verdict
Stellar blades often look good and feature solid combat designs, and remain exciting throughout. But it’s disappointing by the dull plot and the bland cast of characters that don’t consistently fascinate the story over the course of the runtime.
Star Blade Open it with a pod that runs through the atmosphere before hitting Earth. Our hero Eve appears in a slow ponytail that flows through her unlikely techno supermodel figure, freed from the pod and surrounded by her arched back and a burst of flying combat in the distance. Soon, Eve is thrown into action. You learn to dodge around insect creatures, blow them off from their extended limbs and carve them in the agility of the fencing master. Everything is technical and hyperreal.
In Stellar Blade’s SF Future, Eves are designed to serve a specific purpose. Her job is to defeat monsters that overrun the planet and force the troubled remains of civilization into urban enclaves who wish to protect them from the threat of the dystopian world. When she meets an ordinary person, they often address her as a “angel” for her forces and descent from the universe to the world below.
Eve is designed to serve a similar purpose for players. She is intended to be a very capable warrior, inspiring her to see her passing through her enemies and flying around the battlefield with her superhuman acrobatics. And she is also intended to be a charming figure for wearing various outfits and decorating Ogle, perhaps, as the camera is on her body, as if it were her introductory cutscene.
Stellar Blade is good at achieving goals, for better or worse. Most of it runs across to expand the apocalyptic environment, climbing, swimming, running through rusty abandoned landscapes, or through abandoned facilities, but the heart of the game is combat.
Eve is a skilled fighter, and the star blades are modeled after a fluid design that sends maneuverable enemies with agility, jumps into the air and sends them with various combo attacks. This game excludes new additions to these systems (extra kinds of guns and special melee abilities). Animation and soundwork have a welcome impact on any hit, with a consistent need for various enemies to be broad enough to learn new tactics to adopt against them, and the interaction of the enemy and the player’s shield and the system dominating the health bar is all well considered.
Audiovisual sights of these battles also help keep them attractive when ripping weaker enemies or taking on a stronger boss. Stellar Blade is an impressive game in terms of fidelity and often also the appearance of its creatures and post-apocalyptic landscapes, but many sections of the semi-fine environment take a lot of time to wear thinly before the next one opens.
There is a great touch here and there to lift the tense time to sprint through the lush ruins of an abandoned metropolitan city dotted with wet sewer systems and crumbling statues. With narrow alleys and street mazes and streets filled with shops, the city of Xion ultimately hums in life nowhere else in an apocalyptic environment. Its architecture alone shows its location in the plot as an oasis of the vast desert of the devastated Earth.
It also has a moody level that leads to an overwhelmingly large research station chamber, and is built on a very large scale, so the Eve warps with distant ceilings and distant walls. On PC, it’s all particularly cool and can showcase the strengths and visual fidelity of the game in combat, and it’s enhancing the best way to play it.
Some of the character designs are exceptional, like the magical Oakar, like the sad singer Enya, whose bodies and heads are made up of irony, with their bodies and heads erected above the robotic shell, giving way to knotted wires and metal machines.
The monsters that make up most of the enemies in the game are wonderfully grotesque. They charge or wander as if to be uncomfortable with their own strange anatomy, bodies resembling bugs and sea creatures, chunks of rock animation, or bodies resembling the abstract growth of diseased flesh. Most often, the characters are made up of people ideal for the absurd, with the main cast featuring a lineup of men with strong jaws and plastic women. It’s especially good enough to read as a parody, especially when you encounter an angelic guard from another world dressed in latex and lace lingerie, or when you notice that Eve.
However, despite the efforts devoted to surface sexual attraction, it is a very chaste game in terms of characterization and intrigue. Beneath the surface of the character, you will not be able to encounter anything other than digital objects throughout the entire conversation or plot event. Stellar Blade is a game filled with dolls rather than people, and like puppets, its cast doesn’t seem to be anything more than an approximation of humanity. They are plastic representations that do not convincingly express thoughts and emotions that could make characters capable of developing meaningful connections.
For this reason, the plot of the game – a well-served science fiction story with no outstanding elements – ends up flat. This is a hodgepodge of apocalyptic themes and meditations about technology that have been repeated enough to be instantly familiar to other media. Even though Eve and the other cast are too one note to resonate, even acknowledge that the blades of stars reflect, in part, what being “human” means in a world far different from our own. Without a set of characters that can be trusted to lock that idea in place, the plot won’t get caught up in anything truly memorable, no matter how it twists and complicated itself.
There’s plenty of Star Blades to recommend as a solid action game, but the experience overall is just as empty as its portrayal of its protagonist. Star blades like Eve can have flashy and thrilling battles, even if they don’t exist much beneath the surface that can be spoken to the player in the shallowest terms.
