Ahead of the Stellar Blade PC release, its Steam Next Fest demo was dominating the charts. Its launch earlier this week might have kicked it off the list of the biggest demos, but with the free version of the game still available, I decided it was time to see what all the fuss was about.
Stellar Blade's PC demo is a free version that leads up to the end of the first major bossfight. There's an intro cutscene, a brief tutorial, and some exploration that lets you start to get to grips with the game's extensive upgrade tree, and for a game of this size that's dropping its PC port in the same week as Next Fest, it's a relatively chunky demo. After that first boss fight, there's even a second battle that you're thrown into, a few hours into the rest of the game.
Those two fights were easily the highlight of what I played of Stellar Blade. The satisfying 'chiiing' of a successful parry or the balletic red lines of a perfect dodge both encourage a deeper connection with the combat than simply holding down the guard button or spamming dodge-roll. There's decent weight behind the boss' attacks, fitting of statures that tend to tower over Eve. The trouble is, I'm fighting through much better bosses elsewhere right now, and this demo is nowhere close to convincing me to make the jump.
I'm working my way gradually through Elden Ring Nightreign with my friends at the moment, and it's indicative of the problem that I had with Stellar Blade almost immediately. While there's a competent soulslike in there, it's very clearly a game that relies on style over substance. That's clear from its opening cutscene, and while there's little need to rehash the conversation about Eve's physique here, Shift Up found many more ways to show off visually than in other departments.
Its flashy, setpiece-filled intro and its gratuitously gory cutscenes quickly gave way to a dark, muddy city that was dangerously close to the iconic 'PS3 brown' color palette. Even in that relatively close-quarters environment, performance was an issue, and despite outshining the recommended specs I had to scale the graphics way back before I could get free of some distracting stuttering.
Elsewhere, it wasn't long before I was being waylaid by level design; having an enemy lying in wait behind a door might have been an homage to Dark Souls, but the floaty physics puzzles are certainly a feature I don't really need from my soulslikes. The style of Stellar Blade's big moments is decent, but the substance of its moment-to-moment combat and traversal doesn't live up to the checks its cutscenes are writing. Eve's attacks are lightweight compared to her finishing moves, her response to getting smacked around a boss arena disappointingly clunky in the face of her apparent agility elsewhere.
It's hard, while playing Nightreign in the background, to not compare the two. And despite the chaos and rapid pace of the Elden Ring spin-off, there's no question which is the better game. Granted, Shift Up is making a leap into less-familiar territory with Stellar Blade, while FromSoftware is adapting technology it's spent years honing to a laser's edge. Stellar Blade is by no means a bad game, and nor is it entirely fair to compare it to anything Elden Ring-shaped, but it's certainly not good enough to have justified the discourse that's swirled around it, or to convince me to abandon my Nightreign condemned for Eve.
Check out our Stellar Blade review to see what we thought of the original PS5 launch.
