In Eternal Strands, a major part of your adventure will be doing battle with the nine massive bosses that wander freely throughout parts of the world. In my time exploring the magical land of The Enclave, I encountered a handful of these formidable monstrosities, which ranged from a robotic bipedal summoner who used his magical staff to cover the world in fire to a flying dragon who persistently hunted me from the skies above. Continuing our month-long coverage of Eternal Strands as part of IGN First, today we’ll be taking a look at one such oversized baddie: The Ark of the Forge, a hammer-wielding automaton with deep love of smelting puny Weavers into piles of ash.
The Ark of the Forge is one of the bosses you’ll encounter in the second half of your adventure, as you explore the underground forge of the ruined city-state of The Enclave. Since bringing down these behemoths is how you obtain your game-changing magical powers in Eternal Strands, you’ll want to throw yourself at this mechanical blacksmith at your earliest convenience, as I did the moment I saw him.
After getting immolated on my first attempt, Jo and Fred of Yellow Brick Games gave me some advice on fighting this fiery tyrant.
“So one of his trademark visual things you will notice, the first is, of course, the giant, flaming hammer. So spoiler alert: he does use this giant hammer to create fire in the environment. He can hit the ground with it. It makes a lot of flames everywhere, and makes the environment super hot. So then you need to avoid not only the giant hammer, which is enough trouble on its own, but also what that creates in the environment. Which, when you fight with him, after two to three minutes, you can get into a situation where you look at the battlefield and you don’t know where to go because there’s so much fire everywhere. It’s not a one-and-done. The fire stays in the environment and it does affect the battlefield a lot,” game designer Jonathan Lachance told me.
Game director and co-founder Frederic St-Laurent added, “He also has an anger management problem because…If you start doing a lot of damage to him, he’s going to get angry, like flame up his entire body and run directly at you to smash your face.”
That troublesome ability to light his entire body on fire certainly made fighting the big brute a challenge, since in order to beat him, you’ll probably want to climb atop his massive body to deal melee damage to areas of his body not protected by armor. That became quite difficult when I was not only managing the usual stamina meter for climbing, but also my health meter as I was dealt damage-over-time from the oppressive flames.
In order to counter his scorching offensive, I’d need to make use of some of the ice-based powers in my arsenal, which could not only help cool down the battlefield and put out flames, but also to prevent the blacksmith’s movement by doing things like freezing his foot to the ground, covering his hammer in ice, or even frosting his ankles together, each of which inhibits his movements or abilities in a specific way, buying you valuable time to climb the monster and start dealing damage.
Unfortunately for our hero, though, Eternal Strands makes sure you can’t just chop away at an enemy’s ankles by making each body part completely immune to damage once you’ve done a small amount of DPS to it. In the Ark of the Forge’s case, you can counter this in a couple ways, by using telekinetic powers to throw yourself in the air and land on a body part that’s higher up, using your ice abilities to make his armor brittle and break it off, exposing more weak areas, or by just gitting gud, dodging the boss’ counter attacks as you manually scale him. Of course, he isn’t likely to take any of these approaches lying down, and will shake you off limbs, break out of your ice, light everything on fire, throw objects at you, and even just pick you up while you’re climbing him to squash you like a bug and toss you back into the firestorm at his feet.
The fight also differed based on the exact scenario I faced him in, whether that be the environment or the weather of the area. For example, one time I fought him in a somewhat barren stretch of ruins where his flame attacks didn’t have much to engulf in flames, making the going easier, while in another instance I made the mistake of facing him while surrounded by vegetation and quickly found myself completely overwhelmed. The weather of the area you’re in also plays a major role in how easy of a time you’ll have, as a cold front will make all fire abilities, including the boss’, a lot less effective, while a heat wave will make fire all the more formidable and make your ice powers all but useless. Let’s just say that when I tried fighting him during a drought things didn’t go particularly well – but it definitely made for a fun challenge!
For more on Yellow Brick Games’ upcoming boss-slaying adventure Eternal Strands, check out the action-packed reveal trailer, and stay tuned for more exclusive reveals all month long as part of our ongoing IGN First coverage, and for everything else stick with IGN.
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