Frozen Flame – Review
Since survival games are currently so popular, it’s time for them to be broken down into sub-genres so that players can more easily distinguish titles like Rust and Valheim, which offer vastly different experiences despite sharing a common theme. Before continuing with this review, I feel obligated to let you know that Frozen Flame is a survival game that leans heavily towards the Valheim and V Rising side of the experience. Frozen Flame faces stiff competition, as it is hardly the first hybrid RPG/survival game to appear on the market. Many of its predecessors are, in fact, quite good.
It’s surprising that for a game with so many role-playing elements, Frozen Flame doesn’t have much of a story: you start out as a skeleton who, I assume, has died in a major battle; after a brief combat tutorial, you’re tasked with killing a couple of other skeletons; and, finally, you meet a mage at a portal who tells you to “rise again” and walk through the portal in front of her; doing This isn’t exactly life-changing literature, I wonder why I’m already dead. Is there some reason that I can be brought back to life? How about I get my revenge before I die? At least in the parts of the game I’ve completed, nothing is explained. After entering the proper world, you’ll meet a merchant named Hornhead who gives you a variety of quests to complete in exchange for crafting blueprints. You’ll need to chop down trees, smash rocks, and scavenge food from bushes to gather resources, but the main gameplay loop consists primarily of completing quests and killing bosses in exchange for blueprints and currency.
By collecting materials, you can forge better weapons, and with the help of the campfire, you can cook up meals that restore health and grant you buffs that make it easier to take down certain bosses. There’s also a building system wherein you can construct various crafting desks, houses, and the like, but I don’t see how this would significantly improve the gameplay experience. Sure, you’ll need to construct a floor to put your crafting desk on, but I don’t see much of a reason to continue spending resources on constructing the walls and roof to make my base a complete structure. Basically, the game boils down to completing quests, collecting resources, and killing enemies in order to level up and become stronger. As you progress through the game, you’ll gain experience that you can spend at shrines to learn skills that will improve your combat effectiveness, increase your carrying capacity, and even heal you during battle. While Frozen Frame’s gameplay loop isn’t particularly innovative, it has been shown to work, and for the most part it does, with the exception of the building mechanics, which feel like an afterthought.
Frozen Flame’s combat mechanics are a bit of a mixed bag, especially when it comes to melee where it is very hard to target enemies and at times I found myself floundering around swinging wildly into thin air, especially when attacked by groups of enemies, and the dodge mechanic is also a problem seeing as the space bar is used for both jump and dodge, which makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. However, I found that engaging in ranged combat was more enjoyable, as it was satisfying to sit back and fling magic or arrows at enemies, and the vexing dodging/jumping problem did not arise. Cutting down trees and collecting resources from the world presented no problems for me.
All of the problems aside, Frozen Flame is an absolutely gorgeous game from its landscape through to its characters and their animations, it has an aesthetic that puts The Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild and Phoenix Immortal Rising in a blender and mixes them up surprisingly successfully. The world is a joy to explore mostly because of its visuals rather than the game enthralling me enough to actually care about progressing forward.
Frozen Flame isn’t a bad game, and it is possible to have fun with it; however, I don’t think the game has enough of a story to keep players engaged with its questline, which is a shame because it features a gorgeous world. There are better and cheaper options out there, so it’s hard to recommend Frozen Flame at this time; however, the title is in early access, so hopefully the developers keep adding to the game to make melee combat work more competently and to add some more semblance of a story to the game.
