While the Iron’s Hot [Review]
Become a journeyman blacksmith and rebuild your town in While the Iron’s Hot.
Image: Bontemps Games / Humble Games
Bontemps Games and Humble Games’ While the Iron’s Hot is a crafting adventure game where the player is a young blacksmith on a quest to become a master of his craft. He arrives at Ellian, a land of craftsmen, only to find that the blacksmith village has been destroyed by an unknown calamity. The player must rebuild the village while honing his craft and helping the other villages of the land, each with its own craft specialty—woodsmen, hunters, shipwrights, alchemists, and miners.
The player travels across this world, helping people by crafting tools and good while also uncovering what happened to destroy the blacksmith village. People you meet offer to join your town, offering services and perks to the player. Every building is upgradable as well.
Image: Bontemps Games / Humble Games
Crafting goods is a multi-step process and each step is its own minigame. You smelt ore in a furnace to make metal ingots. You hammer metal on the anvil to shape parts. If a piece needs to be sharp, there’s a grinding wheel. Finally, you place components on a 3x3 grid on the crafting table to build the final item. In the beginning of the game, this gets tedious quickly. Fortunately, upgrading the smith shop gives perks like stacking to work on multiple pieces at once and then allows you the skip the mini-games at the expense of only making medium quality pieces. The only irritation that remains, at least on the console version, is when choosing how many of something to use or make, you can only increment by one at a time. This is especially irritating with the player’s home base piggy bank upgrade, where it becomes simply unwieldy to deposit any significant amount of coins for safekeeping.
Some timing based minigames have controls that feel a bit unresponsive. Hammer movement in the anvil minigame doesn’t always respond as you’d expect to input, and furnace pumping timing can be wonky. There are a few points in the game where you must button mash to fill a gauge; timing for the mashing is unclear as it fills the gauge unevenly. The button mashing isn’t fun, it’s simply irritating, and it presents an accessibility issue because there’s no option to disable needing to mash.
Image: Bontemps Games / Humble Games
There’s some degree of dungeon crawling combined with puzzle solving, where you must climb, push boxes, use switches, and repair mechanisms to get through. I feel this side of the game is lacking, simply because there’s not enough of it. There’s only a single area that involves avoiding monsters and blocking off tunnels to trap them, and this is just one of a handful of these sort of areas. I would have liked to see more puzzles where the player must use blacksmith ingenuity to succeed. The developers should have given this side of the game more depth.
While the Iron’s Hot’s graphics are in a charming pixel art style. All the art feels stylistically consistent, though at times it needs a little more life; things can be too still at times. The best bit is that you can dress up your ox that pulls the mobile blacksmith shop and the accessories are super cute.
Image: Bontemps Games / Humble Games
I finished the game in around 15 hours. You can definitely get through it more quickly; I was having fun so I spent time upgrading my town, doing jobs, and finding optional crafting recipes. The game is a linear adventure and it’s pretty clear when it’s close to coming to an end, but you can keep playing after the ending to tie up loose ends and sidequests.
While the Iron’s Hot is a good game, but if the devs were to address some quality of life changes in UI and control issues, it would be a great game.
While the Iron’s Hot is available now on PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
