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I have a tentatively good feeling about Stellar Blade. After spending a few hours with its upcoming PS5 demo, I'm reasonably sure that I'll enjoy this action RPG when it launches April 26. I'm also pretty sure it's not going to be an amazing game. Instead, I expect a solid-to-above-average game that appeals to me specifically. There's room for the full game to either drop the ball or totally wow me, but the demo indicates a clunky action RPG that's still more than enough fun to convince me to pummel the same boss for several hours just to feel out the combat system. I played the demo and now I want to play more, which is a positive sign.
Welcome to Earth
Stellar Blade, or at least its demo, is a fascinating slice of the last 15 years of game design. It's presented as a flashy action RPG in the vein of Nier Automata, now with a dose of parrying from Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and a distinctly Korean aesthetic. And it is basically that, just with somehow even more sexually exaggerated character designs. Indeed, even some of the surprisingly grisly Naytiba monsters have oddly prominent busts. I'd expect nothing less from the studio behind Nikke, which you may know as Butts: The Game.
You play as Eve, one of many cybernetically enhanced warriors (seemingly all women) sent to take Earth back from a race of truly hideous aliens, sword in one hand and gun in the other. This doesn't seem to be going very well judging from the unexpectedly gory opening, and after a botched mission Eve teams up with a local engineer named Adam. That's about all I can tell you about the story; the demo is not very long.
The opening pitch is simple: hack and slash your heart out. OK, sure. I'm down for that, video game. But then Stellar Blade hits you with the entire action-adventure playbook of the 2000s and 2010s. I'm talking about yellow-painted parkour set pieces, notes with codes to open chests, levels that loop back with shortcuts via locked doors, a scanner button that reveals nearby loot and points of interest, and – whisper it – light environmental puzzle solving. There are honest-to-god quick-time events, stealth kills, and even plunge attack insta-kills. I'm still holding out for the inevitable turret section and motorcycle level.
I'm mainly enamored with the combat so far, but the moment I felt I understood Stellar Blade came in the second area of the demo and had nothing to do with fighting. I polished off a group of enemies – which was a little frustrating, for reasons I'll get to – and navigated a climbing section that you could add wholesale to the modern Tomb Raider games without anyone noticing. I was ready for the next fight, and then Stellar Blade asked me to do the last thing I expected: jump into a flooded chamber, dive underwater to grab some loot, then slowly push a floating plank over to a ladder – also painted yellow, obviously – so I can climb up and continue exploring. OK, I know where I am now. I'm gonna have to readjust my combat-obsessed brain for these open-ended sections, but I don't dislike them. I found a cool new collectible on my second run of the demo, which bodes well for exploration.
Fun but uneven
All that being said, I'm primarily here to fight things. Eve is a little awkward to control in levels, with some jumps and interactive features like kiosks being finicky to approach, but she moves pretty well in combat. Well, except for when she doesn't, but as much as I'm gonna rag on this demo, I do want to stress that I had a lot of fun with it, and I had a lot more fun the second time around once I'd acclimated.
You start with a wide range of sword combos that chain light attacks and heavy attacks. Some lock you into long animations that prevent parrying or dodging, and you don't often have a long opening to get a full string in anyway, so I've generally stuck to a few fast combos to stay agile between parries. Landing hits or parrying will generate energy to spend on Beta attacks, with the default two being a charged AoE slash and a heavy thrust. Beta attacks can interrupt enemies and deal extra stagger, inching you toward a stun and a critical hit that deals huge damage, so using them at the right time is important. Connecting these attacks is a long-range slash that hurls Eve toward the targeted enemy, and I gotta tell you, knocking a dude's socks off with a Beta attack and then teleporting to him to keep the pain train rolling hasn't gotten old yet.
There's a variety of dodges, too, with several attached to Sekiro-like color-coded attacks. Dodge forward for blue attacks, dodge back for purple attacks, dodge anywhere for unblockable yellow attacks, and perfect-dodge anything else to trigger a red slow-time effect that can chain into follow-up hits. The special dodges sound and feel fantastic to pull off, giving some fights a rhythmic tempo that thrums along with the battle music. However, the normal dodge is so unbelievably unreliable that I've just been parrying everything instead. It feels like Eve dodges one half-step out of the way and has approximately two frames of invincibility. I'm hoping that some skill tree upgrades will fix this, but until then it's a parry carry for me.
Movement is a bit disjointed in general. Eve has very little step-in on her sword attacks, so I'll sometimes end up swinging at the air when it really feels like I should be close enough to connect. The walk speed is slow and even the sprint feels a little sluggish. There's a disruptive pause after finisher animations that prevents you from acting or attacking immediately afterward. Screw it, let's get all the complaints out of the way while I'm at it:
- The camera is a little too close, with seemingly no FOV slider (at least in the demo)
- Fighting multiple enemies at once is a nightmare because you'll get staggered by a leaf on the breeze, let alone an off-screen monster
- Several abilities buried in the skill tree should absolutely be available from the get-go, not as upgrades
- All the fancy new-gen lighting can obscure the animations of enemies that are already hard-to-read piles of meat
- Loot consists of tiny, easy-to-miss cubes of light that are in desperate need of a bigger pickup radius and an auto-pickup setting (Update: There is an auto-pickup setting! I don't know how I missed it the first time – possibly a pre-release demo discrepancy but more likely that I just cannot see – but it's in the settings, and everyone should enable it immediately. Thank you to the reader who pointed this out.)
So if Stellar Blade has all these problems, why do I like this demo so much? Why did I stay up until 1am beating the boss at least 20 times in a row, endeavoring to master the fight with several no-heal runs? The rule of cool is definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting. I see Eve rip an ornament out of her hair, transform it into a laser sword, stab what can only be described as a bipedal chainsaw and slam it into the ground, then slice it open belly to head in a mercifully easy quick-time event, and my brain just goes, cool. It is base kinetic satisfaction, but it's working.
The story doesn't seem to be teeing up any groundbreaking innovations, the fundamentals feel a little sloppy, and I haven't had much space to engage with the buildcrafting side of this action RPG – which may smooth out some of the problems I've mentioned – but I'll be damned if it ain't fun to cut Naytiba to ribbons. So far, Stellar Blade shines in the boss battles. It's got the action down for the most part, which is half the battle. Here's hoping the full game improves as it goes along.
While you wait for Stellar Blade, check out the other upcoming PS5 games coming this year.
