Today, we are taking a look at the PC port for Blades of Fire, a third-person hack-and-slash where players fulfill their dreams of becoming an epic blacksmith, forging unique weapons through an in-depth crafting system.
MercurySteam’s latest title puts players in the shoes of Aran de Lira, a blacksmith who receives a sacred hammer that allows him to forge weapons immune to queen Nerea’s petrification curse. While accompanied by the young scholar Adso, Aran now seeks to ends the queen’s tyrannical rule.
Blades of Fire has found a somewhat mixed reception amongst critics, but was warmly received by audiences, receiving high praise and impressive scores when it comes to user reviews. We are still curious about one thing, though: How good is that PC port?
Blades of Fire‘s PC port comes with most of the settings you would expect of a modern release, allowing users to choose between three different sampling methods: NVIDIA’s DLSS, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 3, and Intel’s XeSS Super Resolution. DLSS was the method chosen for this review, but the difference between the three seems to be negligible, at least on an NVIDIA/Intel combo.
Running on an RTX 3080 at 1080p, the game averages at around 80-100 FPS on max settings and nearly doubles those values when frame generation is enabled, ranging between 150-180 when out in the open world. These higher values mean you are pretty much guaranteed a stable 60 at 2K, and if you have a beefier graphics card then 4K won’t be an issue either.
It’s worth mentioning that, as far as it’s noticeable, Frame Generation doesn’t bring any delays into the game, so there’s no need to worry about paying for performance with your ability to parry correctly. The entire experience is smooth performance-wise, and as long as your PC meets the requirements there really isn’t anything you can do wrong.
Blades of Fire has a reasonable amount of graphical settings, featuring the usual suspects like VSync, HDR, and frame rate caps up to 240 FPS. At the bottom of the graphics menu, we can find a small list of graphical presets, which can be customized between three options: performance, balanced, and quality.
Certain features, like motion blur and depth of field, can’t be fully turned off, instead only having three quality options for the player to choose between. This would normally drive me insane, as I am a certified depth of field and motion blur hater, but the effects are applied in moderation, with motion blur especially being hard to notice, so it’s not that big of a deal in this case.
One small annoyance is that the game doesn’t have an in-game language switch, instead forcing users to change the language of their Epic Launcher for the game to match it, completely ignoring command line arguments on launch and your system locale. It’s not a massive issue overall, but it is a very random choice that might take users a second to figure out.
As far as the actual game goes, Blades of Fire is filled with little quality-of-life features, like the fact that it doesn’t shove tutorial prompts in the player’s face mid-combat, instead displaying a small timer at the top left of the screen, which allows you to either read the tip by pressing select or let it fade away by ignoring it.
This is a feature that should be in more games, as it’s common for modern titles to not let players immerse themselves in their first few combat encounters, immediately bombarding the screen with tip after tip, to the point where it’s genuinely disruptive and creates not only an annoying sense of hand-holding but also a terrible first impression of gameplay.
Another useful feature is that if you let the timer go but still want to read the tip afterwards, you can pause the game and find all tutorials neatly categorized inside of a menu tab, with the newer ones getting a notification marker to make them easier to find.
As is the case with most hack-and-slash and character action games, Blades of Fire is best played on a controller, but surprisingly enough, the developers have managed to translate the directional combat system reasonably well to mouse and keyboard.
The left and right attacks are mapped to the left and right mouse buttons, while the head and body shots are mapped to scrolling the mouse wheel up and down, which is a decent solution, but unfortunately makes strong attacks inconsistent, since those are now based on either how far or how fast you scroll the wheel.
The default control scheme is good, even featuring a better weapon switch mechanic than the one we have on controller, but there is no remapping whatsoever, so if you don’t like the position of a button, that’s entirely too bad. The game does have multiple associations for certain actions, like dodging on both CTRL and ALT, but those are not good replacements for a full remapping system.
Overall, Blades of Fire has a pretty good PC port, featuring a decent amount of modern features that put modern hardware to use, as well as a surprising amount of extras, like built-in 4K and HDR support. There are definitely some oversights here and there, like the lack of a remapping system for mouse and keyboard controls, but it is still an easy recommendation to make.
MercurySteam has always been consistent about their PC releases, and despite being a small studio, their technical work consistently eclipses titles put out by larger companies. Their releases have been somewhat future-proof since Clive Barker’s Jericho in 2007, and their in-house engine is keeping up with modern times effortlessly.
If you are on the fence about grabbing Blades of Fire on PC, go ahead and do it. You’ll encounter smooth performance and great visuals, as well as a fantastically fun game, although you should definitely play with a controller.
Blades of Fire is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Microsoft Windows (through the Epic Games Store). Also consider reading our full review for the game by clicking here.
