are never forged into an effective whole. In Short: A flawed but interesting attempt at a mash-up of everything from God Of War to Dark Souls, but where crafting weapons is often more fulfilling than using them. Pros: The core business of forging weapons works very well, including in terms of how you get blueprints and the level of customisation available. Weighty combat and memorable boss battles. Cons: The combat is interesting but too simplistic to sustain the whole game, while the storytelling is bland and cliched. Awful map system. Score: 6/10 Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC*Price: £49.99Publisher: 505 GamesDeveloper: MercurySteamRelease Date: 22nd May 2025 Age Rating: 18 *Epic Games Store only Email gamecentral@ leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader's Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. MORE: Games Inbox: When will the new Tomb Raider be revealed? MORE: Nintendo Switch 2 is getting an old school midnight launch at major UK toy store MORE: Official PS5 price cut slashes up to £140 in upcoming PlayStation sale
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
EA thinks it got Battlefield right this time, projecting confidence to investors in advance of a summer reveal: 'When we get it right, Battlefield is a giant franchise and often the biggest shooter in the year'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. After the unhappy reception for Battlefield 2042, EA went all in on player feedback, methodically addressing complaints and promising that the next Battlefield game will center the opinions of fans from the start, with what EA CEO Andrew Wilson calls "the biggest playtesting initiative in franchise history." Wilson has been talking up Battlefield 6 (or whatever the new game ends up being called) to investors for a while now, and in this week's quarterly address he reported that a "core group" of playtesters have already played thousands of hours of the game. The CEO reiterated his usual talking points during the call: This is the "biggest Battlefield" yet, with "the biggest team behind it" yet, and EA has learned its lesson from Battlefield 2042. "We've always worked closely with the community, but we haven't always worked as closely as we should have," he said during the Q&A portion of the call. "We haven't always really worked to help them understand the things that we're building and for us to understand the things that they really want out of a Battlefield. "We know that when we get it right, Battlefield is a giant franchise and often the biggest shooter in the year. And so this time, we wanted to ensure that, one, our player base and our global community had a better understanding of the things that we were building and how we were building and some of the approaches that we're taking to building, but more importantly, we wanted them to have the ability to feed back on map construction, weapon lineup, progression, all of the things that make Battlefield great at Battlefield scale." Wilson also acknowledged that he would say that everything is going great, but even so, I can't say I'm not curious about what makes this Battlefield so "big." The word probably doesn't refer to map size or player count, since Battlefield 2042's 128-player maps weren't received all that well. It may just mean that they've spent a lot of money on it, which they clearly have. This is the first Battlefield produced with Infinity Ward and Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella in charge of the series, and a bunch of studios are involved aside from series progenitor DICE. Ripple Effect, which made the cool Portal custom servers mode for Battlefield 2042, is "working on a new Battlefield experience." Motive, the studio behind the Dead Space remake and Star Wars: Squadrons, is working on singleplayer. Need for Speed studio Criteorion is working on Battlefield, too, as well as another "Central Tech Team." Fellow PC Gamer Battlefield-liker Morgan Park and I have a running joke about new Battlefield games, which is that the newest Battlefield is always the worst Battlefield ever, but only until the next one comes out, at which point it becomes the best Battlefield ever, and everyone wonders how EA could've been so foolish as to change direction. Will the new Battlefield break the cycle? It's hard to imagine a lot of people going to bat for Battlefield 2042 given how acidic the initial response was, but it is funny to notice Delta Force, a free-to-play shooter that cribs quite a bit from Battlefield 2042, doing brilliantly on Steam today. EA will now open up its Battlefield Labs testing program to even more players as it heads into a summer reveal. So far, a 10 second clip in the Battlefield Labs announcement video is all we've seen of the game, at least officially—you can find supposed leaked footage with a quick search, and, yep, it looks like a Battlefield game. 2025 games: This year's upcoming releasesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together Sign in to access your portfolio
