In an ever growing gaming industry where interesting games can come from places and territories you least expect, I appreciate the way the Korean gaming industry is slowly breaking into more AAA fare as of late. For a territory with as many gamers as it has, yet typically defined by MMOs and mobile games, it’s been fascinating watching their moves as they break into more traditional genres. Last year, Lies of P from developer NEOWIZ impressed with a Pinnochio-themed action game in the vein of From Software’s cult classic “Bloodborne” to great success. Now, we get Korean developer Shift Up’s turn in the action genre with Stellar Blade.
Originally revealed as a PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC game with the name “Project Eve” in 2019 before re-emerging in 2021 as a PlayStation 5 exclusive, Stellar Blade demonstrates developer Shift Up, em, “shifting up” from their mobile shooter roots with an evocative and provocative sci-fi aesthetic. Taking many cues from different genre stalwarts does their first console release deliver the goods? Or is it just a flash of style with no substance?
“Naytiba Or Andro Eidos… Is One More Human Than The Other?”
Stellar Blade is set in an undisclosed time in the future after humanity has been driven out of Earth due to losing a war against a group of malformed creatures known as the Naytibas. You take control of the “Angel ” warrior Eve of the Andro Eidos 7th Airborne squad to lead an assault against the Naytibas, and aid the last surviving city of Earth, “Xion”, in order to reclaim it back for humanity.
From the outset, the story conceit makes it very clear if you’ve ever experienced a sci-fi post apocalyptic story in the last few years that deals with humanity’s extinction, you’ll have a fairly good idea of the kind of narrative Stellar Blade weaves. The well worn tropes of chosen warrior making their way back to Earth on a noble mission only for things to not be what they seem, is all predictably covered in this game, complete with the pseudo religious references/terminology meant to engendered gravitas. This being a video game, if you have played 2017’s beloved Nier Automata from Square-Enix, Platinum Games and the eccentric Yoko Taro, you’ll likely be able to predict a lot of the plot and emotional beats Stellar Blade has to offer. Don’t be surprised if a lot of your reaction to the game’s narrative you keep thinking “but, we already have Nier Automata at home”.
As predictable as most of the plot beats are, more problematic is how bland most of the characters are through the majority of the game’s early chapters. Usually I don’t mind if a story’s main narrative thrust is predictable as long as the characters within it are compelling or interesting. Early on, EVE is a mostly blank slate protagonist and her companion characters, Adam and Lily, have slivers of personality to balance EVE’s blander traits. Through some side content is this lightly elaborated upon, thankfully, otherwise the early hours would have been a complete numbing trudge or simply going through the motions.
Thankfully, Stellar Blade manages to eventually escape its wobbly early hours into something particularly more compelling. The environmental storytelling and character work slightly improves as you make your way towards its denouement. Bland and aloof for most of the game, EVE eventually shows a bit more personality, particularly when dealing head on with the game’s existential themes and the pseudo religious topics. For a game that riffs and lives on the shadow of Nier Automata so much, if a sequel eventually happens, Stellar Blade sets up an interesting foundation with its different endings. Shift Up certainly has the capability to spread its wings into something more confident and unique for the future of this would be franchise.
“It Began With Me, I Am The Source Of It All”
While narrative is absolutely not the game’s strength, Stellar Blade lives and dies by the strength of its combat system. From the combat perspective, Shift Up absolutely has cooked an absolute banger. It finds a perfect middle spot among character action-based games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta , a precision parry title like Sekiro, and i-frame dodging found in the Souls games. It creates something where success is assured by embracing the song and dance of combat momentum, and fast, yet deliberate, parrying and dodging. If you only try to play it one way or another, either as a straight hack-and-slasher, or as a deliberate parry and dodging reactionary, you’ll struggle as the game pushes that sweet spot throughout the entire journey.
Though, be warned, this excellent combat system takes some time to develop. Stellar Blade commits what I believe is the gaming cardinal sin of locking away important, transformative abilities and movements behind its RPG-lite, skill-tree and gated story upgrades. While I have no real problem with the pace of unlocks, I have more of a problem at the out-of-whack balance of the kinds of things that are initially locked away in the skill tree. It effectively makes the initial impression of the combat system seem way too limited and slow for the kind of game it actually is, and eventually becomes.
Aspects such as unlocking extended parry windows are one thing, but locking away counter attacks, precision dodge movements, stealth attacks, and most of your shoulder attacks behind a bit of a grind is too limiting to the early variety of combat. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself spending hours running back and forth, killing respawnable enemies, just to grind XP so you can unlock what should be basic combat kit abilities. It’s especially frustrating given how much they transform the combat into its unique hybrid instead of simply an imitator of other seminal works.
Following modern trends, Stellar Blade is another pseudo, wide-linear game. It’s split between intricately designed linear environments and two open world-lite segments filled with side quests and collectibles. As someone who doesn’t mind the spice of life that is having your crafted, curated environments, and wide open exploration places in-between, I like the double approach, particularly when you are allowed to free roam and complete side quests. While there are many side quests that are overtly fetchy and quick in nature, I enjoyed the more character specific side quests that help develop the game’s personality more than what you usually get from your main protagonist and her companions.
Thankfully the side quests can be pretty rewarding too, as many provide you with enough materials for item unlocks and specific build crafting upgrades that help build your EVE to your particular gameplay style of choice (my EVE was decked out for stealth kills and gun distance combat paired with parrying/dodging expertise). They also provide options for the many unlockable costumes. If you are a fan of decking out your character with different costumes that can be unlocked in game and not via micro-transactions, Stellar Blade absolutely has you covered in that area, especially with how many can be unlocked in the main playthrough and its new game plus option.
Speaking of New Game+, I have to commend Shift Up for going against the trend mostly followed by Sony published games where they hold their game’s New Game+ option to be released later down the line for “xyz” reasons instead making it available from day one. More importantly, their New Game+ also follows the mantra of going above and beyond simply replaying the game with your fully decked-out character. It offers not just a new difficulty setting, but more costumes, enemy re-jiggering, and an expanded skill tree. Because of this, it’s rewarding to play new game plus and I appreciate the robustness of the options available. I highly recommend you give it a go if you have the chance.
“Respite of the Hopeful”
One of the biggest talking points I’ve seen online have been people expressing their interest in Stellar Blade before learning it has Souls-like elements that deter them from getting into the game. Usually every Souls-like conversation revolves around the punishing nature of its difficulty and, despite the popularity of the genre nowadays, there will be people that still find this type of game repulsive. As I mentioned above, there are elements about Stellar Blade that definitely can be seen in that vein: from the parrying system, to i-frame dodging, a campsite mechanic where you refill your healing items, and respawning enemies.
While those elements are there, developer Shift Up has ensured Stellar Blade isn’t another wannabe copy of the From formula and remains accessible to a larger audience. If the normal difficulty sounds daunting, the game offers Story Mode difficulty which modifies the damage deltas enemies inflict on you without making it a complete cakewalk. It also opens an extra option to enable or disable button prompts to assist you with parrying or dodging certain enemies. The prompt isn’t for every combat encounter, however, so you still need to learn how and when to properly defend yourself. But it’s still an aid for anyone that may find themselves struggling with the parry and dodging windows.
For the sake of transparency, I played through the majority of the game in the normal difficulty before I suffered a recent case of “Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo” that I’m still recovering from. This affected my eye and hand coordination and delayed this review by a few days longer than I intended. I experienced the final third of the game in the story mode with assists enabled as I slowly made my way to the conclusion. I still found the game challenging enough to not be a complete cake walk, and those prompts became really helpful during some insane boss attack patterns. I can certainly vouch for the effectiveness of the assists where they helped me during a handicapped period. For those that like their challenge, Stellar Blade will absolutely deliver on that. To those that want to see the game without hair tearing frustration, there are safety nets in place to assist, even if it won’t make it a cakewalk.
“We Gave Up Our Humanity In Order To Survive”
One thing certainly can’t be denied: Stellar Blade is a feast for the eyes. This being Shift Up’s first ever major console game, they certainly made a pretty, evocative world that impresses in its decrepit beauty. It also features very impressive character modeling that strikes a balance between photo-realistic detail and exaggerated anime aesthetics. There’s a certain cleanliness to the aesthetics that reminds me of the industrial designs a PlayStation 2 era game but in much higher quality. Coupled with the striking monster models rendered to exquisite detail, there’s a very high quality to the production value that bodes well for whatever else Shift Up does in the console space. And yes, the game certainly has exaggerated jiggle physics. But the costume I wore most of the game kept that at a minimum where I barely noticed.
As for the game’s performance, Stellar Blade comes with three different graphics modes: Prioritize Framerate, Prioritize Resolution, and Balanced. For those that love high resolution aesthetics at 30fps, the resolution option delivers that high-fidelity at full, 4K resolution and a mostly steady framerate. But, for the kind of game Stellar Blade is, I recommend you either play in the framerate or balanced mode, as the smoothness and precision you gain is vital to making the gameplay feel crisper and more satisfying.
As for which one of the two performance modes to pick, if you mostly play in a smaller 4K set or a monitor, the framerate mode cuts the resolution to a still-sharp 1440p and a pitch perfect 60fps. If you play on a bigger TV, I recommend the balanced mode as looks close to as sharp as the resolution mode with a very tiny hit to performance that is so imperceptible to the naked eye as to not be a detractor.
As strong as the visual presentation is, it isn’t flawless. As is typical with games made in Unreal Engine 4, you are going to find some flat textures here and there, especially in the open environments where level of detail just becomes inconsistent from moment to moment. While I certainly loved the striking aesthetic of most of their environments, I feel I have reached my quota on desert open areas. The two open environments of this game (alongside the city of Xion) exist in a desert area and can be striking to look at if not boring from a biome perspective. It’s no surprise my enjoyment of the game skyrocketed around the halfway mark when you start visiting more visually appealing environments that coincided with broader story development. If Shift Up gets to develop a sequel, I hope they move on to more interesting and varied locales.
If you have listened to the Nier soundtrack, Stellar Blade features the same composer, Keiichi Okabe, to provide music with strong vibes reminiscent of the game it strongly lives in the shadow of. While it certainly provides ambiance and gravitas when it’s actually needed, I don’t think the soundtrack for this game will stand the test of time in the same way as the Nier OST which evokes a melancholic sadness.
With regard to character voice-overs, the voice acting is adequate but far from spectacular. It’s part of what made the early parts of the game fail to connect for me from a narrative perspective, and only near the end does the voice-acting have the range to make an impression. I was certainly not as impressed with the audio development of Stellar Blade as much as the visual production.
“This Now Concludes the EVE Protocol”
Even with some obvious qualms, I enjoyed my time with Stellar Blade. While its story unfortunately takes too long to leave an impression, the combat system certainly did. For a developer’s first rodeo, I truly appreciate the unique angle they found in occupying the middle ground between the character action games it apes, and the ever popular modern action game From Software has popularized. Even if it takes a bit for its combat to get cooking, once it goes, I kept craving for more. And with a strong visual style and polish from the get go, I am confident Shift Up has set themselves up for future success as they iron out the more obvious kinks.
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