It’s rare to see a big-budget, AAA blockbuster game coming out of from South Korea in recent times. And here comes Stellar Blade. This new title is developed by Shift Up, the studio famous for their ongoing mobile game Nikke, and directed by Kim Hyung Tae, who have shipped various games in the past including the PS2 game series Magna Carta.
Stellar Blade sure has wowed many a gamer with its beauty, be it the game in general or its leading protagonist. But it has also caught many a gamer off-guard about what the game actually is. At first glance, it looks like a Nier Automata-inspired character action game. But the demo revealed it’s actually more of an action soulslike with various elements of soulsborne being part of the core gameplay. And the full game has some other surprises in store.
As the studio’s first console game, Stellar Blade lives up to the hype of being a well-crafted adventure with good gameplay and stunning presentation. But every rose has its thorns, and Stellar Blade has quite some rough edges which by no means deal-breakers, but you just have to put up to should you intend to play this game.
Presentation
Stellar Blade presents itself with a realistic art style, so it looks fitting among other big-budget AAA games of the current generation. It has some good art direction. The sleek, beautiful, model-like beings that the Airborne Squad soldiers, the so-called Angels, are depicted is juxtaposed by the horrid, grotesque monstrosities that are the Naytibas. The contrast between the machine-augmented humans against the purely squishy monsters feel clashing at first, but leaves a lasting impression. Every rose has its thorns.
The post-apocalypse depiction of Earth looks good, and I appreciate the careful and clever reuse of assets, which does mean some parts of the game looking a little bland. The textures when playing in Performance Mode (Prioritise Performance) can be blurry. I encounter many a blurry rock texture, and texts like on posters or Eve’s outfits that supposed to be legible can look pixely at times.
The particle effects and animations during combat look amazing, and really sells you on the spectacle of the action.
The main cast gets a lot of love when it comes to their character models. Skin details, unique clothing, all that jazz. The game looks great during cutscenes and gameplay- everything is rendered in-engine.
However, in the low-stakes conversations, the ones with the shot-reverse-shot camera angles, those feel a bit off. The pre-canned animations look like mannequins moving rather than humans. Characters are nodding too aggressively and the lip sync isn’t convincing. These conversations look poor when compared to what I assume are motion-captured cutscenes. There was not enough love being poured in this aspect- even the dialogue UI is barebones which is just small floating texts- not even a dialogue box.
Speaking of the UI, the menu and the heads-up-display (HUD) looks clean and clear. It’s uncluttered, you can easily get the info you need (except the tiny ammo indicator), and just enough stylistic flair to make it look cool. Button presses in the menu are mostly snappy, with the exception of the error dialogue which lingers too long and can’t be dismissed by a button press. And I like that you can go in and out of a submenu via the d-pad. And the little beeps and boops of the menu gives it character.
There are some odd choices for the UI. To do a sneak attack/ambush, you have to wait until a prompt appears on screen. Sometimes it doesn’t appear when you expect it to (though that’s less of a UI issue, more of gameplay). But during the times I don’t want to do sneak attack, the prompt can appear like a jumpscare- the audio cue is too abrasive.
Also, rather than having a big button prompt placed at the bottom of the screen where the eyes rarely pay attention to in this game, maybe having the sneak attack prompt appear just above an enemy might be a better choice? Too many times I miss my cues for these sneak attacks and its follow-up attacks.
There is one aspect of Stellar Blade I have no (negative) notes on, and it’s the soundtrack. Goodness me, the soundtrack. It ranges from melancholic lullabies with a grandiose aura to chiptune hip. From smooth lounge jazz to headbanging, thrashy butt rock. From music you’d expect to hear at the end of a K-drama to a soft, calming ballad featuring a man crooning in Korean. With sprinkles of bossa nova in-between the action played at the camps.
The music variety, and quantity, is off the charts. I was surprised at how much bespoke music they had just for one level, and some of those songs have different instrument arrangements, and I’m not talking about the combat arrangements which triggers when you enter a fight, where effectively the same song plays but now with amped-up beats.
Stellar Blade has a produced a great soundtrack album. And it serves well as its own product, but in the context of the game, it definitely elevates the experience with some goosebumps-inducing, hair-raising music.
It’s a shame I can’t say much about the voice acting. I switched to the Korean dub part way through the game I found the dialogue sounds more conversational, more flowy than the English dub. I do not speak or understand Korean, and I barely consume media in the language, but it just sounds better than in English.
The English script feels like it is translated word-for-word from Korean. And I feel that the voice direction seems lacking for the English dub, as characters deliver lines that seems to not match what I expected their emotion or tone should be in that particular situation.
Overall, Stellar Blade has done well in delivering on the presentation front in the broad strokes. The more intimate moments don’t get as much love, unfortunately.
Gameplay
In Stellar Blade, you play as Eve (stylised as EVE in the game), a member of the Airborne Squad that just dropped down to Earth with one mission: kill the Alpha Naytiba.
Eve isn’t the only one on this mission, but as you see in the intro, just about everyone of these human soldiers (curiously with cybernetics and other machine implants) get wiped out. Eve is then saved by Adam, and later joined by Lily, and the trio is set to complete Eve’s mission, as well as help Adam and the remaining human populace. She’s the only Angel left that can.
Let’s just get this off straight away. Stellar Blade is clearly inspired by, among others, the Nier series. Nier Automata in particular. And the word here is “inspired”. The dev team speaks openly about this. Nier creator Yoko Taro is cool with it. And Stellar Blade has Easter Eggs that makes this very clear.
Comparing Stellar Blade to Nier Automata, the first Game Of The Year winner Gamer Matters ever awarded since the site’s inception, is not something I’m going to do in this review since I was, and still am, the one person in the team that didn’t play Nier Automata in full.
Stellar Blade may have the same vibe of Nier Automata (pretty female humanoid character that wear stilettos that fights with a blade that’s neatly tucked away when out of combat and is accompanied by a drone in a post-apocalypse world) but gameplay-wise, it’s actually an action soulslike.
A Fun Action Soulslike
What does an action soulslike mean in this context? Stellar Blade has the fundamentals of a soulslike combat system (in particular, like Dark Souls). In combat, Eve moves slow, attacks are slow with long start-up and wind-down animations and you usually want to fight enemies one-on-one. Because enemies can overwhelm you easily with numbers on their side, and you can get stun-locked to death if you’re not careful.
Eve also has a refillable health potion (your Estus Flask equivalent) and you can restore them at campsites (your bonfire equivalent), where it has the other effect of respawning all the enemy Naytibas.
The action bit comes from how this fundamental soulslike formula has been tuned to promote more action-focused fights. You are encouraged to go on the offensive with various character-action-esque combos and strong bar-consuming skill moves, the Beta skills.
There’s no stamina meter and its place is the Shield meter which acts like a posture meter from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice (also an action soulslike). Reactionary play is welcomed to thanks to the parry, where if you can string perfect parries enough times you can get a big hit.
However, Stellar Blade’s blend of combat doesn’t exactly fit into any of the soulslike games I’ve played.
It’s not exactly Sekiro, from what I remember Sekiro moves and fast and fluidly during combat.
It’s not like any of the Team Ninja soulslike (which are all action-coded soulslikes) as the game’s tempo is much slower and does not rely on quick button-pressing reflexes, just the right timing of said button presses.
However, playing it slow and steady like a FromSoftware souls game isn’t fun as a lot of your toolkit encourages you to ham it up.
It’s also no Devil May Cry either, you don’t have air launchers and there’s technically only one air combo.
What I conclude is that in order to enjoy Stellar Blade, you have to play it like Stellar Blade.
Come to terms with its slow start-ups and wind-downs. Work around it (I find nailing perfect parries easier if you keep tapping the block/parry button in a rhythm which comes out faster than doing a raw block/parry). And go ham at the end of the boss phase (just burn all of that Beta meter to confirm a kill). And when you’re playing like that, it’s a fun time.
I have no problems beating any boss in Stellar Blade on Normal difficulty and I am a relatively new soulslike player. Though I did do a lot of side content to unlock better gear and have better stats.
That said, fighting the pesky smaller Naytibas is just a pain. And in some ways, that’s true in most soulslikes- the mob enemies are not to be underestimated. But fighting them in Stellar Blade feels not fun in that they are way too tanky for my liking. Fighting them feels like a waste of time and ammo.
Though I do appreciate that the devs try to be sneaky and devious with their placements. Expect Naytibas to suddenly jump around a blind corner, tentacles sprouting out of the ground and other nasties spawning just as you rushing to grab that one little shiny thing over there.
Stellar Blade, Dull Gun
Eve only fights with a sword for her melee attacks, but she does have access to range attacks. The ranged attacks don’t have any synergy with the melee. Why change to a ranged weapon mid-combat where the aiming isn’t snappy and changing ammo type is cumbersome? Too many a times I was caught lacking. In ammo.
The ammo indicator is too tiny, enemies can be absolute bullet sponges and you won’t lock on to the enemy you locked on previously after you let go of the ranged weapon aim, so it’s awkward to use in all but one combat moment: when you nail a deflect move and revealed an enemy’s weak point.
But ranged weaponry works well enough should the level is designed around it. Which the developers totally understand.
Build Your Battle Angel
Stellar Blade lets you customise Eve to favour certain playstyles. The exospine upgrades are the most drastic ones, while gear sockets gives smaller buffs. There are plenty to discover. Gear socket buffs have better rarity so you are encouraged to check the long list once in a while, while the exospine is upgradable by spending resources. That made me settle rather quickly with a particular exospine and never looked back.
There’s not much to theorycraft here, despite the variety of buffs to slot on offer. Tip: find the ones that boost Eve’s attack speed. When she attacks 100% faster, the combat feels much more fluid and workable, at least it was for me.
Jump Around, Find Out
Outside of combat, you are encouraged to explore around, as there are many little shiny things to grab. The platforming has a lot of the climb-and-jump-by-following-the-yellow-paint variety, but some secrets will have you jump and climb unmarked things hoping that there’s no invisible wall blocking, which is neat. And you do want to find some of the secrets. See a small-ish cube with red lights? Grab that, as that will surely include a new cosmetic for Eve (or sometimes for Adam, Lily and the drone).
There’s a bit of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor in Stellar Blade’s exploration. The former motivates you with new beards and hairstyles for your ginger Jedi. The latter unlock interesting new clothing options for your humanoid heroine.
The platforming controls can be a bit loose, though. It’s good that Eve has floaty jumps, but it lacks the mid-air control that great platformers have. When grabbing onto a rope where you can swing back-and-forth with, you only get control as Eve rocks backward, rather than forward. So there are many a times where I activate my platforming game instinct (where you can play a little sloppy as you can make minute adjustments mid-jump and such) and kept falling off a rope. You shouldn’t do that, apparently.
And I also don’t feel confident with sections where you do wall runs and jump off to another wall on the opposite side to continue the wall run, because the normal jump seems too short but the double jump is too much and can place you in an awkward angle where you wall run too high up and fall into your doom. This is just another of this beautiful rose’s thorn. You have to be a little delicate when platforming.
There’s also a lot of box pushing puzzles. The ones where you are pushing floating items while swimming is fun. The ones where you move orange boxes, less so. Mostly because it’s too slow to push and pull these boxes.
Having More Money Than Things To Spend On
The gameplay of Stellar Blade seem stellar at first, but I was less impressed by the end. The way the game balances its in-game economy is a bit too generous. Never have I had an issue of running out of gold or vitcoins, the latter supposed to be the rarer currency used to buy special items from shops.
I even have excess upgrade parts after exhausting the upgrades which some other games would require you to specifically acquire them in specific parts as they have the exact amount to how many upgrades you can unlock. I finished unlocking the drone upgrades and gear socket upgrade so early on, that the many exploration goodies I found were just more drone and gear socket upgrade parts which is disappointing.
I understand the decision to put these upgrade parts in abundance so that you shouldn’t be combing through every level in hopes to not miss an upgrade. But it robs the fun out of exploration to those who, figuratively, brought out a comically large comb to comb through a large desert.
No really, figuratively comb through that literal desert. There’s plenty secrets in plain sight in that particular level.
The overall feel I have of Stellar Blade’s gameplay is that the idea is there, the execution just isn’t perfect, but good enough. It lacks that finesse and refinement of a more experienced design team. The broad strokes are beautiful, but upon close inspection there’s plenty of tiny imperfections that add up over time that hold back this game from excellence.
Content
Content-wise, Stellar Blade sets up some high expectations at the start of the game. The demo was impressive, and then I saw the entirety of the Eidos VII level and it left me agape. Are the devs for real? Are they ever going to keep up this level of quality in all the subsequent levels and sequences later in the game? This is astoundingly lavish. New locations, new music, new gimmicks, new enemies and bosses. All in one level.
Turns out, they kind of don’t. Stellar Blade’s middle act is rather mid. Not because of the variety has scaled down as they used an open world-type map for a level. It’s the fact that they did it twice. There are two sequences where you navigate through a big open world map filled with side content followed by a very cool level with a neat genre-switching gimmick. I loved it at first, but on the second time around it lost its lustre.
At least the finale brings back that bombast from the early game.
The game definitely front-loaded the content. You won’t hear that many different music composed for just one level alone like Eidos VII was. And I argue that there’s no other prettier level locale than the portion you see in the demo. The finale is a close second, with the other levels far, far behind.
The side quests and bulletin board requests are nice distractions, but can be repetitive. It could have been propped up better if the story or worldbuilding is stronger, but after a few quests see you inspecting a dead body it gets rather dull quick.
The math puzzles are infuriatingly brilliant though, but most people playing this will likely just look up the solution and not experience the hell that is pattern recognition via multiple arithmetic operations (and a sprinkle of algebraic equations).
There is a fishing mini-game that’s a bit too intense (you have a hard time limit to reel in a fish) to be relaxing distraction. The side stories are worth seeing through just to see some character development as well as to unlock secret shops.
Evening Dress
As mentioned previously, Eve has a lot of cosmetics. By a lot, I mean more than 30 different outfits. Eve got that drip. And that ranges from alternate Airborne Squad gear to casual fits. From gothic lolita dresses to cyberpunk-themed cyber-wear. From sexy, revealing getups to modest wear (though Eve will only wear tight pants or short skirts as well as a pair of high heels- you will see her sexy legs no matter what).
She can also have her styled differently, but whatever hair style you put on her, the ponytail stays.
Do you know the Korean word for Angel? Cheonsa. You’ll hear that a lot in the Korean dub as that’s what most folks call Eve. And guess what, you can have Cheonsa wear a cheongsam.
And there’s definitely some outfit and hair combos to make Eve cosplay as particular characters.
There is collectible collecting in the form of cans. These rare items definitely requires some effort to collect, some includes special puzzles and sequences you have to encounter. Not only does it confer item bonuses but it dangles the best carrot on the stick: a cool outfit for Eve.
Stellar Blade can be completed within 20 hours, and be stretched over 30 if you went out to collect all the collectibles, the outfits and do all the side content, as well fishing. There’s a lot to do if you wish to prolong your play. Otherwise, this is a refreshingly short game and that’s great.
I’ve Seen This Story Before…
The story is just okay. The worldbuilding is a bit underwhelming though. Starting in medias res and letting the audience figure out the world of Stellar Blade on their own is a bold move that I respect. It was fascinating sifting out what is normal and abnormal for the characters in this world that seems to be analogous to our Earth, in contrast to our own worldview.
But I find that a lot of my guesses and assumptions of what this world is were a couple steps ahead from what the characters know, leaving a lot of the plot revelations to lose its gravitas. It doesn’t also help that so many of the writing just revolve around the same themes.
The flavour text isn’t as flavourful as I wish to the point that I feel unsympathetic towards the many final memories of dead people you find. Because there’s too many dead people. And their final thoughts are not all that unique, or are memorable.
Personal Enjoyment
Honestly, I was never a Stellar Blade fan. Mostly because I don’t want to associate myself with fans of Stellar Blade, who talks about the game in a really weird way that I don’t vibe with. And yes, it’s mostly thanks to the weirdos who can’t stop talking about Eve’s appearance.
Having no expectations, it was a nice surprise that the demo shows off a competent action game this is. And the presentation oozes style that’s actually cool now that I’m experiencing it firsthand and not see or listen to the fandom’s opinions of it.
But now, having played Stellar Blade, 33 hours of it, I find the game to be… good. It’s a perfectly enjoyable game, it is created with competence. But it lacks that little refinements that would’ve elevate it to a higher level.
The loosey-goosey in-game economy, the stale worldbuilding, the predictable storyline, the weak middle act. These are all the things that disappointed me somewhat. Again, these particular points are by no means bad. It just didn’t resonate with me. I sense this is either a lack of a strong vision, or wanting to play it safe, in how these aspects being a little underwhelming.
But the places where the devs are clearly confident in, it shows and they definitely evoke some emotions of of me. The spectacular soundtrack will live on with me forever. I’ve shed some tears over how beautiful the theme that play over the flooded plaza is. The boss fights are immensely satisfying without being overly punishing, just enough to give that adrenaline rush. The cheeky tricks the level design pulls out once in a while keeps me on edge at every moment.
And the quality of Eve’s many outfits, as much as I hate to admit, definitely made an impression on me.
If I was not reviewing Stellar Blade, would I have eventually play it? No. Did I enjoy my time with playing Stellar Blade? Absolutely, even with all its thorns, the beauty of a rose is undeniable.
Verdict
Stellar Blade wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and has some neat ideas by its integration of soulslike mechanics into a character action game.
There are certainly parts where this game shines bright, but it has its fair shares of aspects where it could’ve delivered more. And there are parts of the game that may annoy and frustrate players.
But for a relatively new team tackling their first big-budget AAA blockbuster game, Shift Up can be proud with its debut entry. Between this game and Lies Of P, it’s cool to see more games of this scale coming out of South Korea. And there’s at least one more coming soon from another established developer.
As it is, Stellar Blade is one beautiful rose, and every rose has its thorns.
Played on PS5. Review code provided by the publisher, Sony Interactive Entertainment
Stellar Blade
Stellar Blade wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and has some neat ideas by its integration of soulslike mechanics into a character action game.
There are certainly parts where this game shines bright, but it has its fair shares of aspects where it could've delivered more. And there are parts of the game that may annoy and frustrate players.
Stellar Blade is one beautiful rose, and every rose has its thorns.
- Presentation 9.5
- Gameplay 8
- Content 7
- Personal Enjoyment 8