Stellar Blade
Over the past few months, Stellar Blade has managed to make a lot of noise, primarily due to the appearance of the game’s protagonist, Eve. Western leading media and activists have been so focused on the issue of «realism» Eve’s shape that they have completely forgotten that Stellar Blade is a video game first and foremost, and no attractive girl can save it if it is not fun to play. Did the Korean developers succeed in making an interesting game or is the protagonist’s model appearance a boring, talentless fake? Let’s find out in our Stellar Blade review.
After many years of brutal conflicts, humanity was on the verge of extinction. But suddenly, an unprecedented life form — the Neytibi attacked the Earth. The aliens became the new owners of the planet, and humans fled to Earth’s orbit. After some time, the «Project Eve» appeared, and its goal is to retake the human home from the invaders. We play as Eve, an assault unit of the seventh airborne squadron.
At some point, everything went wrong and only Eva and Tachi, the squad leader, survived. If you’ve played the demo, which is essentially the beginning, you already know what happens next. After the long prologue, which here takes 4-5 hours, you will already have a feeling that something is wrong with this story. What exactly, we will be given small bits and pieces throughout the game.
If you’ve played the Nier dilogy, many of the story elements will be familiar to you. At some point, it seemed to me that the developers borrowed almost entire chunks of the story and story arcs from the games of Yoko Taro (author of the Drakengard/Nier series). And not only from him For example, The last place on Earth that serves as a refuge for those people who could not leave the planet is called Zion. And it is related to the Matrix not only by its name, but this is already spoiler territory.
Moving through history, life returns to the streets of the city. There are more people, additional tasks and activities. In this aspect, the developers acted very wisely, in my opinion, by dividing additional quests into two categories. There are additional missions that are marked on the map and each of which tells a separate story. There are not very many of them, but most of the ones I managed to complete were interesting and sometimes charming. Some even have a certain multi-level, but the next stage does not open immediately, but after a while, so as not to distract the player from the main plot.
I recommend not ignoring these «big» quests. In addition to a good story, they also give you a lot of experience, useful items, and some of them open up additional features, such as a barbershop. And most importantly, they don’t boil down to just «go kill», which is also nice.
There is also a bulletin board. The townspeople have their problems, so if you have the desire and time, you can help someone find a husband, someone who hasn’t received a valuable cargo from the carrier, and so on. As a rule, these tasks are elementary (sometimes too much), performed at the same location as the main quest, so you can collect a whole stack of similar ads. Again, they pay with gold and resources, and most of them are performed alongside other quests, so I don’t see any point in ignoring them. Unless you’re in a hurry to complete the game’s story.
After completing an additional task, the game offers to immediately teleport to the questmaster. This solution saves a lot of time and doesn’t take away from the atmosphere, because teleporters are already in the game.
The story will take us through several biomes, which are divided into zones. If you miss a secret or a box, don’t worry. At some point, the game allows you to return to the locations you’ve already visited with new abilities to collect resources. The only question is whether you want to do this because there are no special problems with resources. They are enough for basic tasks.
The biomes are really different, from an abandoned city that is being reclaimed by nature to the desert and stinking sewers, which are necessary in a setting like this. In general, the locations look good, but most of them don’t inspire any kind of excitement, they’re just good.
The game’s story and lore fall under the old joke «cheat in your words». But the developers, unfortunately, are not as talented as Yoko Taro, and therefore everything that happens to the story is either guessed very much in advance or does not arouse interest. As a bonus, some of the dialogues seem to have been written by a 5th grader who was assigned to prepare an episode in a cheap anime. Of course, most of the scenes are written well, the characters are also nice, but such individual, albeit very infrequent moments, somewhat detract from the generally serious mood of the game.
Stellar Blade’s combat system is based on the holy quartet: strong and weak attacks, blocking, and dodging. There are also beta abilities. These are essentially super attacks that use a special beta scale. The scale of striking opponents is filled in. Later, two more types of abilities will be unlocked, one of which is a variation of beta abilities, but with its own conditions. The other is the usual rage mode, which gives you exorbitant power for a short period of time.
Stellar Blade encourages you to play against counterattacks after a perfect block of a punch or a successful dodge of an attack. You can build entire combo chains on such counterattacks, which is facilitated by separate battle mechanics, such as mini-games with timings.At the beginning of the game, the combat is rather sluggish. There are no combo attacks as such, and there are few abilities. But this is a common problem with the slasher genre, so I wouldn’t put this point down.
From the middle of the game, when most of the abilities are unlocked, the combat looks like a whirlwind of swords and flesh, with Eve at the epicenter.
Augmentations with passive bonuses and firearms complement the combat. The drone serves as our escort here. But it is not an autonomous combat unit like in Nier: Automata. Eva physically picks up the drone and shoots it like in a regular shooter. The device has several types of projectiles, each suitable for different tasks and enemies. Firearms are difficult to integrate into combat, as in the same DMC, and therefore are more often used when the enemy opens vulnerable points, which happens to some large creatures under certain conditions.
In addition to the health scale, enemies also have stability. Only in Stellar Blade, it’s not a separate scale like Sekiro, but divisions. By perfectly blocking the enemies’ attacks, you take away their stability bars. As soon as they all disappear, you can perform a powerful attack that kills weak and medium enemies and deals a lot of damage to bosses.
However, this mechanic is fully revealed only in boss battles and is meaningless in the fight against ordinary enemies. It’s much faster to kill them in the usual way than to try to block their blows perfectly.
Stellar Blade takes a very long time to swing. This applies to both the combat and the enemies. For the first 5-7 hours, you have to fight the same dozen enemies. At some point, I began to doubt that the game would offer anything new at all, but I reached the wasteland and this question was settled a little.
This also applies to bosses. In the first 10-13 hours, we were given only 2-3 full-fledged bosses, and that’s including the secondary ones. And then in a row, within two hours, we got three main bastards.
The combat system is also taking a long time to gain momentum. Stellar Blade has two locked talent trees. The first of them opens in the middle of the game, and the second almost immediately after, in just an hour and a half, depending on how well you play
If the developers hadn’t shown us that new ability branches were waiting for us, maybe this problem wouldn’t have been so acute. And since I saw that new abilities were supposed to open up one day, and after 15 hours they were still closed, it was kind of depressing.
Stellar Blade has a lot of mini-games, but the developers are constantly introducing new ones or changing the rules of the old ones.
At the beginning of the game, the combat system did not arouse interest, but later it grew into something extensive and grandiose. At the same time, the mechanics are absolutely accessible to players with any experience in slashers or dynamic action games. We can even say that the authors were able to get closer to Platinum Games and the DMC series. Not in terms of similarity, but in terms of variability.
There’s no getting around the hype surrounding the sexualization of Stellar Blade’s protagonist. I don’t really have any complaints about Eve and her appearance. Yes, she looks… more relaxed than most heroines in AAA games, especially when compared to games by Western developers
However, the developers lose a sense of proportion and sometimes openly objectify the heroine, which the authors of Nier: Automata authors did not. This line is actually very thin and, of course, extremely subjective. Let me try to explain it with an example In Nier: Automata, if you try to look under 2B’s skirt, the heroine will wave the camera back to its normal position. If you do this several times, you’ll even get a trophy for perseverance. But in Stellar Blade, at certain moments, the authors can deliberately hold the camera from underneath for quite a long time.
Of course, I’m a white cisgender man, and I love trying on Eve’s costumes. But I couldn’t help but feel that the developers were going a little overboard in some of the staging moments.
Such shots are actually a problem primarily for those who want to see «beautiful» characters in games more often. All the opponents of such «beauty standards» in games are clinging to such moments of objectification. Creating an attractive character is only part of the battle. You need to give them personalities so that people don’t get the impression that they are just a beautiful shell to make the marketing department happy. Or at least not over-emphasize their sexuality with overtly adolescent angles. And it is with the latter point that the developers failed somewhat, in my opinion.
Stellar Blade lacks Ukrainian localization, but it is available in a short animated comic-prequels.
At the same time, I’m sure that if not for a few of these episodes, all the hype around the game would have stopped with its release. First and foremost, Stellar Blade is a good game with a dynamic, well-developed gameplay. The combat is the best thing about the game, and it’s what makes you want to move on to the finale. And yes, even if the game’s lore is made up of pieces of other people’s stories, the main thing is that in the end, Stellar Blade will not be forgotten as a scandalous game with a doll heroine. It will be remembered as a successful debut project by Korean developers who skillfully attracted attention to their game.