Stellar Blade Review
“Nier, far, and beyond the stars” Written by: Hunter (@ReaperHunter23)
Stellar Blade was revealed in late 2021 during one of the PlayStation Showcases. It appeared to be a crazy action game with some manner of space/sci-fi setting. I like crazy action games and the visual style of the game looked unique enough so my interest was piqued. I waited patiently for the game’s release all while more details gradually revealed themselves. Now the game is out and it is time to see if my interest was warranted.
Image Credit: Shift Up, PlayStation
Stellar Blade takes place in the far flung future. Earth has been ravaged by monsters and human society as we know it collapsed long ago.Some of human life managed to escape to an orbital colony to one day fight back and reclaim the planet. And what remains on earth are the monsters that devastated it and the stranglers of humanity that weren’t lucky enough to escape.
We assume the role of Eve, a member of the Seventh Airborne Squad in the army of the orbital colony. Her squad is deployed as the colony’s latest effort to rid the earth of the Naytibas, the monsters wreaking havoc on the planet. Things quickly go sideways and Eve is the last survivor of the mission, narrowly escaping death thanks to the assistance of Adam, a human living on the surface. From there the story lays out the broad goal of confronting what they call the Elder Naytiba in order to finish Eve’s mission and save the remnants of humanity on earth.
I’ll be honest, I did not find the story and characters of the game to be all that interesting. It does a good enough job at contextualizing what I was doing, but I was never really eager to know what came next. The broad strokes of the plot were pretty much what I was expecting. There are a couple of twists but not really anything shocking. On its own, a by the numbers plot isn’t much of an issue, usually in a game like this a charismatic protagonist or an interesting world can carry what would otherwise be a rather blasé story. Unfortunately, Stellar Blade lacks the latter elements as well.
Eve is a serviceable protagonist, but she isn’t really all that interesting. I never really cared about seeing what she did next. My opinion of Adam had a more negative slope. He started off fine, but as the game went on he became more prone to the “Sidekick that points out the obvious” type of dialogue. And his dynamic with Eve and Lily just didn’t feel like it was all there. Of the three lead characters I liked Lily the most. She’s not award winning by any means but she had an energy about her that I appreciated. Aside from that, there were a couple of side characters I enjoyed. I rather liked Su and Enya and the story that unfolds across their couple of quests. I also enjoyed Kaya, the junk shop owner in Xion.
Image Credit: Shift Up, PlayStation
Thankfully, what Stellar Blade lacks in interesting story, it makes up for with some pretty solid gameplay. I think the combat is best summed up as predominantly hack and slash combat with some light RPG elements in the systems. Eve can perform a light attack and a heavy attack as well as a respectable number of combos by alternating between the two. Your base moveset is rounded out by the perfect dodge and parry maneuvers.With parrying regenerating a meter for special attacks and the perfect dodge allowing you to get back on the offensive as quickly as possible. Later on you gain access to a slate of special moves that are all done by pressing L1 and one of the face buttons.
All of these elements come together to create a nice flow for the combat. And it allows for the freedom to approach battles in a few different ways. Depending on how I was feeling I would usually approach a fight in one of two ways. The first would be comboing the enemies to smithereens and dodging when need be. The other way I go about battles would involve me starting by popping off all my special moves, and then parrying until it built enough of the Beta energy meter to attack with one of the special moves again.
The enemy selection did a good job at directing you to think about all of the tools at your disposal instead of just the one way you might be falling back on going about combat encounters. The endless combo method works fine against enemies with little in the way of defense but you may want to change up your approach against the creatures with the shields. I commend the game for managing to do this without it feeling like a majority of the enemies were a chore to deal with. Off of the top of my head, the only enemy that really got my goat was the robot with a canon for a head.
Stellar Blade’s level design can be pretty hit and miss. I think the opening few hours are really well paced. They present the ruins of an abandoned city and deftly pace out the combat encounters with the exploration through the level. Everytime I hit a new checkpoint camp I felt like I had come a reasonable distance further from where I was at the last camp. And I had a reasonable idea of how much further I was from my goal.
I would say my primary issue with the level design as the game gets further along is the pacing. There were so many instances in later areas where Adam would chime in with “ The Alpha Naytiba is just up ahead” only for it to be some other boss encounter that was only a stop gap. There were so many sections that I feel like I would have enjoyed more if they just trimmed the fat off of it a little.
There are few other decisions the game makes design wise that are puzzling. For example: My least favorite area in the game was this lab that took away your sword. The only means of defense you have is the gun mode of the droid that your sidekick pilots. The segment isn’t overwhelmingly difficult since the enemies that accost you die in just a couple of shots. I just didn’t find it to be very engaging. And the area was capped off with an equally lame boss fight.
The other hit and miss element in a lot of the later game was anything that involved platforming. It was fine at the start of the game as just one of the ways you were moving around in the world. I feel like introducing actual obstacles was a mistake. I specifically remember a few instances of a rope dangling from the ceiling that Eve would fail to grab because I had picked up just a little too much speed on the run up to the jump. And in general the platforming was very floaty. It led to a level of disconnect when the rest of the game controlled so tightly.
Image Credit: Shift Up, PlayStation
Stellar Blade is a very visually impressive game. The environments and enemy designs are where I’d say the game shines the most from a visual standpoint. There's an instance in the first couple of hours where Eve is exploring what is essentially a massive server room that house all of humanity’s existing records before the societal collapse. The sense of scale in that room was what made it stick out to me. For a moment it looks like a pretty average server room and then the camera finds Eve and it turns out that the room is the size of a city block and the computer towers are several stories high.
The ruined city was visually impressive as well. It was filled with decrepit structures being overtaken by nature while water was flooding a number of areas. The game managed to have a lot of desert type locations without it ever feely too visually samey. As soon as it would feel like I was starting to see a lot of sand, suddenly I’d be sent to an underground facility that gets increasingly more vascular and organic as I explore it.
The enemy designs were very cool to look at. There were a lot of body-horror adjacent mutations. Plenty of weirdos with vertical mouths or tentacles popping out of where their ears would be. Most of the boss designs looked quite impressive as well. One of the first boss battles is with this Naytiba with its chest cavity essentially being the starting point of its mouth. While it narrows out as you go further up its body.
I wish the key characters were as visually distinct as the enemies were. Eve’s design was alright. I found her most memorable element to be the shockingly good hair physics. I did also eventually find a couple of outfits that I thought looked pretty cool. I do think that the game does itself a disservice by making the default outfit the most generic of the bunch. Adam’s design could be replaced with almost any other humanoid character in the game and I don’t think it would change that much. There were some NPCs that looked rather striking. Oracl looked pretty cool and I enjoyed the design of the lady who stood next to the odd jobs board in the city.
Image Credit: Shift Up, PlayStation
Summary
At its core, Stellar Blade is a really solid action game. If you like Hack and slash games or other games with more action focused gameplay, I would recommend that you give Stellar Blade a try. I think that it's a pretty good showing for being Shift Up’s first major console release. The combat mechanics are refined and satisfying. Yeah, I have my gripes, but I feel like they could all mostly be improved in a sequel or another similar project. All of the elements that fell flat to me never got in the way of the core combative experience enough to bog down my playthrough. At the end of the day, bland characters and a few annoying platforming jumps aren’t going to ruin my experience if I’m spending most of my time tearing up cool looking monsters in a satisfying fashion.