Blades of Fire

Introduction

Blades of Fire has an unusual path to this review. MercurySteam — the studio behind Metroid Dread and the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow series — originally released it on 22 May 2025 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC exclusively through the Epic Games Store. It reached Steam a full year later, on 14 May 2026, arriving alongside "Version 2.0," a genuine content update — New Game Plus, Photo Mode, a new Titanium difficulty tier, additional weapon parts and skins, DLSS 4 support, and a Boss Revival mode — that launched simultaneously across every platform, not just as a Steam-exclusive sweetener. One reviewer captured the mood of that arrival bluntly: "Now that the game has been freed from its Epic store prison cell, actual human beings can finally check it out!" This review reads the game's Steam-era reception in full, both because that's the audience newly encountering it and because the version now on offer includes real, substantial new content beyond the base 2025 release.

Forging as the whole point

The game's central conceit is that your weapons aren't static tools — they dull with use, need repair, and eventually wear out entirely, tying maintenance directly into both combat pacing and long-term progression. Reviewers consistently single this system out as the game's strongest idea, even when they have other complaints. One detailed review broke the game into "3 major loops that lead into each other: Exploration, combat and Smithing," describing the smithing loop with clear affection, down to a friend's reaction to watching a weapon get "max starred." Another reviewer framed the studio's choice to build its own engine, rather than license Unreal Engine 5 like so much of the current market, as itself a meaningful selling point: "it doesn't feel like another UE5 cookie-cutter project. The game runs on its own engine, and honestly, that alone already gave it personality for me." That sentiment — a distinctive, slightly rough-edged game with real personality, compared favourably by more than one reviewer to a "PS3/360-era game" in the best sense — is the throughline connecting most of this sample's positive reviews.

Where the combat splits opinion

Combat is where this review's sample disagrees most sharply, and the disagreement is specific rather than vague. The core complaint: taking a hit cancels whatever attack is currently in progress, even deep into a swing's animation, which lands hardest on heavier, slower weapons that commit to long windups. "If you get hit at almost any point during your swing, your attack is cancelled—even when you're already deep into the animation," reads one detailed negative review, arguing this undermines the tactical patience heavier weapons are supposed to reward. A separate, equally detailed reviewer lists a cluster of related systems — weapon dulling, separate from durability, separate from number of repairs remaining, with permanent weapon loss eventually forcing new material farming — as more numerous than they are fun, arguing the game "forces you to use them constantly" rather than letting players opt into as much complexity as they want. Weapon balance draws a related complaint: several reviewers describe piercing weapons as consistently strong while slashing weapons are "nigh useless" regardless of build, an imbalance that undercuts the smithing system's promise of build variety.

None of this is universal. Plenty of reviewers describe the same systems as the source of the game's appeal rather than its friction — one specifically praised using the mouse wheel to mix downward and upward strikes as "very satisfying," and several describe combat as demanding real thought without crossing into unfair. The honest read of this sample is that Blades of Fire's combat asks for a specific kind of patience, and reviewers who brought that patience in tend to love it, while reviewers expecting faster, more forgiving action-game combat tend to bounce off the same systems hard.

The section almost everyone agrees on

If there's one place this review's sample converges regardless of overall verdict, it's a specific mid-game escort sequence in the area Steam's own achievement list names "Crimson Abyss" — commonly referred to by reviewers as the Crimson Fort. The task: protect a vulnerable child companion through an area with a high, repeating enemy spawn rate; get hit, and the child can be knocked away or captured, forcing a restart of the sequence. "It's a long, brutally annoying escort quest to carry a skeleton child to a destination... There is what seems like an unlimited stream of enemies," wrote one reviewer who described loving the game up to that point. Another, more colourfully: "the first 'dungeon' area of the game also be yoshi island escort quest where you have to protect a tiny skeleton child who will fall off your back if you get hit once or twice." This isn't one outlier's complaint — it recurs across reviewers with wildly different overall opinions of the game, several of whom specifically say it's the single section responsible for turning their recommendation negative. As of the patch notes available at review time, this design hasn't been revised — the most recent hotfix addressed save-compatibility, a Forge-related crash with multiple mods loaded, PS5 controller compatibility on Steam, and clearer wording for graphics options, but nothing targeting this specific sequence.

Performance, a year on

Optimisation complaints appear throughout the negative sample and don't read as fully resolved even after Version 2.0's DLSS 4 addition. One reviewer's review, updated roughly two weeks after the Steam launch, noted plainly that "the game has not received a single performance update" in that window, despite marketing efforts continuing in the meantime. Other reviewers report smooth performance on comparable hardware, which — as with several other games this library has covered — suggests inconsistent optimisation across configurations rather than a uniformly broken build. Prospective buyers with borderline hardware should check current benchmarks specific to their setup rather than assume DLSS 4 alone has settled the question.

Final Verdict

Blades of Fire is a genuinely distinctive action-adventure that earned real affection during its original 2025 release and, on the evidence of its Steam-era reviews, mostly keeps that affection a year later — helped by a Version 2.0 update that adds real content rather than treating the Steam launch as a bare port. Its central forging system and its refusal to run on an off-the-shelf engine give it a personality this review's sample repeatedly credits directly. Its combat system asks something specific and divisive of players, its weapon balance has real, named gaps, and one mid-game escort section draws a rare degree of cross-review agreement as the point where patience runs out. None of that erases what the game does well; it does mean this is a recommendation with real, specific caveats attached rather than a clean one. Go in knowing what the Crimson Fort holds, and Blades of Fire has a real chance of becoming the "underrated" game several of its own reviewers already believe it is.