Frozen Flame - Early Access - Review

Dreamside Interactive is a studio that was founded back in 2017 with their HQ located in Nicrosia, which is the capital of Cyprus, they feature a staff of more than 35 members and their flagship game has just been released onto Steam Early Access. In their own words the studio promises to create games “full of adventure and filled with mysterious worlds to explore”, will Frozen Flame live up to this promise or will it fizzle out before it even has a chance to make us feel the heat.

Survival games are a massively popular genre at the moment to the point that since these type of games are a dime a dozen these days they really need to start being categorised into sub-genres as the difference between games like Rust and Valheim for example are immense to the point where their gameplay and overall experience is miles away from each other. Frozen Flame is a game that leans heavily towards the Valheim and V Rising side of the survival game experience, this is not a bad thing, I just feel necessary to point this out before you continue reading this review. Frozen Flame is certainly not the first hybrid RPG/Survival game off the block and a lot of the ones that have come before it are pretty damn good, so Frozen Flame has its work cut out for it.

For a game that heavily features RPG elements Frozen Flame doesn’t really offer much of a story, you are dropped into the game as a skeleton that I am assuming has died as a result of some major battle, you are then given a short combat tutorial and are tasked to destroy a couple of other skeletons and once this is done you meet some sort of mage at a portal who tells you to ‘rise again’ and walk through the portal in front of her, doing this enters you into the main world of the game itself. Hardly inspiring stuff, why am I dead? Why am I able to be resurrected? Do I get to avenge my death? Nothing is really explained, at least in the parts of the game that I played through. Once in the world proper you then meet a merchant called Hornhead who tasks you to do some various quests in order to earn some blueprints for crafting from him. The main gameplay loop basically sees you doing quests and killing some bosses in order to be rewarded by blueprints and currency, of course you will also need to cut down trees, smash rocks and scavenge food from bushes to gather resources, much like most other survival games.

Gathering resources will allow you to then craft more powerful weapons and some can even be used at campfire to create foods that will restore health and give you various buffs that make some bosses easier to defeat. There is also a building system, you can build different crafting desks and houses and so forth but this largely adds nothing to the game, sure crafting benches and the like need you to build a floor to place them on but beyond that I don’t really see much of a reason to continue spending resources building the walls and roof to make my base a complete building. Completing quests, gathering resources and dispatching enemies in order to become stronger is pretty much what the game amounts to, and as you go along doing these activities you gain experience which you can use at shrines in order to choose skills that will allow you to become more proficient in various weaponry, increase your carrying capacity and even heal yourself in battle, amongst other things. The gameplay loop is something we have all seen hundreds of times before and while it is not particularly innovative it has been proven to work and for the most part it does work as far as Frozen Frame is concerned apart from the building mechanics feeling like they are just tacked on.

Combat and gathering mechanics in survival games have to be spot on as this is what you spend most of your time doing, unfortunately in Frozen Flame the combat mechanics are a bit of a mixed bag, when it comes to melee 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, the dodge mechanic is also a problem seeing as the space bar is used for both jump and dodge which leads to the frustrating situation where most of the time I jumped when I wanted to dodge or dodged when I actually wanted to jump, I really don’t understand why a separate key press wasn’t implemented for each of these actions. Ranged combat is good though and it feels very satisfying to sit back and fling magic or arrows at enemies so when I could I stuck to ranged combat as this also meant the annoying dodging/jumping issue did not rear its ugly head. I also had no problems chopping away at trees and gathering other items in the world as the mechanics are pretty solid there.

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 terrible game by any stretch of the imagination and there is fun to be had here it is just that your amount of fun is going to be limited as I don’t really feel that the game has enough of a story to motivate people to push forward through its questline, which is really a shame as it has a really beautiful world to explore. The title is in early access so hopefully the developers keep adding to the game in order to make melee combat work more competently and also to add some more semblance of a story to the game as I feel that having an interesting narrative would stir my interest enough to want to keep pushing through the game, at its current price and stage of development though it is hard to recommend Frozen Flame as there are just so many better and cheaper options out there.

The Score

6.5

Review code provided by Ravenage

The Pros

+Beautiful world and animations

+Gathering resources and discovering new food recipes is fun

The Cons

-No narrative to encourage players to delve deeper into the game

-Melee combat is sloppy and frustrating

-No public servers at launch