For the most part, Stellar Blade is exactly what I was hoping for: a good action-RPG that I enjoyed a lot despite several issues. It can be clunky, inelegant, and laugh-out-loud stupid, but firing on all cylinders, it delivers exhilarating combat and boss fights, endearing characters, and stunning environments. It's an uneven mix of 15 years worth of gaming tropes, intriguing but underbaked themes, and a combination of linear and open-world design that handles a few things incredibly well but fumbles others severely.
Release date: April 26, 2024
Platform(s): PS5
Developer: Shift Up
Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment
Machine-enhanced warrior Eve takes an escape pod down to Earth, sent to fight a race of monsters called Naytiba by an orbiting colony acting as humanity's last bastion. Joined by a local survivor named Adam and colony engineer Lily, she sets out to hunt the Naytiba and simultaneously defend and rebuild Earth's last city, Xion. This plays out across four main areas, with Xion acting as a quest hub, plus some side levels tied to story beats.
Not the straightforward action game I expected
When it's not channeling Nier: Automata, Stellar Blade more closely mirrors the action-adventure formula of Uncharted or Tomb Raider with a mix of climbing, environmental puzzles, and pockets of combat punctuated with boss battles. There's a whole Uncharted 3-type train sequence, and plenty of quick-time events. It's all loudly video game-y, which I found charming. Two areas, the Wasteland and the Great Desert, are sprawling, open-world environments which can be explored freely, and while they are engrossing sandboxes, they're disappointingly similar. I would've liked a big space with more than desert and ruined buildings, but, well, I hope you like sand. Other areas also allow for exploration and secret-hunting, but they're tighter and have no map.
I enjoyed both the focused and open-ended areas, in part because it pays to explore. Huge upgrades for your health, damage, and customizable components are buried in the margins of the world. I'd revisit levels for side-quests and discover a key item or massive area that I'd missed. It helps that the game looks fantastic, especially in its industrial vistas and skyboxes. Stellar Blade hits a striking combination of overwhelming hugeness and thick detailing, with fascinating visions of futuristic technology woven in. It all looked and ran great for me in PS5 performance mode; the only graphical hitch I encountered was pop-in on a few enemies.
Stellar Blade is glued together by a mix of combat and unexpectedly plentiful platforming. Eve uses a sword for light, heavy, and special attacks, as well as a gun with several types of ammo. I used the gun to pick off weak targets, thin groups, deal with annoying enemies, or hit exposed weak points, and it is fun to use. Cycling through slugs, shotgun pellets, homing missiles, mini-RPGs, and a charged laser brings a Ratchet and Clank flair to some fights. There are gun-only sections where the game basically becomes Diet Dead Space, and I was surprised how much I liked them.
Melee is the focus, and it feels incredible when everything lines up. Parrying to deal balance damage and set up critical hits, using the right combo for a brief opening, chaining Beta and Burst special attacks, perfect-dodging unblockable attacks – strung together in a breakneck rush, these create an action playground that oozes flourish. Eve is the rule of cool on legs. She slashes acrobatically, lunges and stabs with palpable strength, and unleashes anime-grade AoE attacks with punchy slow-motion. At its best, Stellar Blade is a spectacle that I didn't want to put down. But this is blunted by overly recycled enemies and control hangups which disrupt that flow state.
Less than stellar
As fun as combat can be, the dodge sucks. Even with every dodge upgrade I could find, I struggled to evade attacks. Unique blue and purple-marked attacks have an easy special dodge, and the parry is rock-solid, but anything else that couldn't be parried was a sure-fire pain. I got a little better with practice, but I've mastered a lot of unforgiving dodge rolls in my day, and I never felt confident with this one. In a similar vein, the God of War Spartan Rage-style power-up mode is inexplicably underpowered, to the point that I didn't use it very often.
At the same time, I found Stellar Blade to be a bit too easy on normal mode, dodge troubles aside. I wish I could've played on hard mode from the outset, which is unlocked after reaching any of the multiple endings (there are at least two, from what I know). Checkpoints are everywhere, you get tons of healing items that you can use while sprinting, a cheap consumable lets you respawn in place once per life, redoing your whole build is easy, and there's virtually no punishment for death anyway. It's very kind to the player.
Just three of Stellar Blade's bosses took me more than one or two tries, with two of those being the final fights, and even they got stunlocked in the end. It turns out special attacks that down enemies or deal balance damage are busted, especially when you power-level them in the skill tree and use your two primary and four secondary equipment slots to beef them up, which is about the limit of how inventive the RPG buildcrafting gets.
Most of my deaths were just me or the game being dumb, which brings us to the platforming. Stellar Blade is not a precision platformer, but it sure seems to think it is. Eve is not built for small, careful movements like negotiating comically tiny platforms or swinging from ropes. I nudge the analog stick or tap the jump button and sometimes she just goes soaring in an unintended direction, like right into the hole or hazard I was trying to avoid. Plus it's often unclear what surfaces are actually climbable amid frequent invisible walls. There's a lot of platforming, so this is a recurring problem. The worst offenders are the aggravating pseudo-stealth sections where you're forced to duck in and out of cover. Combat has its issues but feels great most of the time, whereas platforming is at best serviceable but always slow and never especially fun.
I praised the world's visual design earlier, but Stellar Blade can be bafflingly limiting in exploration and quest design. You can only engage with some elements once you pick up the right side quest, which leads to frustrating backtracking. This makes sense in some cases, like when characters change locations after story events, but it's totally inorganic elsewhere. I had to revisit things I'd found in the open world simply because Stellar Blade wouldn't let me do anything with them until after I spoke to the right person. It's dumbfoundingly arbitrary, and I would've had a lot more fun if I could just find this stuff on my own, discover the quests after the fact, and tell the quest-givers that, oh, I've already done that. Instead, Stellar Blade shuts down curiosity.
A world held back by its story
Stellar Blade presents an interesting world, and gorgeous besides, but more so in theory than in execution. It's hard to reveal much without spoilers, but it's one of those stories that's weakened by constantly chasing the next twist. It becomes predictable, some massive reveals are dropped with little impact, and I was unsure of the purpose of it all at various points. Eve's initial goal is to take down the queen bee-like Elder Naytiba (and with it the whole race), but as the plot thickens and thins again, her motivation is muddied. As a vehicle to propel the adventure, the story is dynamic and filled with neat set pieces, but the writing isn't particularly memorable or hard-hitting. (I played with Korean voices and did enjoy the performances at least.)
Eve herself approaches the world like a person learning to be a person, her blank character slowly – but not entirely – filled in over time. Not much is said of her life back on the colony, but her identity wavers between emotionless living weapon and thinking, feeling human woman – or machine-human woman. For the record, the RPG side to play is mostly reserved for your fighting style; I only made a handful of decisions in the whole story, and only one felt significant, which was a bit of a letdown.
Side quests hide some of the most interesting characters. A butcher who insists on cooking old-school food, a hairdresser who disses Eve's drip, a fisherman cruising through the post-apocalypse, a sharp-tongued information dealer with prosthetic limbs, a tragic teddy bear collector, and an amnesiac singer who's lost most of her flesh-and-blood body. My favorite is a sweet young girl named Kaya, a merchant who's ecstatic to talk to Eve, the "Angel" sent by the colony. Characters like these helped push me to complete nearly every side quest, which stretched my play time to 26 hours.
The unavoidable backdrop to all this is the treatment of Eve's character and how her sexually exaggerated design clashes with the dour tone the story tries to build. Stellar Blade is infinitely better when it lets its characters act like normal people instead of prodding them to be outwardly sexy. Eve winds up trapped in a needless tug-of-war of the game's creation.
This review doesn't spend much time discussing the sexually charged design of Stellar Blade's protagonist, Eve, or the related handling of her character, not because it isn't an important part of the critique and discussion for this game, but because it warranted a separate article entirely.
One moment the camera treats her as an unserious sex object for players to gawk at, and in the next the story presents her as a serious character whose entire arc revolves around her own sense of agency. It's not a good or cohesive look when the game repeatedly presents lewd outfits – lingerie, bikinis, and bunny girl suits – like they're rewards to chase, using a soulless, dead-eyed version of Eve as the model. It could not be clearer that she would never wear these within the context of the game's world, so they feel forced on her, and for what? Thankfully there are a lot of sensible, fashionable outfits that actually look good on Eve, like a classic leather jacket and jeans, so I just wore those.
I was never really bothered by Stellar Blade's fixation on sex appeal; it was the jank that wore me down. The game deserves a lot of credit for the sheer range of experiences it crafts, but it feels too broad for its own good. It's carried by exciting combat and visually arresting boss fights and environments. The game soars in those moments. But repetition dulls its world, a few lovable characters can't stop the story from losing steam, and annoying inconsistencies in its most core mechanics keep Stellar Blade from true greatness.
