I must admit that when I first laid my eyes on Blacksmith Master, I dismissed it as yet another generic simulation game that has permeated and gained a foothold on Steam over the last decade or so. But upon seeing it had been stamped with the Hooded Horse publisher logo, who’s behind games like Manor Lords, Xenonauts 2 and Against the Storm, I might realise that it might be worth having a look.
- Genre: Strategy Management/ Tycoon
- Developer: Untitled Studio
- Publisher: Hooded Horse
- Release Date: 15th May, 2025
- Price: $14.99/ 14,99€/ £13.49
- Buy at: Steam
- Reviewed On: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 2080
I’m glad to say that I did give Blacksmith Master a try, because it’s a fun-tastic weapon crafting, tool stamping, armor forging management game that tickles my capitalist brain in the most satisfying of ways, especially because this is one of those where it’s all about seeing numbers go up and building your own thing.
You start as the owner of a humble forge, equipped with just enough to get you going. A crafting table, a forge, an anvil, a hammer, and a couple of merchant requests for small quantities of low-quality kitchen silverware. Complete enough of these and you’ll be able to save yourself some gold doubloons to reinvest in expanding your facilities, hiring new blacksmiths, and building new crafting stations. Do that enough and requests for merchant deliveries will keep on increasing in the quantity of items, and the pay also increases.
Soon enough, your smithy is going to start morphing into a small shop, with one cashier, a couple of tables to showcase items for sale, and some guys stacking shelves with the materials you’ve been creating in excess. A couple of hours later, your store is probably going to be a two-story warehouse with dozens of employees frantically moving around, trying to deliver on merchant requests as well as trying to produce enough to stack the shelves to meet the ever-growing wave of customers.
I kid you not when I say that it all happens in a matter of 4 to 6 hours. Unlike other management sims, which tend to be slow burners (and for good reason, most of them), Blacksmith Master is a game that moves on quite quickly, and I was pleased with that because it’s just the kind of game I was looking for to boot up for 30 minutes before going to bed, do some sales, rearrange my store for the millionth time, and be done with it. This is to say that if you’re looking for a massive, in-depth and never-ending blacksmithing sim, you won’t find it here.
As your polygonised employees deliver more and more requests, new blueprints become available for you to research new tools, armor and weapons, and eventually even jewellery. These merchant requests also grant you new cosmetic items for the store, like new walls, floors and paintings, as well as some more useful things like large quantities of ores. It’s an addictive loop that also incentivises you to never drop the merchant requests to exclusively focus on your store, at least until you have everything else unlocked, which is going to take a while.
As you craft more and more items, your employees will gather experience. These can come in several ways, some are blacksmiths- your bread and butter-, some are assistants who carry materials around and stock shelves, others will be transforming ores into ingots, some are cashiers, and there are also miners and woodsmen—more on those in the next paragraph. For now, all you need to know is that employee progression also happens rather fast, and you’ll be constantly bombarded with requests to upgrade the skills of your guys and gals. Each class of employees has their valuable skills, so if you have guys smithing you might want to have them be more proficient at metalworking, assistants will be able to carry more items and walk faster as they accrue experience, and cashiers will be able to cross-sell items to unsuspecting customers when they cross their checkouts.
I mentioned miners and woodsmen, and that’s because in Blacksmith Master you’ll be able to own some mines and forests, which you can exploit to retrieve raw materials such as wood, iron, steel, silver and all other manner of precious metals. These can also be managed as if they were your smithy or store, by placing locations for your workers to lay for rest, place their tools and work on their materials.
The game is a research which serves as a progression system, where by crafting items you’ll accrue research points which can be used in a tree to unlock new stuff your your store, new floors, new ingots, and a whole host of other bonus and fun things to play around with. You’ll unlock these new locations.
Now, allow me some criticism of the game or better yet, some suggestions to improve it. While Blacksmith Master is a fun experience, and for the price point of 15 dollars, I can wholeheartedly recommend it, there’s still work to be done. Having built a massive store, which looks more like an IKEA or a Walmart instead of a local smithy, and having my basement being an absolute unit of a forge with dozens of people moving to and forth, I still struggle to keep the store stocked with goods for sale, due to the sheer amount of customers shopping around. This might sound like the store is doing great, and it is, but it also feels like there’s never a lack of customers, and they’ll buy whatever is out there.
I think that if Blacksmith Master wants to become a great game, one of the first things it needs to improve is customer behaviour. At the moment, they all seem to act the same, and their tastes appear to matter not, or very little. Because if all I have for sale are metal cups and bows, they’ll all rush the racks to buy them. I was expecting to have to deal with dissatisfied customers looking for weapons, which I should have in stock, but I don’t. Or even some seasonal events, like a war or a massive town party, to pressure you into changing your production output to meet those demands.
For the game to do that, it’s also going to reword the way your virtual employees are assigned tasks. At the moment, you can assign them to craft generic types of materials, like wood items, metal items, the cheapest, the most expensive, the one with the least amount of stock, the most complex, etc. I wish I could just have my most capable blacksmith working exclusively on building, say, legendary kitchen knives. This lack of granularity in control leads to a lot of inefficiencies and removes the sense of accomplishment one should have when everything is working exactly as you want it to.
To wrap things up, you might have raised an eyebrow at the idea of a legendary kitchen knife. Do not, because in the game, you can upgrade the rarity of the items you produce, and you can even hammer together legendary hatchets, wooden cups, and cheap clubs. It’s a fun nod to a roleplaying game (RPG) trope. However, this takes me back to what I was saying earlier about customers feeling like walking banks, ready to give you money in exchange for something, no matter what it is. I think that we, smithy managers, should be able to put together orders for our blacksmiths. Say, for example, I wanted 50 normal swords, 25 rare ones, and 5 legendary ones. When you upgrade your items to legendary, you’ll only be smithing legendary items. This doesn’t change a lot, except that it becomes slightly more expensive. I think that the rarity of the items should mean something other than a bigger check for the same amount of work and resources. Say you want to craft a legendary metal cup, then instead of using a steel ingot, you should use a gold one, encrusted with precious jewels, for example. But I can also see the fact that the developers might have just wanted the game to be a bit simpler, and I respect and admire that. As you unlock more advanced blueprints, the number of different parts can complicate the supply chain quite a bit, so it’s not like the game is lacking in that department either.
Final Score 7/10
As it stands, I can recommend Blacksmith Master, even in its Early Access state, and the main reasons are its unique premise, the execution is solid already, its low price tag, and the gut feeling that the game is going to be something quite special in the long run. Blacksmith Master is one. Keep in mind this is an Early access review, and things can change dramatically down the line.
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