Bladesong is a sword-making sim that needs a little more edge | Hands-on preview
Bladesong is one of those games that makes me wish I was artistic. I mean I can string a sentence together as well as the next barely-functioning young-fella-me-lad, but I can’t draw a convincing stick man without some guidance, and the premise behind Bladesong is to create artefacts of death that won’t just succeed in putting holes in your fellow human beings, but that will look really, really pretty while doing it. Or totally weird and hideous, if you like. I mean, you do you.
In Bladesong – currently due to land on Steam in 2025 – you are a blacksmith in a medieval fantasy town, and your job is to craft and sculpt swords for a variety of customers with increasingly lofty demands. The first one you make can be any old pig-sticker, but soon you’ll be required to follow strict design instructions taking into account the sharpness, point, weight, and balance, necessitating the use of different cross-guards, hilts, and pommels, as well as the shape of the blade itself.
This will involve trips to various merchants to buy these items before returning to the forge and crafting the weapon. Time moves on as you work, as you’ll be given timeframes within which to work, as well as a list of special instructions. As a concept it’s certainly unique. We’re all used to crafting swords at a basic level in games, but not creating masterpieces such as these.
The discerning digital artist among you will be able to create famous swords from movies or games to, to a certain extent. You might not be able to fully recreate the Soul Reaver or Connor MacLeod’s samurai sword from Highlander, but you’ll be able to get close.
I will say though, I’d have preferred something that felt and looked a little more like real Smithing. Perhaps a big sweaty avatar with ember-pocked skin, or a lass in leathers with a soot-smeared brow – whatever. It would have been nice to feel the tactile feedback of hammering a sword into the desired shape, tempering it in water, and engraving runes into the blade. Instead what you get is a very clinical digital design suite that really fails to capture the intended magic.
It’s even weirder when juxtaposed with the “story”, which is incredibly po-faced, played entirely straight when a bit of humour or a few self-deprecating gags wouldn’t go amiss. Instead, the moments outside of the “forge” depict a dark, dreary dark fantasy world where it always seems to be raining and everyone is covered in mud, before you return to the workshop and fire up the medieval CAD software.
Bladesong is a niche title, for sure, and one that will appeal to a certain type of creative. There’s not even a way to take your creations into an arena and see them in action, which would add a real extra level to it all. Instead you finish a job, get a few lines of text, and then start the next one. It’s all a bit lacking in life or depth right now.
But then, this is early days yet, and there’s plenty of time for the devs to add more to it in terms of features and mechanics before the release in 2025. It’s certainly not a bad experience and will provide something you can’t get elsewhere, but for me it needs a little more confidence in itself and is crying out for some good old razzle-dazzle.
Bladesong is coming to PC via Steam.
