Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator Switch Review
I love a game that has a good crafting system. When I was recovering from my brain injury my wife would move my character in Skyrim from town to town to help me unlock fast travel, so I could spend my time slowly but surely providing the Nords with some high-quality steel. When I made my full recovery about 28 months later, I finally ventured out of the safety of the walls of Whiterun, putting my product to use. It should be no surprise that I would snap up Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator for Switch, especially at its price point. What’s it like? make sure you have some coal, grab a hunk of copper, and fire up the forge as we review Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator for Nintendo Switch.
Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator sees you put on the leather apron of a blacksmith to provide the town’s citizens (including a shocking number of nuns) with the finest weapons of warfare. You purchase materials from an item board, refine them into handles and hafts, or forge blades, and then assemble them all for the customer. Each customer has a request that presents itself on another wooden board next to a window. When you craft the correct item, you drop it at the window and wait for the next order to come through.
It all sounds like an interesting concept on paper, except it’s not executed very well. For starters, aside from a few pages of text when you load in, there’s no direction or indication of what you need to do outside of making orders. I failed my first few times which boiled down to user error, but when I finally got the hang of things, I realised you would only serve one or two customers each day… usually at the same time, leaving you to either go to bed to bring on the next day, or using your spare time (and there’s a lot of it) to prep more daggers for the next few customers. Construction of items consists of either a quick time event or a button mashing quick time event that affects the quality, which you have no way of indicating on the item. The QTE’s aren’t challenging, simply difficult due to the design, with some button prompts giving you no time to react, making for a frustrating experience. I think the game would have been much more enjoyable if it was focused on serving as many people as you can before your day is through, alas, the developer seems to be opting for it to be a Blacksmith Survival game, only without the elements of survival, simply failing if you miss a customer due to their lack of patience. There are two skill trees, one permanent, and one temporary, that unlock new weapons and designs, but aside from that, I didn’t really feel like there was anything to work toward.
Graphically, Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator has a low poly feel somewhat akin to For The King, but it lacks the style and charm that made For The King so endearing. The UI is a series of boards that you can sometimes select, that feature bright bold text that fails to build any immersion in the game. It’s not that the graphics are bad when compared to the art direction Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator was going for, it’s that it has no personality, which is a shame because there’s a lot of potential to be had.
The overwhelming amount of bugs makes me wonder if Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator is set during a plague, as some options aren’t selectable, sometimes crafting produces extra parts, and other times pressing A (which is pressed a lot) while making items randomly purchases items from the shop, leaving you with an excess of materials. Grabbing items sometimes doesn’t work, and the game’s reliance on you stacking multiple items to be able to craft is frustrating at best. More often than not, Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator will leave you pointlessly waiting, wondering if another customer will arrive so you don’t lose the game by trying to sleep the day off.
I wanted to love Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator, but getting to an acceptable amount of playtime to write this review was a chore due to the repetitive gameplay and inundation of bugs. Some players may find fun for a few hours with the game, but with the recent spate of great games released on the Switch, your money is probably best spent elsewhere. I genuinely dislike writing reviews like this, especially when the Gaming industry is having trouble, but Fantasy Blacksmith Shop Simulator feels like a hurried port of an already average game, aimed at some quick sales. Much like the pile of daggers on my workshop floor waiting for customers to purchase them, there’s a distinct lack of polish, it’s dull, and probably best left out of people’s hands.
