Stellar Blade is a dull experience held up by sharp combat
It’s hard in some ways to separate Stellar Blade from the social-media controversy that has surrounded it, with many people left wondering if the game actually aimed to create an interesting experience or if it was more concerned with giving players an overtly sexualised doll to play dress up with.
After sinking many hours into everything Stellar Blade has to offer, it’s actually pretty much both. It's an experience that is overall just fine, though perhaps if this storm hadn't been whipped up, the average player might have waited for a sale to give it a chance one evening.
Combat is what Stellar Blade does best, focusing on methodical and punishing encounters that’ll require you to have your senses sharp in order to time dodges, parries, blinks and other moves of the sort.
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You simply can’t run in and hack ’n’ slash your way to victory through sheer brute force and pig-headedness. Each enemy has a balance meter which you can whittle down through well-timed parries, knocking them off their balance and leaving you an opening to punish them for their misstep.
As you battle, your encounters will have little visual nods letting you know what to execute and when. See a blue flash? You can teleport behind your foe, if you’re quick. Purple flash? Could be the best time to recoil and devastate the beast in front of you.
It’s a system that brings out the intensity in each battle and forces you to really evaluate who you go up against as you explore the world around you. This extremely focused aspect of the game is great, and leads to some fun moments and encounters once Stellar Blade takes the training wheels off.
The big problem, however, is getting to those fights. We found ourselves going through the motions, as we pushed through to the next camp, fetch quest or extremely similar dungeon.
The story is your average sci-fi fare about a space soldier, mutant creatures (the Naytibas), and a devastated post-apocalyptic earth. It’s extremely forgettable, and what’s worse, the characters themselves are as dull as possible. These human-esque personality voids have little to say, with some bad scriptwriting delivered by even worse voice-acting.
Eve stays the emotionless heroine throughout, and we essentially learn nothing about her from the game's opening to its close.
And how could it not leave a bad taste when every female character in the game is a lace-clad wobble machine with nothing to say, no personality and a questionably juvenile face held on an overtly sexualised body that is clearly built for a very male gaze? That’s not even getting into the many unlockable costumes for Eve, which are exactly as you’d imagine.
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There’s a lot of platforming elements you’ll need to tackle too – something Stellar Blade doesn’t handle with even half the finesse of its combat. Every jump feels extremely uneven, and it feels like you're breaking the game's boundaries as you make each jump, rather than feeling natural.
Often, Eve will just slide over where you landed, or clip the edge of a cliff rather than land a jump or wall run – something that isn’t helped by what we suspect is slight input latency along with a lack of visual clarity on the movement Eve has.
Sure, she’s swinging on a pipe with zero effort, but apparently she has still built enough momentum to fly over that massive gap. Yet, doing a fast run up to a cliff? Well, she won’t jump very far, why do you assume that?
There’s side quests aplenty to fill the time in between your main storyline, but most of them don’t amount to much more than fetch quests or 'Please find my missing spouse/friend/cat' – most of whom will be a corpse for you to loot before you head back to the quest-giver.
You can also invest time into collecting soda cans through the game, unlocking certain items at various milestones, but ultimately, despite the seemingly open-world skin, Stellar Blade is a linear experience.
Stellar Blade is a hard game to pin down in the end. The combat really sings in its moments and the boss fights are some of the most memorable you’ll encounter in this genre, but it’s bogged down by a bland story, uninteresting characters and the need to make boobs wobble in every second of every cutscene.
There’s some fun to be had in there if you can look past its gripes, but in an age of games costing £70 or over, whether it’s worth that is entirely questionable.
Platform reviewed on: PlayStation 5
Stellar Blade is out now on PlayStation 5.
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