Blue Isle Studios’ Citadel: Forged with Fire, which was recently released on Steam, via the Steam Early Access program, is an online sandbox RPG where players can explore a 36 square kilometre world as a wizard. Your goal in the game is up to you, as you can simply explore the world, gather materials, build yourself a house and establish an alliance, tame the wildlife, or take on the game’s various monsters which include Orcs, giants, demons and dragons.

Citadel: Forged with Fire is at its core an enjoyable game, but to reach the core you need to find a strong insensitive and a willingness to look past several technical issues. Like all sandbox games the enjoyment you get from Citadel is from player choice, as I mentioned earlier you can do anything from going around killing monsters, to building a house and establishing an alliance with other players in an effort to fight a rival alliance.

To help facilitate the freedom of choice, the game’s knowledge or talent system allows you to spend points across four categories: items, utilities, structures and spells. The item category focuses on weapon, armour and trinket creation, utility focuses on potions, taming and flight, structures focuses on housing and housing items, and spells focus on combat, protection, utility and weapon specific spells. While you can mix and match what you learn, it can be helpful to specialise. If you want to explore the world quickly it would be wise to learn how to craft a broom over learning how to craft a trinket, this is because both the broom and trinket use the same equipment slot.

Now as I just mentioned Citadel: Forged with Fire does have a focus on crafting. Nearly everything in the game is obtained by crafting materials that are either gained from gathering or by killing the various monsters that dot the landscape. Gathering for materials is a relatively straightforward process as you just click the E button to pick up plants and wood scattered throughout the world, but once you hit level 5 you can learn the ‘extract’ spell, which allows you to use mana to extract materials from trees and stone. Extract is a useful spell so I recommend picking it up as soon as you can. Along with picking up extract I highly recommend you learn to craft health and mana potions; because once you learn to craft these you will become almost invincible. With all the mana potions that the game allows you to easily create, you don’t have to worry about running out of mana while using the extract spell or plummeting to the earth due to your flying broom draining all your mana. While crafting is an overall easy experience it can take some time to make higher level items as you need to learn how to build specific crafting tables for your house.

In regards to building a house, it is a straightforward task of collecting wood and pressing the B button to lay down wooden floors, walls, ceiling, doors and a throne. As you level up you can touch up your house with stone or ornate structures, torches, flags, trophies, crafting tables, storage space, a respawn point and health and mana regeneration pools.

Now, if crafting, gathering or building a house isn’t your thing, how is combat? Well, honestly it is a bit of a joke. As I said health and mana potions can make you almost invincible, so if you load up on enough of them you can take down enemies with ease, I mean at level 18 I took down level 30+ enemies with ease as the game simply allowed me to spam fireball attacks while drinking health and mana potions at the same time. Yes, the ease of Citadel’s combat is in my opinion tied to a laughably low cool down timer on both attacks and item usage. Although, with that said there is another reason why monsters are so easy to defeat and that is the game’s technical issues.

Citadel: Forged with Fire suffers from a number of issues, which include higher than advertised server pings, for example, the server I selected had an advertised ping of 54-90 ms, but in reality, the ping fluctuated from 180 to over 400ms. This high ping meant that it would take longer for monsters to attack, as I found myself landing between two and three attacks before a monster would move, and when my target finally noticed me it would either attack me normally or teleport all over the place while attacking. While the ping was bad, the game’s graphical performance wasn’t much better with the game struggling to hit 60fps no matter what graphical setting I selected. Now, the graphical performance can be explained as the game not being optimised, but the issues with the servers are well in my mind inexcusable. Hopefully, as the game gets closer to its 2018 release, these issues will be cleaned up.

Also, in regards to the game’s servers, the game contains PVE, PVP and RP options, but if you are expecting a small number of each type so that players can experience the game with a large number of other players you are in for a rude awakening. Citadel: Forged with Fire has an unnecessarily large number of both official and unofficial servers, which means that it is unlikely you will encounter a server with a high population of players, I mean in my time playing the most populated server I experienced was a server consisting of 11 players, the maximum number of allowed players on said server was 40.

Conclusion

Citadel: Forged with Fire has the potential to be a great sandbox game, but combat lacks any form of challenge and the game has numerous technical issues.

*A preview code was provided by the game’s publisher.*

For more information on Citadel: Forged with Fire, visit http://citadelgame.com/.