Citadel: Forged with Fire

I came into Citadel: Forged with Fire the same way I come into any multiplayer sandbox: I wanted to fight people, raid bases, and find out whether the combat had any actual ceiling to it. The short answer is that it does not, at least not in the way a competitive player would care about. The longer answer is more interesting than I expected. The core pitch is an open-world sandbox RPG in the vein of Ark and Conan Exiles, but with magic running through every system. You do not just pick up an axe and swing it. You equip wands, staves, axes, and gauntlets, each slot accepting up to two spells drawn from different schools of magic. Arcane, fire, and other elemental essences change what those spells actually do: a standard beam on a wand becomes a short-range flamethrower when you swap in a fire essence. Gathering itself is done via a harvest spell once you unlock it early on, which at least makes the resource loop feel thematic rather than just tedious. There are no hunger or thirst bars to manage, only health and mana, which keeps the pacing lighter than Ark. You level up attributes, unlock new fortification materials, and eventually get airborne on a broomstick or with an elixir. Taming creatures, including horses and dragons, feeds into both PvE progression and PvP raiding on servers where castle destruction is live. The building system is genuinely deep. Hundreds of structural pieces, a flexible editor, magical defensive structures like attack towers and shield generators. Players who care about base construction will find a lot of room to play. The flip side is that unlimited building on public servers has historically turned into server-wide clutter, with roads and structures sprawled across the map and no hard cap to clean it up. That was a complaint at launch and it was never fixed before development slowed to a stop. And that is the critical context going in right now: the last patch shipped in March 2021. Blue Isle has not run events or holiday content since that year, and official servers were consolidated because populations thinned out. Concurrent Steam players currently sit in single digits. The tutorial is weak, the UI and control remapping are awkward especially on controller, and the quest system is shallow fetch-and-kill work. None of that was ever going to get addressed. If you want active PvP, the server browser will mostly disappoint you. If you want to spin up a private shard with four or five friends and play through the progression loop on boosted settings, there is a genuinely enjoyable 40-60 hour arc here before the content ceiling hits. For solo players, tweaking the XP and resource multipliers in a custom session is the move. The world of Ignus is a 36 square kilometer map with plains, forests, mountains, swamps, and tundra, and it is pleasant to explore even without anyone else in it. The magical aesthetic is consistent and well-executed in a way that holds up. It just needed two more years of active development and a functioning ranked PvP layer that never arrived.

Fred · Scout Team

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