Blades of Fire review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

I once saw someone describe Blades of Fire as the most forgettable game of 2025, and that description has stuck with me ever since. After all, even though the game came out on PS5 and Xbox as well, last year it was stuck behind Epic Games exclusivity, which meant that, for a good of PC gamers, the game basically didn’t exist. Now that it’s finally been released on Steam and GOG, is it actually a hidden gem that will become beloved by a wider audience?

Well, no. Not to the hidden gem part, at least. Maybe it will become beloved by more people now that more people can actually play it, I suppose. I have a hard time imagining it, though.

For starters, it doesn’t do anything particularly well or interesting. That’s not to say it’s bad, to be sure, but that’s another part of why it’s so forgettable: it’s fine at everything without being great at anything. The world, the characters, the combat, the weapons – everything here is done well enough to be acceptable, but not so well that you’ll find anything about the game all that compelling.

Let’s take the game’s combat as an example. It’s pretty much your standards Souls-like, with a strong focus on parrying and timing. The innovation here, for lack of a better descriptor, is that you get to forge your weapons and adapt them to your playstyle – which sounds great in theory, but in practice it doesn’t really mean anything since it’s all the heavy/light attacks and dodging that you’d expect from a game like that.

The world, too, is awfully lacking in distinctiveness. Blades of Fire is a dark fantasy game with all the usual heavily armoured nights and monsters in a vaguely medieval setting. It looks exactly how you’d expect it to look – which is to say that the visuals and environments are perfectly pretty and adequate, but there’s nothing here that will make the world stick with you or make you feel all that invested in exploring. Unfortunately, the game relies on you being so enamoured with its world that you’ll want to investigate every nook and cranny to discover its secrets, but it’s missing anything that will make you actually want to do that.

Again, by no stretch of the imagination could Blades of Fire be described as a bad game. It’s well-made enough that if you want a fantasy Souls-like, it delivers exactly that, and you probably won’t be disappointed. But there’s also a very good chance that even you play it for hours and hours, it’ll slip right out of your memory – because, if nothing else, this is a very forgettable game.

505 Games provided us with a Blades of Fire PC code for review purposes.