Blacksmith Master is a game that’s all about, well, it’s in the title: becoming the master of your own blacksmith business, fulfilling orders for weapons and tools, and expanding your smithy to become the ultimate supplier of reshaped metal in your medieval town.
The game progresses in a pretty satisfying and straightforward way. As the owner of your blacksmith shop, you hire smiths to fulfill the orders of people in town, with the orders becoming progressively harder to fill as your business grows. A blacksmith, assuming their order involves smelting metal, will take an iron ingot, heat it, shape it, cool it, and then deliver the finished product to a merchant until the order is filled.
As you get later in the game, the process can change with different materials, or even multiple materials, required to finish the job. It also evolves with the addition of assistants who perform mundane tasks for your smiths so they can focus on crafting. Your business progressively grows until you have multiple handfuls of assistants, smiths, and eventually a shop where you can sell your products to customers directly for a higher price.
When I first saw Blacksmith Master, I thought the game would be a little more hands-on. Less hiring blacksmiths and more running a smithy of your own, hand-crafting each hatchet and sword as the orders come in. The game does allow you to play as a smith yourself and get directly involved in the process, but it is not the most immersive of mechanics, being more like little rhythm minigames rather than an involved process of crafting.
Nevertheless, I still had fun watching my business grow each day as my increasingly larger number of employees continued to earn me money and experience.
Beyond just making money, the game features three forms of progression: points earned by crafting items, research, and employee XP.
The first and second on that list are directly involved. By assigning blacksmiths to research rather than crafting, you unlock a currency that can be spent to increase the quality of the tools you craft at your smithy. This increases the price they sell for and earns you points each time a blacksmith crafts them. Those points are then spent on permanent upgrades, such as the ability to expand your shop or cut out the middleman in supply distribution and have raw ore delivered to and smelted at your blacksmith.
Blacksmiths and assistants also improve over time as they work, leveling up and allowing you to make them better at specific tasks to increase the efficiency of your business.
Blacksmith Master is in Early Access, so there are bound to be some unforeseen issues that still need to be worked on.
One such issue I noticed during my game had to do with the pathing of my blacksmiths. At one point during my playthrough, I had set up three different sets of forging stations: an anvil, a cooling station, and the forge itself, with the thought that my blacksmiths would each be able to work on a project of their own. However, one of these stations was in a different room from the other two. I quickly found that this created an issue where two of my blacksmiths would decide to use the same set of workstations in that disconnected room, instead of the two stations that were open in another room. This immediately slowed down production, as it created a line for two people to use the same stations, going against the whole point of creating them in the first place.
It seems that your blacksmiths are coded not to use the most convenient of interactable objects, but just a randomly selected one. Later, I tried to set up a separate chest (a storage device for crafted goods that allows your hired assistants to haul the stored items to merchants) next to my woodworking station so my blacksmith set to carpentry would not have to walk as far to store his goods. Getting him to use it was pretty hard. He would occasionally switch between using his more convenient chest and those set up for others, far away from his workstation. This is definitely a change I hope to see from the developer before the game launches.
Perhaps the biggest downside to Blacksmith Master currently is the endgame. I found that it not only takes too long to unlock interesting items such as swords and jewelry, which are at the dead last spot in the tech tree, but long before you get there, the game will start to get mundane. It does not take a lot of time or investment past the one-hour mark or so for your blacksmith business to become profitable and essentially automated. About halfway through the tech tree, I started to get bored as my business raked in thousands of dollars in profit each day across my massive employee pool, and while the promise of crafting more advanced weapons and jewelry at some point did interest me, I could not really see the point in doing so when the challenge and meaningful means of progression were essentially, at that point, gone.
All in all, Blacksmith Master is an interesting tycoon game with cool theming that is sure to keep you interested for at least a few hours in its current Early Access state. However, before the game launches, it could seriously use some tweaks to its endgame and economy, and perhaps add a little more personalization or story to the game as well. At some point, the act of running a purely profitable business becomes kind of mind-numbing with nothing introduced to shake things up.
Pros:
- A great theme for a tycoon game
- Great employee management mechanics
- Interesting store buildings and business management
- Multiple forms of progression keep you playing for a while
Cons:
- Some issues with the game’s AI
- The mid-game stretches on too long, and the late game lacks meaningful content
- A lack of mechanics, such as story elements or interactable smithing, to shake the monotony up or personally invest the player after a while
Try Hard Guides was provided a PC code for Blacksmith Master. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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