Blacksmith Simulator PC Review

Have you ever wanted to work in a high heat environment and forge metal to your will? Blacksmith Simulator will put you in the shoes of a dwarven blacksmith and task you with making swords for your growing list of clients. So fire up the forge, make sure your quenching barrels are full and prepare to shape some steel… or bronze or whatever you can manage.

As someone who has long held an interest in blacksmithing (yes really, though more casting metals), I was quite keen to have a look at a simulator game that would allow me to try blacksmithing. What could be a standard caveat applies… namely that simulation games have to weigh the idea of recreating every element of an experience versus what is more likely to keep players engaged. Having said that… Blacksmith simulator will get you melting your own ore into ingots, ensuring those ingots are hot enough to work and then hammering them into shape before quenching your work and adding the final touches. Beyond that you will have to mine your ore and trade to obtain parts to make the non blade section of the swords you create.

The game starts with a tutorial… it’s fairly brief but covers the creation of a basic sword… gathering ore, smelting ore into an ingot, working the ingot to create the blade, quenching the blade and adding guard, handle and pommel and sharpening. After completing the tutorial order you would think you are all set to really make some progress… but, this is when you really start to notice just how many of the things you need to make swords require upgrades to make better swords, which is not in and of itself a problem… till you notice just how much each upgrade costs. This is the first big problem with Blacksmith Simulator, it feels like it was set up as a free to play game with paywall advancement ie you can make basic swords… but if you want to make the next level of swords you need to upgrade your forge to be able to smelt higher quality metals, you need to upgrade your grinding stone to give a better finish, you need to unlock new areas of the mine to access better ore etc. That might not be so bad if the cost to do each of those wasn’t so high from the outset.

Now… if you can overlook the need to upgrade just about everything to progress to making better swords you have the biggest issue of all. Soft locks! After I first completed the tutorial I got a bit muddled when using one of the stations (I believe it was the oil barrel) and somehow managed to “drop” the sword I was working on… at least I assume I dropped it… basically I pressed a button and suddenly I no longer had the sword… as a result I couldn’t even hand over a sub par quality product to my client because it seemed to have disappeared. Ok not the worst issue… I can make a new one. The bigger issue was when I tried smelting some gold and it turned out my furnace wasn’t capable of reaching the required temperatures (without upgrading)… ok fine… except I was unable to remove the ore from the furnace which meant essentially I couldn’t use it to create ingots of metals it was capable of working with which in turn meant I couldn’t make any more swords and therefore couldn’t make any more money to actually upgrade the furnace.

Final Thoughts?

I like the concept. I also don’t even really mind the high cost to upgrade everything, mostly because once you realise the false sense of time pressure of having to accept the next client as soon as they arrive is not real (clients come and go… the important thing is not to accept a new client if you aren’t ready to deal with their request… that’s when the real clock starts ticking). You can develop a workflow of gathering ore while you wait for an ingot to form or for the next client and start getting things ready for the next order. But when you’ve made so much progress to then have the game soft lock you and essentially throw all that (very) hard won progress away… it just becomes unplayable. Either wait until a patch that fixes these or possibly even have a look at the other blacksmith simulator that is available (yes there is a different blacksmith simulator in existence :D ).