ROUGH GEM

BLADES OF FIRE doesn’t quite manage to bring the heat

- Kerry Brunskill

Blades of Fire doesn’t do itself any favors pairing Aran, its rugged action hero with godlike powers, a tragic past, and a broken heart, up with a much younger sidekick he insists on calling ‘boy’ and ‘kid’ far too often—but cracking through the Kratos of it all reveals a game that’s trying to leave a more exploration-heavy mark on the cinematic action genre. These are places to be savored, not slaughtered.

The game truly believes that taking the time to explore its rustic fantasy locales, poking around sandy ruins and enormous crumbling castles instead of rushing from one waypoint to the next, is the heart of the experience. So much so that the game defaults to the hardest difficulty setting, the only one that doesn’t allow me to bring up a convenient ‘go here next’ map marker whenever I’m feeling a bit lost. And for a while, it’s magical.

There's always some out-of-reach place I can’t help but wonder how to get to close by, and every small deviation off the beaten path seems to hold some shortcut or stat boost. Everywhere I go looks gorgeous, whether covered in snow or sand, or blood, and I did enjoy entering new areas just to see what gorgeous vista I was going to be treated to next.

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