While the Iron’s Hot Review: Forging Your Blacksmith Dreams

In the relaxing crafting adventure While the Iron’s Hot, you’ll be stepping into the heavy boots of an up-and-coming blacksmith looking to make his mark in the fantasy land of Ellian. This charming game comes from the combined efforts of publisher Humble Bundle and developer Bontemps Studios, who sought to deliver a combat-free experience focused solely around mastering the age-old art of blacksmithing.

After a fateful shipwreck, you’ll find yourself in possession of an abandoned smithy aching to ring with the sound of hammer on anvil once more. Through smelting, sharpening, and assembling, you’ll take raw materials and transform them into tools, weapons, and other useful items for the locals. It’s an intricate process, but the simple yet engaging minigames make it approachable for apprentice and master alike.

Spend your days filling orders, taking on quests, and breathing life back into the forgotten smithing town, all while unraveling the mysteries of past blacksmiths. With a charming cast of characters and vibrant fantasy setting, While the Iron’s Hot aims to faithfully capture the sights, sounds, and satisfaction of being a blacksmith. So put on that heavy apron, fire up the forge, and see if you have the steel to become a master tradesman.

Mastering the Blacksmithing Craft

While the Iron’s Hot drops you into a robust crafting system centered around forging metal and other materials at your trusty smithy. The gameplay loop finds you gathering resources from the surrounding fantasy landscape, smelting them down and shaping them via engaging minigames, and then turning those crafted pieces into useful items to fulfill town orders and quests. The complexity and challenge of recipes slowly ramps up as you progress, but starting out is simple enough to quickly get in a zen-like flow.

When you first inherit the abandoned smithy, your equipment and knowledge will be limited, only able to craft more basic items like pickaxes and shovels. Yet through expanding the town itself with new buildings and upgrades purchased with your earnings, you’ll unlock additional recipes and functionality. This gives a strong sense of progression as you bring prosperity back to your new home.

Central to the experience are the smithing mini-games that turn raw materials into weapons, tools, and accessories. Operating the bellows for the furnace, timing your hammer strikes at the anvil, sharpening blades at the grindstone, and precisely placing shaped pieces into product templates keeps the act of creation involved without growing repetitive or dull. As in real blacksmithing itself, there’s an art to working the metals that translates remarkably well.

While much time is spent at the smithy filling job board orders from various townsfolk in need, you’ll want to regularly embark on quests that further the lighthearted story and unlock additional crafting options. These activities run the gamut from fetch quests to navigating maze-like mines and ancient towers, with some environmental puzzles sprinkled in to exercise more critical thinking skills. It’s a nice change of pace from the rhythms of smithing, giving breathing room before returning to the forge.

Perhaps most impressive is the sheer variety of items available for creation, numbering into the hundreds. From sturdy weapons and tools to accessories and building materials, the diversity ensures crafting never grows stale even after hours at the anvil. Help towns rebuild bridges with processed lumber or try your hand at decorative glass blowing using desert sand. Then take a break at the local tavern you helped erect. It captures that satisfying feeling of utilizing your trade to better the world around you.

With intuitive controls and streamlined interfaces, simplicity and accessibility govern the experience. Yet those hoping for added layers of strategic depth may find the unfailing pacing and difficulty plateauing after the first few hours. Thankfully, judicious use of upgrades and robust post-game content extends the journey for those not quite ready to douse their forge fires yet.

Adventuring Across the Fantastical Land of Ellian

While the Iron’s Hot transports players to the lush fantasy world of Ellian, a land once legendary for its master craftsmen before its preeminent blacksmith mysteriously vanished. This sets up the main thread that finds your customized character arriving by chance shipwreck to revive the abandoned smithy and return it to its former glory.

The journey will have you traversing across Ellian through a diversity of biomes like dense ancient forests, murky swamps, and frigid rivers that affect gameplay in slight but meaningful ways. Arctic waters may crack and damage tools, for example, incentivizing crafting reinforced variants to access resources. It incentivizes exploration and serves up new crafting materials unique to each vividly-realized environment.

The writing brings warmth and humor to the experience through endearing – if eccentric – characters. As you complete tasks that restore buildings and services to your central home base, it attracts a growing community of colorful NPCs. Drystan, the one-armed former smith who aids your progression with upgrades serves as a particular standout. And the lighthearted escapades with your exploratory guild feel ripe for an ongoing buddy comedy. Their interactions provide memorable between-quest banter without rigidly moving the narrative forward.

While the overarching plot remains straightforward and unobtrusive, side stories with choices that influence outcomes offer welcome narrative depth. These vignettes may reward rare crafting materials or introduce opportunities to customize the look of your equipment. It’s a nice compromise for players more invested in the writing and characters versus those simply looking to zen out through the mastery of blacksmithing systems. Post-game content expands these narrative threads as well, providing reason to remain invested after the credits roll.

If anything, the worldbuilding serves to bolster the crafting gameplay rather than fully stand upright on its own. Yet sprinkles of historical context tying regions and cultures to crafting traditions display attention to detail. And the diversity of people and creatures you encounter reinforce that this fantasy realm has breadth worth exploring beyond its metals and ores. It may not spin epic sagas, but When the Iron is Hot transports you readily to a pleasant land well worth visiting.

A Visual and Auditory Treat

While the Iron’s Hot impresses with its vibrant, pastoral presentation that aptly captures the sights and sounds of living as a fantasy blacksmith. The overhead perspective when navigating the countryside gives way to side-scrolling views when interacting with towns or delving into mines that showcase rich environments flush with colors that pop off the screen. It’s elevated further through small touches like ambient smoke drifting from chimneys and the glow of molten ore during smelting.

Character models are similarly brimming with personality in their exaggerated proportions and vivid outfits. The stout frame and soot-stained apron of your burgeoning blacksmith creates an endearing central figure to guide through the journey while eccentric NPCs like the elder ox Leopold and his grass-munching ways elicit chuckles. Even the cows appear bursting with charm.

What truly impresses is how distinctly each location feels from misty bogs to flat desert scrublands. It immerses you into the diversity of biomes and lends uniqueness to the resources gathered there. The visual and audio presentation even shifts slightly when donning different outfits, adding fuels to the fantasy. And small atmospheric animations within the smithy as you progress through crafting steps enhance the experience.

The laidback soundtrack of gentle guitars and soothing village themes similarly enhance feelings of warmth and community central to crafting titles, transitioning fluidly to more upbeat adventuring ditties when questing farther afield. The audiovisual experience creates palpable satisfaction when your hammer rings out on the anvil.

Controls and UI elements keep comfort and accessibility as the priorities. Menu navigation feels intuitive, with crafted items easily sortable by type or ingredient. The ability to pin desired recipes serves as a nice quality of life touch when pursuing multi-step projects spanning hours. Some limitations around keyboard mapping do seem odd omissions for PC players, however. And screen surfaces can feel somewhat barren at the start, leaving the appealing environments yearning for a touch more liveliness. But minor blemishes do little to tarnish an otherwise slick presentation tailor-made for unwinding across hours of content with users of all ages.

Hours of Post-Story Smithing Await

Players hoping to reach the credits roll in While the Iron is Hot can expect around 15 hours of content through the main storyline. But for those invested in fully upgrading their central village, completing all side quests branches, and crafting every recipe, that playtime can readily double. It makes for a robust core experience even before evaluating the post-game offering.

A standout reason the hours fly by lies with the sense of progression as you accumulate resources to purchase permanent upgrades tied to exploration, harvesting, and crafting efficiency. These meaningful unlocks prevent stagnation from setting in across extended play sessions, providing that “just one more upgrade” drive to keep hammering away. Some may only provide incremental benefits, but they accumulate into tangible improvements.

Of course, the sheer diversity of equipment available to craft also fuels the journey, numbering in the hundreds. Outside item durability issues that plague the early game before acquiring more durable materials, the creative freedom in constructing glass vases, accessories, weapons, and advanced machinery like submarines keeps creativity kindled. And limited inventory space provides steady motivation to sell off goods.

Replay value sees a healthy injection through post-story content that expands the narrative and home village upgrades. Once the credits roll, a lengthy series of additional tasks unfold organically through NPC dialog rather than feeling tacked on. And with new structures like a tavern still left to build, tangible goals keep you returning beyond personal accomplishment.

Additional outfits to discover and crafted item variants also entice completionists while providing collectors compelling reasons to keep fine-tuning creations or seeking alternate materials. It could benefit from more substantive collectibles like lore items, however. And randomly generated town job boards would elevate replayability even further.

But those who’ve grown attached to the world and its inhabitants should find reason enough to linger. Harder difficulty modes add challenge for the crafting veterans as well. When the Iron is Hot may eventually cool as all crafting titles do, but what’s there during its glow should keep wrists working and coins jingling for scores of rewarding hours.

Highlights and Lowlights

While the Iron’s Hot does what the best crafting sandboxes aim for – eliciting simple satisfaction through well-tuned core loops. The minigamesdexterously transform raw materials into items full of purpose and tangible worth for a community in need. Whether smelting, sharpening blades or piecing armor, the smithing itself engraves permanence and progress rarely found in titles focused on destruction. There lies beauty too in how intuitive controls allow quick immersion for blacksmithing apprentices while layered complexities reward veteran craftsmen.

Equally well-realized is the vibrant fantasy land ripe for harvest, lush with charming characters that lend personality to the goods you provide its people, however mundane the overarching stories spun. And post-game content generously extends reasons to linger once the credits roll.

If blemishes appear on While the Iron’s Hot, they originate early when flimsy starter tools snap too frequently disrupting resource gathering flow. Inventory limitations likewise irk in the opening hours before upgrades ease such quibbles. Repetitive fetch quests can also nag those craving more imaginative side stories to drive the smithing journey.

While charming and accessible for all ages, the simplicity in progression systems and difficulty spikes may leave hardcore crafters desiring more strategic dimensions to separate the apprentices from legendary masters. And with crafting as the crowning jewel, those merely hoping to just dabble between story beats may find the repetitive nature of creation wears thin despite the backing of those charismatic cows.

Yet slim shortcomings barely dull the sheen of a honed product perfect for unwinding across hours with nourishing positivity. The warm embrace of its community and fundamentally gratifying act of craftsmanship proves only the grindiest gamers may feel their skills outpacing the efforts required. When the Iron’s Hot smartly sticks to its simmering strengths while avoiding half-baked ideas that could detract from its wholesome nature. In an industry too often focused on leveraging violence and competition, this crafting title brims with much needed cozy vibes.

An Accessible Fantasy Crafting Treat

At its glowing heart, While the Iron is Hot transports players into a pleasant pastoral existence as a rising blacksmith in a charming fantasy land. Through well-tuned crafting systems and a diverse array of minigames, it neatly captures the meditative joys of creation and progress intrinsic to the profession. Supporting elements like the humorously written NPCs, vibrant visual presentation, and light experimentation well outside the forge further bolster the experience.

Sure, the overarching plotline treads familiar ground about restoring a forgotten craft to its former glory. And those seeking evolving strategic complexity may find the straightforward grind wearing thin after several hours. Yet in avoiding overstuffing the experience with extraneous features that could detract from highly polished core systems, When the Iron’s Hot smartly plays to its strengths as an unwinding life sim.

Fans of Animal Crossing eager for more game-like objectives or those pining for the complex production chains of leading crafting sims like Craft the World may walk away wanting more. But by honing an inviting gameplay loop free of combat, it carves out a cozy niche perfect for younger audiences or even veterans looking to lose themselves in simple creative escapism.

Stacking up nicely against contemporaries in the non-violent simulation genre like Cozy Grove and Spirit of the Island, When the Iron is Hot manages to invoke smiles through nearly every play session – an impressive accomplishment given the repetitive nature of crafting systems. That it achieve such Feats without combat like the similarly appealing Moonlighter or action-RPG trappings of My Time at Sandrock speaks further still to the mastery of its craft and wholesome nature.

So while it likely won’t go down as an all-time classic, When the Iron is Hot still deserves commendation for the glow it brings to the chill simulation genre. Its family-friendly world-building, accessibility and proudly pacifistic sensibilities serve as a testament that not every worthwhile game need revolve around besting enemies. Instead, it empowers creativity in users of all skill levels. And that uplifting message itself proves rewarding enough to make this crafting game worth playing for gamers young and old alike.

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