Frozen Flame PC Early Access Preview

Over the years there have been some great crowdfunded games that have been released. Undertale and Elite Dangerous remake to name just two games that seen life start as crowdfunded. Now we have a new company, Dreamside Interactive, that have released their first title into Early Access on Steam titled Frozen Flame. As this is in Steam Early Access this is an unfinished game and will be improved upon before it leaves Early Access. Let us look to see if it makes the cut.

Frozen Flame is an open-world, survival Role Playing Game that sees you fighting in the vast world of Arcana. When you load up the game and create your character you get dropped into the world and to be honest it is very difficult getting a sense of purpose and direction. You must work things out on your own and also where most RPG games start off with minimal skills and you have to build up to getting better abilities and stuff, Frozen Flame gives you a strong start. This is not necessarily bad, but you don’t get to learn must about the game.

The crafting system is a mixed bag and you don’t get much in the way of instructions on how to survive. You get occasional popups about how to build, but not the basics about positioning your buildings so that they don’t start deteriorating due to bad placement. This is an issue when you get attacked often and you have nowhere to go for protection as a short time later it is broken. Also, the resources you are given are such a little amount that you can’t really build anything great without going out to grind them for building very often.

The amount of stuff you can carry is also unrealistic and make getting items impossible without making multiple trips. The clothes you dress your character in adds to the weight that you carry and it is quite a considerable amount of the allocation. You can get a better carrying capacity but it is tied to having to unlock when you move up levels, but this can be tricky as you are so restricted from the start.

Hopefully these issues above should be fixed over the time that it will be in Early Access. Next, we come to the major issue with the game, the combat system, which honestly lets it down badly. The system feels like the combat mechanics that is used in games like Dark Souls, where you lock-on and attack them. This is fine but with this game there is no lock-on and you just run around and hit the enemies until they die. You can also dodge but this is nearly useless as it is on the block button, so this makes it tricky to get an effective dodge happen.

Also, while the game looks nice even on my high-end gaming rig the game suffers occasional framerate opposed to other reviews I have seen, they were nothing major as to make it unplayable. And of course, the times it does happens is during combat so that you end up have trouble fighting the enemies and you take some damage or get killed. This is hopefully since the game is still in development and will be sorted out by the time it is fully released.

Final Thoughts

Frozen Flame is a game that has a lot of potential but sadly now it does not live up to it. There are many issues which is sadly game breaking and hopefully over the coming months they will be fixed and game showing its true potential. A fun game to play but very broken at the moment.