From the creator of Tavern Master, Blacksmith Master is an indie title by a solo developer that lets you manage your own smithy, earn money, expand your facility, and upgrade your skills. You can handle every stage from mining the ore to getting it into the customers’ hands.
As this is an Early Access title, I’ll just be sharing my initial impressions rather than a full review.
Humble Beginnings
You start Blacksmith Master with nothing but a single blacksmith, a small smithy, and a dream of more. Luckily, business is waiting for you right from the start, with merchants waiting outside with requests for items to forge. Choosing items is enough to have your blacksmith automatically start work, though I should note there is a mode to directly take control of a blacksmith with very simplistic timing-based minigames for item creation. But I found I was soon far too busy with management to spend time on that.
At first, I was just hiring a few blacksmiths and buying basic equipment. The most complex task was looking at how good the blacksmiths were at processing materials and judging their positive and negative traits. Should I start with the one with faster ingot heating, but slower wood processing? Or the one that gets more experience but is slower with metal? It was simple decisions like that. But as you’d expect from a management game, it starts simple and small-scale, then slowly adds new features to deal with as you get further into the game.
Soon enough I was unlocking upgrades and options on a ‘mastery tree’, getting more complex offers from merchants with non-monetary benefits and timed challenges, assigning staff to specific types of tasks based on their skills, and dealing with replenishing resources. Money was always a concern, but so was making sure I had the right facilities for the number of workers and enough work for them to do. Until I figured out the right balance, I occasionally had workers waiting to get to a furnace, especially when the merchant requests were particularly skewed toward metal items that day. It absolutely captured the part of me that loves to optimize things a little too much.
Scaling Up
As time went on, I unlocked more and more features. The ability to improve blueprints to earn more from items and unlock new ones, to hire different types of workers who could act as blacksmith’s assistants, miners who could go gather ore, and far more.
Perhaps the most notable one was the shop. While merchant carts hanging around outside your forge remain a constant, later you can directly sell to customers which adds a whole new dimension of creating a shop, furnishing it, and various factors to attract customers. It also adds more on the manufacturing side, with a new need to balance creating items for the merchants and those for the store.
This was also around the time that I realized I could actually already expand. I was half-expecting it would be an unlock, as most other aspects of the game were. So I moved over to build mode, started building some new walls, and moved all the equipment over to the back while creating a shop at the front. The build mode has a good number of options and one thing I particularly liked was that changing the designs of walls and floors doesn’t actually cost anything, leaving me free to play around with it.
What was an unlock was further floors, but soon enough my shop had expanded upward so I didn’t have to squeeze so many shelves and weapon racks in a small space. ‘Nook Crafting’ had come a long way from its beginnings in a tiny little workshop and Blacksmith Master made it feel like it was progressing the entire time, with almost every in-game day leading to some new equipment, an additional hire, or some kind of unlock.
Misforged Moments
While I certainly enjoyed my time with Blacksmith Master, there are a few issues to mention, keeping in mind this is both Early Access and I write this just before its release.
I did feel there was sometimes a lack of clarity. While I figured things out easily enough in the end, there were certainly a few moments where a tutorial or even just a hint that something could be done would be useful. To give a small example, I didn’t see it mention how to view anything above the ground floor after unlocking it. Luckily it was the first thing I tried, ‘Page Up’. Playing so many hours of The Sims when I was younger finally came in useful I guess.
There were also just little annoyances, like what seemed to be ‘lazy assistants’, but was presumably just a lack of logic around it. One of the tasks you can set assistants is to carry items from chests to the merchant’s carts. Each one can carry different amounts based on their skills. Unfortunately, it seemed to often be the case that the one who could carry a lot went for the chest with almost nothing in it, while the one who couldn’t carry much went for the chest with a lot of objects in them. That or they both went for chests with almost nothing in them. This left items lingering in the chests for a long time, until I managed to hire more assistants and upgrade the ones I had to mitigate the issue.
Looks and Sounds
While Blacksmith Master has rather simplistic graphics, everything ties together nicely and fits the theme of a medieval smithy. There were no issues with performance either.
The music is fitting too. I can’t say it particularly stands out, but it’s exactly what I would have imagined to fit the idea of a relaxing management game set in medieval times.
Final Thoughts
Blacksmith Master is certainly impressive for a solo developer title. How the systems connect together and the progression seems well thought out, which helps lead to an experience that was hard to put down. It feels like there’s always something new to unlock or a way to progress, and the different demands do add a need to keep an eye on events and adjust as needed, which made me feel more involved than some management games.
BLACKSMITH MASTER IS WORTH A TRY
If you are looking for another game with simulation elements, you might want to check out Suzukuri Dungeon: Karin in the Mountain.
Many thanks go to Hooded Horse for a PC review code for Blacksmith Master.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
