4/5 ★ – Nirv's review of Stellar Blade.

Stellar Blade is an awesome game and great first AAA outing for Shift Up, but it’s got some big problems. Some story spoilers below. Firstly, Stellar Blade’s combat is great, taking inspiration from Devil May Cry and Nier Automata. There’s plenty of combos, special skills and even a limit break mode. I particularly liked the action queueing system. It feels like attacks are on a slight delay and your parry takes priority, skipping the queue and animation canceling with near frame perfect timing. I can’t really name another game that has felt like that. But, the combat feels really bad when you run into mobs of enemies. It’s so hard to handle more than one enemy at once, you practically are forced to use your AOE Beta or Burst attack. Also, I used the combat items maybe a handful of times the whole game. I’m sure they have their uses but I just didn’t see the necessity ever. Outside of combat, the gameplay is typical action adventure where you’re running around linear/larger sections and exploring shallow locations for hidden items, etc. The platforming is pretty bad, and there’s a ton of it. It just feels like you over shoot every possible jump. There’s some really fantastic set pieces though like Eidos 7 and Spire 4. And then there’s genuinely bland and boring set pieces like the Wasteland and Great Desert. They effectively feel like the same location because it’s just sand and rocks everywhere for both. Some camps (functionally the same as meditation points in Star Wars Jedi) not having fast travel points for whatever reason make these locations such a slog to travel through. The disparity with some locations having maps and others not is such a weird design decision. Oddly, I didn’t hate the gimmick sections (Altess and Abyss Levoire) though. They had a nice horror vibe to them that I enjoyed. One thing I was really impressed by were the animations. Climbing a ladder/rope, mantling a box, sword sliding, special moves, they all look insanely good and well animated. Especially in boss fights and executions where you see special cinematic animations that’ll blow your socks off. The kills are just so visceral. The boss fights are also engaging and well designed, I don’t think there were any that I felt were corny and needed to be cheesed. This game has way too many collectibles and there’s just way too much exposition going on with each. I managed to find what feels like everything and it has to be damn near 1,000 collectibles. I read maybe 30 of them, mostly because I noticed they outright spoil the twists and plot points which is crazy. Though I did love collecting the cans because it’s something so normal to us and in this world it just makes sense that they’d be hard to find. It’s just a little bit of extra goofy and I can appreciate that. Something that disappointed me were the character designs. Every character looks like they’re out of a completely different game. And it’s crazy when you run around Xion and it looks like Sanctuary from Borderlands 2 with the cell shading, but Stellar Blade is a completely art style. Eve, Adam and Lily look so wildly different from each other it’s so hard to suspend disbelief. The enemy designs on the other hand were fantastic and they’re very reminiscent of “lore accurate angels” (more on this later). But like the Elder Naytiba is an insane design, I fucking love it. Eve’s outfits were generally fantastic too, all bringing something *ahem* unique. My favorite was the punk top, which you don’t get until pretty late into the game sadly. Different hairstyles/colors for Eve was a nice touch too. The game runs pretty well on performance mode and still looked great too! I only noticed some frame drops in one of the very final fights where there’s a ton happening. The soundtrack is pretty damn good, especially the theme in Eidos 7. There’s some really, really good boss themes too. On the other hand, voice acting is not great. I played in English and Eve is pretty good, but mostly everybody else is pretty fine at best. I don’t want to say I was disappointed by the story and plot because I expected it really but man it is not good. So much of the exposition is done through the collectibles and they freaking spoil some of the huge twists in them which is insane to me. Not that the twists aren’t telegraphed and you don’t see them coming from 20 miles away, because you do. And it stays 20 miles away because the pacing is so damn slow. The middle 20% - 80% are every which way of pacing nightmare. The first 20 are redeemable because of Eidos 7 and being new to the world. The last 20% are actually pretty damn good and really could be near perfect for the title if they trimmed some of the fat. But, yeah that third act is definitely the best part of the game. And realistically the game is a sub 20 hour playthrough for non-completionists, so it’s really not *that* bad overall. It is a little on the nose sharing some same motifs with the Bible and having the main cast being named Adam, Eve and Lilith. Somebody definitely watched Evangelion before watching/designing the game and said I want that. It is very funny that the naytibas are kinda fucked up and then you eventually get to the lore accurate angel naytibas like Demogorgon fully revealed in space. The emotional beats of the story never really hit, mostly because you have no engagement with any of the characters involved. Most of the characters are pretty bland overall. Eve is pretty lifeless for most of the game. She definitely gets better as the game goes on but a lot of that growth you only see from banter with side characters you do a string a quests for. Adam and Lily though are so damn boring man. Overall though I was pretty impressed with the booba game, even after playing the beta. Genuinely interesting world and nice set pieces, awesome combat and enemy designs. Those are the big things I look for in action adventure games so I was left pretty happy. Plus, bonus points for fishing. The refuse Adam ending is alright. The accept Adam ending with Lily at 100% affinity is hype as hell. And it seems like they’re interested in a sequel based on the post credits. I do think there’s a lot of potential for this studio after this first outing. They just need to buff out some of the rougher parts.