Recent reviews by Design

We dive together. Spill oil, spread liberty.

I'm giving this a thumbs up because it has potential, but the game is extremely rough even for early access.

TL;DR before I get started: wait for some patches and bugfixes before picking this up, it isn't playable in its current state (in my experience anyway) as of 1.0.1.

The main problem here appears to be the scripting more than anything. As others have mentioned, trying to put the hammer away will often cause it to freeze midair near the player, and it'll prevent you from moving in that direction and push you into the air. You can work around this by always dropping the hammer on the floor, but if you aren't careful you can lose it in the dark (which I'll come back to in a moment). Another game-breaking bug I've come across is the inability to assemble the sword after you've finished the blade. All the parts will be present on the stand, but an attempted assembly will get the game stuck in the assembly view with me unable to put on the crossguard, handle, or pommel. The last one I've come across is when exiting while forging and loading back in: as you hammer the ingot it'll keep stretching out, and all the segments for the blade will look they've been strung on a thin piece of metal. Imagine any fantasy whip-sword and you'll get the idea.

Other issues: first and foremost the lighting. It's pretty atmospheric as it stands right now, but it isn't functional at all. It's extremely easy to lose tools or hilt parts in the dark. You can buy a torch on the market, but the amount of space it lights up is laughably tiny. I suspect anyone actually trying to smith in the dark like that would go blind from eye strain. The rest of the issues I have with the game are pretty minor: the menu is unintuitive but easy enough to figure out, the grammar/spelling errors are a little jarring but still understandable.

So why am I still giving it a thumbs up? The heat, beat, repeat cycle is pretty cool and customization going into the sword is very promising. I've long had an interest in smithing, but there hasn't really been a game that approaches it with the level of detail that this one does. I would like to see more effort put into the grinding/sharpening phase at some point. but it's more important to get the current systems working correctly first. All in all it shows promise, and if the devs stick with it I think it can really shape up to be a fun and unique game.

Great if you're more into realism, you'll either love or hate a lot of the mechanics. Pretty punishing early on, but once you get established things get really easy (perhaps too much so).