Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer: SHIFT UP
Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed)
Ohhh boy, here we go. If you aren't a gamer and you've heard of Stellar Blade, it's likely for one reason: the design of protagonist Eve. There's a reason I don't call myself a gamer despite the fact that I game as a hobby: the most vocal self-proclaimed gamers are porn-addicted weirdos who completely flipped out about Eve's design because it had big badoinkadoinks. A thing to know about these people is that they have this imaginary culture war where they believe game companies intentionally make female characters "ugly" and/or make them look like men (meaning "not like an anime character"). But for once in the history of make-believe gamer controversies, the blame for this blowing up isn't entirely their fault...game journalists posted a bunch of pearl-clutching self-important articles about the nature of Eve's design and stirred up the hornet's nest, playing right into that imaginary culture war. The gamers would've been weird either way (read some of the things people say in the subreddit about why they "haven't made much progress yet" and try not to throw up), but the journalist treatment put it all on a stage...all for possibly the most blown out of proportion "controversy" I've ever seen. So, that's the mise-en-scene and that's all I'm going to say about it, because I absolutely could not possibly care any less about the culture war nonsense. So, rest assured, cheeto-fingered neckbeards everywhere: my problem is not Eve's design...it's the fact that Stellar Blade just isn't good.
But as bad as the story is, the characters are far worse. Eve, for her part, doesn't show a single bit of personality throughout the runtime, even when she's supposed to be emotionally devastated. What's more, for all the work that went into the jiggle physics, she has the single least expressive, most deadpan facial animations you can imagine. It doesn't matter that she's sorta-kinda an android, it isn't a good reason. Then there's Adam, who is a nice guy and that's all. Then there's Lily, who is the prerequisite nails-on-a-chalkboard little child genius character. And that's about it. Nobody gets any kind of development (except for one character at the very end), and nobody is pleasant to be around or talk to. They're boring at best and downright irritating at worst. This is partly due to the terrible writing, but it's also partly due to the consistently flat voice acting...well, mostly consistently flat. The one exception is Lily's actress, who, to her credit, does try...however, her character is just too annoying, so the effort doesn't end up mattering.
By far the game's biggest strength is its bosses. I have almost nothing bad to say about them. They're just fast and just strong enough to be a legitimate challenge without being frustrating, and while still managing to be one-try victories most of the time. That's not a small brag! There's excellent balance in the boss battles, and in fact, it's so excellent that the bosses are legitimately the only reason I stuck with Stellar Blade until the end. So if you take nothing else away from this review, remember that the bosses are so great that they carry the experience for someone like me.
Now that that's out of the way, let's talk about how gameplay actually works. Despite the fact that the overall aesthetic and story of this game are akin to Nier: Automata, it plays more like a Soulslike...well, more like a Sekiro-like. Combat is pretty much a cut-and-dried attack and parry kind of affair. You also have several special attacks that you'll use to deal extra damage, but most of the experience is centered around well-timed parries to build up stagger damage and unleash cinematic finishing/critical moves.
The parrying, for its part, is another part of Stellar Blade that feels excellent. I don't say this lightly: Stellar Blade could go toe-to-toe with Lies of P in terms of how fist-clenchingly satisfying parrying feels. But it's not just that. Enemies and bosses come with yellow, blue, and purple attacks, all of which require certain kinds of dodges to handle. For yellow, the direction of your dodge doesn't matter so long as your timing is solid. For blue, you dodge forward, which causes you to blink behind the enemy and launch a counter attack. For purple, you dodge backwards and reveal the enemy's weak point, allowing for extra damage for a limited time. A lot of the bosses will launch several of these various attacks in quick succession, and in moments like these, it feels excellent, like you're playing an anime.
The caveat to this praise is the basic enemies. A small handful of enemies will use the blue and purple attacks, and even for enemies that don't, the finishing moves you can inflict feel just as epic. However, a far greater amount of enemies are either dead before you can launch a finishing move or take slightly too long to kill without giving you much chance to execute cool moves. There's a serious lack of balance in the enemy types, and there's one major problem that results from this: fighting individual enemies just isn't fun most of the time.
The silver lining is that this is the one Souls-adjacent game where fighting multiple enemies at once (so long as they're not all small enemies) is more fun than fighting one-on-one. It's as I said in the beginning of this blurb: when this game is firing on all cylinders, it's great. Meaning, when the game is throwing the whole kitchen sink at you, that's when it's at its strongest. That isn't normally the case in games like this, but it's the case here, but sadly the game is content to choose a slower pace that it just isn't equipped for. Simply put, it just isn't challenging outside of bosses...so it's at its best when it hides that fact with visual flare and faster action.
The level and mission design is basically 99% padding...and the irony of that in a game that made headlines for the size of its protagonist's breasts isn't lost on me. You'll spend most of your time looking for energy cells and codes over and over again. It's the kind of level design I despise: the roadblock-centric type. You'll reach a door and find it either needs power or a code to open. If there's no power, you'll need to look for a chest containing a power cell. If you need a code, you'll need to search one of the nondescript dead bodies in the area to find it. In one particularly egregious example of this, you find a door that needs power, but the chest containing the power cell is in the same room as that door, but behind another door that requires a code. You'll do this over and over and over and over and over again, and the outlier padding types aren't any better.
For instance, there's one area where you need to move a crane to bridge the gap between your current area and the next, and this crane requires not one, not two, but three key cards in order to be activated..........three key cards to activate a crane. Unbelievable. And that's not even the end of it! These bits of padding are prevalent in the segmented linear levels bookending the game (say, the first and last 10% of the runtime), but they're also prevalent in the two open segments that make up the stuff inbetween those bookends.
In the first segment, you'll go into a barren, boring desert wasteland. Upon arriving, you'll realize that there's no power in the area and you therefore can't use the game's "bonfires"....which are chairs. So, you don't get anywhere to rest until you go and fix a solar tower so the goddamn chairs have sufficient power. Then, you'll make your way to a secret underground research facility (restoring power to doors and locating codes along the way), fight a guard lady miniboss, enter the facility, have your sword stop working, have to rely on your crap-quality gun in a truly pathetic wannabe Dead Space ripoff segment, solve some more terrible puzzles, and fight a boss named Maelstrom.
In the second segment, you'll go into a barren, boring desert wasteland. Upon arriving, you'll realize that there's no power in the area and you therefore can't use the game's "bonfires"....which are chairs. So, you don't get anywhere to rest until you go and fix a solar tower so the goddamn chairs have sufficient power. Then, you'll make your way to a secret underground research facility (restoring power to doors and locating codes along the way), fight a guard lady miniboss, enter the facility, have your sword stop working, have to rely on your crap-quality gun in a truly pathetic wannabe Dead Space ripoff segment, solve some more terrible puzzles, and fight a boss named Maelstrom.
Did you have to re-read that a couple times to make sure you were reading it right? Well, you're not crazy, and it's no accident that I wrote the same thing twice. You literally do the exact same thing in both the game's major halves, right down to the BOSS. It's the same boss, the same Dead Space ripoff areas, the same guard lady minibosses, the same solar power puzzles, and most damningly, both halves take place in desert wastelands.
..........I mean, really? Is some PG-13 bazongas really all that certain gamers need in order to be White Knights for design like this? Do these people not realize there are avenues of titillation that don't cost $70? It's not just that the game would be all of 2 minutes long if it didn't waste your time at every turn, it's also that the game is so lazy that it copy and pastes its entire structure almost verbatim across 80% of its runtime. There's barely even any visual distinction.
And even this isn't the end of the poor level design decisions. The next thing to discuss is enemy placement in the open areas. There's no care given to it...or at least, it doesn't feel like there is. This one is a little harder to explain, but it legitimately feels like the team just plopped enemies on the map at random.
Thankfully, there's one silver lining: as I said, the game just isn't challenging outside of boss fights. So, you'll get through everything relatively quickly, and the fact that you don't get to sit in a chair when you first get to the boring desert wasteland of the week won't inconvenience you too much if you play with even a little bit of skill. But that's as damning as it gets! This game is so effortless to play that you don't have to experience it for as long as you might if it were challenging. Now, does a game need to be challenging? Absolutely not. However, if I'm thankful that there isn't any challenge because it means I don't have to suffer through the game as long, that's a problem.
Remember the boss quality. Because with literally every objective I ended up getting, I groaned out loud and put my head in my hands and wanted to quit. It's just so bad.
There is, however, one major negative, and that's how Eve herself controls. During combat I have no complaints. Eve controls perfectly fine there! But for everything else, Eve is kind of a nightmare to manage. She's overanimated just like Cloud is in Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, meaning you'll have to turn her and make slight position adjustments in order to interact with things. Furthermore, controlling her jump distance is a herculean task because she simply doesn't respond well to in-air inputs...and if you need to get a little extra distance, the pitiful mid-air dash won't do you any favors, because it's so ineffective it might as well not even exist. This wouldn't be a problem if so many puzzles didn't depend on your in-air mobility. It really says something that the hardest part of Stellar Blade is its platforming sequences instead of its bosses. So, that's a not-insignificant negative, but I give credit where it's due, and Stellar Blade comes home with a pretty decent technical report card.
I'll say this in conclusion, though. I've heard that prior to this article being published, a patch came out that added a boss rush mode. And you know what? In spite of everything, I can see myself coming back to Stellar Blade just to do that. It's not the greatest bit of praise in the world, but it's something. All-in-all, Stellar Blade didn't deserve to blow up in the public eye as much as it did. While it's far from the worst game I've played this year (you'll have your day, Dragon's Dogma 2), I can't say I've ever been so flabbergasted by a game's positive reception. There are reports that the game performed well enough to warrant a sequel...and I hope and pray that if this is true, that the developers consult people with some design talent for the next outing. Now, I can hear the detractors crying about the fact that this is SHIFT UP's first proper game...but that doesn't fly. Last year, another Korean developer put out a Souls-adjacent title as their first proper game...and that was Lies of P, which was my GOTY. "First proper game" isn't a valid excuse for design and execution as terrible as this.
Let us review:
Boring story, characters, writing, acting - 0.5
Hit-or-miss combat - 0.5
Excessive padding - 1.0
Terrible level design - 1.0
Both mid-game segments copy and pasted - 1.0
Overanimation woes - 0.5
The final score for Stellar Blade is...
5.5/10 - Slightly Above Average
Better luck next time, SHIFT UP, better luck next time.
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