Where do I begin with Frozen Flame? Should I talk about how the game is an action-adventure game with floating islands, crafting, and a story-driven storyline? Maybe I could talk about how its visuals are reminiscent of Fortnite. I guess; I should start at the beginning. Frozen Flame; is a fantastic game, and I love it! Adventure games, for me, are my bread and butter. The feeling you get from being whisked away to a magical world; where new adventures await, villains, to stop, and worlds to save! What is not to love?
When; you first load up Frozen Flame, you must pick your difficulty level. The difficulty levels range from Easy, Normal, and Hard mode. Then it throws you directly into combat with a woman telling you to move forward. You pick up your sword, slay some skeletons, and jump through a Portal; that she is holding open for you. Now it is time to create your character.
The character creator is a bit basic, but for an adventure game, it gets a pass. You; get to choose your skin color, eye color, facial hair, hair, and even a tattoo! Then you’re thrown almost butt naked into the world, where a helpful traveler guides you in completing tasks, the standard adventure game tutorial. This traveler will teach you the basics and then later in the game. He will teach you the more advanced features of crafting; home building, and he will educate you in finding resources. So, you will be ready for what the world throws at you.
In Frozen Flame, you are a pilgrim or in adventure game speak. You’re the hero destined to defeat the evil that plagues these lands. And on your journey, you will encounter a variety of NPCs who will help you in your mission; however, if you are expecting to run into item shops to buy weapons and gear. Prepare to be disappointed because Frozen Flame embraces crafting wholeheartedly. If; you want equipment, or if you need to repair your equipment.
Then you; must find the resource. That could involve slaying a monster and crafting several higher-tier workstations to upgrade the base resource; that you ascertained by farming sizable amounts. That is not to say that NPCs don’t sell you things. They do, on occasion. But, they are typically limited to NPC-exclusive armor or craftable blueprints.
That is not even the worst part of Frozen Flame, the higher-tier workstations; that you build, such as The Crafting Bench, The Stone Bench, The Stove, and even your house that you constructed to store all of these items. All of these items have an internal degradation meter.
That if you do not repair or maintain these items. They will break apart, and you will need to go through the time-consuming process of acquiring the materials; all over again. It ends up being a fairly; large, time-killing portion of Frozen Flame, as you need these same workstations to upgrade your armor, repair your weapons and equipment, and so on.
After an hour, my equipment began to break down. So I had to travel back to where I had my workstations set up, farm more rocks, logs, and sticks, and repair my workstations, and then right after, I had to go farm more bones, cloth, and leather to fix all my gear. The worst part of this process is that you can gather these resources while; you are adventuring. But their weight in your inventory will slow you down and even prevent you from fast traveling, which is essential to navigating the numerous worlds that exist within Frozen Flame. And even if you did carry around the resources to repair your equipment. The workstations are; essential in the repair and upgrade process. You cannot simply make new workstations because of the tremendous resource cost. And it is this that will leave you in a vicious cycle of exploring the world for forty minutes and then farming and fixing your equipment for another forty minutes.
Now, where Frozen Flame shines is the story, the combat, and the worlds you can explore; when it comes to the combat in Frozen Flame. I have to say as a negative point. It can become a bit repetitive. The developers included several weapon types in the game, but they all follow the same fundamental principle. If; you prefer magic (staff) or a Bow & Arrow, you’ll play at a distance and dodge around to avoid enemies. If; you are like me and prefer melee weapons, it is attack, block, dodge, and most of the enemy AI isn’t that intelligent. The difficulty, I believe, only changes their health and damage values.
That isn’t to say that the combat in Frozen Flame is trash. In this case, simplified for enjoyment would be more accurate. It allows more accessibility in their gameplay, and I am all for that.
The story in Frozen Flame; is guided for the most part. You go to the area, talk to the character and follow the quest progression. The first area has you defeating four boss enemies to acquire their masks. That will; then open a gateway to a hub-world filled with portals to other realms, AND A DRAGON!
The Dragon and the woman who rescued you at the start of the game; explain that you are a pilgrim and you are here to defeat the Faceless, Faceless being Frozen Flame’s big bad.
Its story-telling feels open-ended and loose, much like how Legend of Zelda’s Breath of the Wild was both in its exploration and the story-telling. Frozen Flame gives you multitudes of worlds to explore and traverse as you work towards gearing your character up and preparing for your inevitable showdown with Faceless. The story itself; is quite linear, and to my knowledge, there are no alternative endings; it follows a set path. It is just how you get there that is the main focus of both its story and its gameplay.
Now, one thing I should mention about the gameplay is that; during all of the exploration aspects of the game. After you have progressed through enough of the story, you can transform into a bird to make traversing areas easier. I should have mentioned this earlier. The Frozen Flame takes place high in the sky on floating islands. Not only are you fighting enemies on land. But you are taking to the skies flying in the air and riding the wind to higher heights! All of this; is happening in a vast, large, and expansive open world.
There is only one thing left that I should mention about Frozen Flame. It has an online mode where you can play with friends. If; you are familiar with the Borderlands franchise.
Then you are aware that you and three; of your friends can join your game and play the campaign together. So, all that open-world exploration, flying through the air, and adventuring! You can bring a party with you! The developer Dreamside Interactive is even working on launching dedicated servers. So you can play with up to fifty of your friends or other players! Now, I am not sure how that will work out for them, considering the closest game with a similar structure is Borderlands, and players have already proven how unstable having a large number of players can be.
However, I remain optimistic! If you think you’d be interested in playing Frozen Flame, you can find it; over on the Steam store! If Frozen Flame isn’t what you were expecting, that is fine. I’m not twisting your arm to buy it; I’m just telling you what I think from my experiences.
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!