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Blades of Fire Has Like Two Cool Ideas
I think it might be doomed
Fifteen years ago, MercurySteam was one of my favorite game developers, thanks mostly to their release of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. It reinvented the long-running Konami action series as a God of War-like third person action game, and also had a beautiful graphics engine with some of the best visuals I think the Xbox 360/PS3 era ever produced.
The team has kept plugging away on new games since then, but none of them quite hit with me as much as that first big Castlevania. It got a sequel and a spin-off that were super weird, before the team then got sucked into the Nintendo content machine. They worked on a couple of Metroid titles, but again, neither of those connected with me personally.
After a decade of doing that, they’re finally back with another medieval action game about a big guy swinging weapons at things with this week’s Blades of Fire. At first I was excited about this, as their proprietary graphics tech is still cooking along under the hood. Unfortunately, after years of lavish budgets and major collaborations with big names in Japanese IP, this game seems like it was made for about eight bucks.
I know that visuals aren’t everything in the world of video games, but a good first impression can do a lot to draw players in. Blades of Fire has…
