Stellar Blade Review: No Sharp Edges

Good video games know what they are. A strong sense of self-awareness about their strengths and weaknesses — it could be the game’s narrative chops or its mechanical robustness — make for games that don’t suffer from an identity crisis. It also prevents games from feeling bloated and scatterbrained. But a concentrated approach can force-fit a straitjacket onto a game, as well, leaving it feeling like a one trick pony.

Stellar Blade, the debut game from Korean studio Shift Up, is also laser-focussed on its singular skillset. As an action-adventure title, it zeroes in on the action with admirable flair, but it purposefully avoids complexity in almost every other department to deliver an experience that constantly urges you forward and deeper into its combat playground with barely any meaningful distractions along the way.

If you want a more rounded experience from your video game, if you desire meaningful side quests, an affecting story and three-dimensional characters, then Stellar Blade will stop short of ticking the right boxes. But, if a 20-hour single-minded rush through monster-infested levels, adorned with kinetic action, challenging boss fights, and flashy visuals, sounds appealing to you, then it will serve exactly what it promises.

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Stellar Blade is also not completely barren when it comes to ideas: its grotesque monster designs, while derivative, are interesting and often anachronistic, fitting the nightmarish world of Bloodborne more than the slick ruins of planet Earth in Stellar Blade, thus making for an unsettling experience whenever they show up; the excellent in-game music not only underscores the frenetic combat, but also accentuates the idle time between the encounters; and the game is almost perfectly paced between cascading sections of breathless action and idyllic moments of relief.

And then, there’s the much talked about character design for the protagonist, Eve, a space soldier dropped onto a post-apocalyptic Earth to save the remnants of humanity and take down the violent, monstrous species that roams the planet. Eve is designed as an E-girl, with anime eyes, flowing silky hair, voluptuous body and skin-tight outfits to match the whole persona. It’s nothing you’ve not seen in anime and other forms of online media before, but it certainly stands out in the video games medium. Games have long been accused of designing their female characters from a hyper-sexualised male gaze (think Lara Croft in Tomb Raider) and the medium has often veered into sexist and stereotypical depictions of women in general.

Eve’s character design is highly sexualised, but little attention is paid to her personality
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

That’s not to say that games have not had iconic strong female characters — you can criticise Lara Croft’s design, but the character took a life of her own beyond video games and reclaimed her sexuality to emerge as perhaps one of the earliest and longest lasting sex symbols in the medium. And she had the personality to match. Even if you’ve not played Tomb Raider games you know of Lara as feisty, intelligent and indefatigable. It’s a testament to the characters’ aura that she later went on to be portrayed by Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider films. The same goes for Bayonetta, another video game heroine known for her risqué character design and personality. The leather-clad witch never shies away from embracing her femininity and is just as ready to drop an indecent innuendo as she is likely to drop you dead.

The same, however, cannot be said for Eve. Her overtly sexual depiction is aggressively incongruous with her boring, flat personality. She doesn’t have the confidence and charisma to match the in-your-face suggestiveness of her character design. She’s neither as embracing as Bayonetta, nor as empowered as Lara to own her sexuality, thus making her persona feel like a hormonal teenager’s idea of what sexy is supposed to be. Heck, Eve doesn’t even have an idea of who she is. Had the designers at Shift Up paid as much attention to her personality and identity as they did to her backside, the Stellar Blade heroine probably wouldn’t have ended up seeming like a sex doll with a sword.

Eve lacks depth and characterisation and thus ends up as a boring heroine
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Stellar Blade is not aiming for narrative excellence either. There’s a functional story about an Earth left to its ruinous fate after humans lost a war to Naytibas — monstrous, blood-thirsty creatures that now infest the planet. Driven away from their home and now living in a colony in space, humans send an airborne squad of angelic warriors to defeat the Naytibas and take back what was lost.

Eve and her squad are dropped into the middle of the conflict, and we’re taken through a quick tutorial section that dives into the basics of attacking, blocking, dodging and parrying. Most of the squad is lost during a planetfall gone wrong and Eve soon loses her mentor, Tachy, to a Naytiba attack. She barely survives the Naytiba encounter herself and escapes with the help of Adam, a human scavenger who survived the initial conflict and remained on the last human settlement on the planet.

The story then takes predictable routes as Eve gathers her strength and embarks on a journey to save mankind and eliminate the Elder Naytiba, the leader of the monsters. She’s aided by Adam, who guides her way through the devastated planet, and Lily, an engineer from an earlier expedition, who crafts new gear pieces and upgrades for her. There are some twists along the way and a final-act revelation that threatens to upend the nature of the conflict itself. But the narrative never rises above being merely serviceable.

Eve’s journey takes her though city blocks left in ruin
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

The characters lack any depth beyond the archetypes they inhabit, and the voice acting is delivered as flat as a slice of bread. The writing is mostly expository, and we barely get to know more about the people on the screen, their motivations and desires. Eve and her allies interact in robotic ways, going through the motions of their programming — they might as well talk in binary. There’s no dramatic or emotional thrust to the story and the sky-high stakes are left feeling weightless at every crucial turn. And as a game that tries so hard to be sexy, Stellar Blade is ironically completely sexless. Beyond the caricature of provocative physicality and juvenile eroticism, the game and its characters lack any real allure and sexual tension.

Eve is supposed to be this overpowered interstellar soldier with a perfectly sculpted body and an army of abilities at her disposal. She carries a sword the size of a streetlamp that she uses as a hairpin when she’s not in combat! She should be cocksure and witty, dropping foes and jokes in the same breath. But she mostly turns up meek and unsure of her own place and purpose on this planet. Eve is ostensibly presented as a dress-up Barbie meant for the male fantasy — change her cute outfits and swap out one schoolgirl haircut for another before you head to battle.

Eve’s outfit and hairstyle can be changed, but she lacks a personality
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

But it’s the battle part in Stellar Blade that distinguishes itself even as the rest of the parts fail to rise above generic video game design. Shift Up has acknowledged taking inspiration from PlatinumGames’ acclaimed action-RPG, Nier: Automata, both in its themes and its action. And while Stellar Blade’s combat lacks the versatility of the 2017 classic, you can clearly see the similarities in the kineticism of the moves. The combat in the game is flashy, based on chained combos and special Beta abilities that come with exaggerated animations and deal devastating damage.

The combat basics are what you’d expect: you memorise enemy attack patterns, dodge or parry incoming attacks and hit back with chained attacks linked to specific button combinations. When you dodge or counter an enemy at just the right moment before the attack lands, you execute a perfect dodge or parry and get a chance to riposte and deal back damage. These defensive and offensive actions slowly fill up the Beta gauge, which allows players to utilise Beta skills in combat. These special abilities, triggered by holding down the left bumper on the DualSense controller and pressing corresponding face buttons, come with unique animations and deal high damage to the enemy’s health or shields.

Later in the game, you also unlock Burst skills, activated by holding down R1 and corresponding face buttons, that result in massive area-of-effect attacks capable of inflicting damage to multiple foes. These are some of the flashiest moves in Stellar Blade, usually accompanied by a long winding-up animation and an explosive impact.

Stellar Blade’s combat and boss fights are its brightest spots
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Aside from these special abilities and melee attack combos dealt with her sword, Eve also has a variety of ranged attack options at her disposal. You begin with a selection of grenades that deal damage to enemy health or shields and later upgrade your drone to double as a versatile firearm that can discharge standard slugs, a charged laser attack, homing missiles, shotgun shells and more. Upgrade modules obtained via exploration and combat lets you further enhance the capabilities of the firearm. While these ranged attacks don’t quite replace the melee combat, they bring a bit of handy firepower that can be used in tandem with the sword attacks.

Stellar Blade also allows for a bit of perfunctory stealth: you can slowly walk up behind an enemy or position yourself on a ledge above them and hit the triangle button when the contextual prompt comes up on the screen to execute them in a single blow. These executions replenish the Beta gauge and once upgraded, can be chained together to take down multiple enemies. These stealth interactions, however, are a bit clunky and you can sometimes end up not locking into the contextual execution action and instead trigger a standard heavy attack and alert the enemy of your presence.

The platforming and exploration sections in Stellar Blade suffer from similar jank. While general movement in the game — running, sprinting and jumping — work as expected, when a combination of these is required to be performed with precision in specifically designed platforming sections, the game just falls apart. The game loses all fluidity and slickness during these sections and Eve feels like she’s been straitjacketed with her animations feeling stiff. Some of these platforming sections are also functionally broken. Later in the game, you unlock the wall running ability and soon meet platforming sections where you have to chain wall runs to reach across wide gaps. I didn’t die in the entire game as much as died in these sections. Jumping off a wall run into another is so imprecise and clunky that these sections grate against the general slickness of the rest of the game.

Stellar Blade’s levels come with clunky platforming sections
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Action games live and die at the altar of their combat systems, and with story and characters taking a backseat in Stellar Blade, the scrutiny falls onto its action gameplay. Here, Shift Up’s game gives a good account of itself. Combat in stellar blade is weighty, but never weighed down. There’s a satisfying crunch to the action, but it also feels flowing and freeform. While attack inputs are limited to a standard and a heavy attack, there are enough combos here for attacks to not feel repetitive. Beta and Burst skills bring a bit of flair to the combat and meaningful skill tree updates keep bringing new abilities to the table.

While the general design of the Naytibas is limited to a select few foes that keep repeating across levels, it’s the boss encounters that truly stand out. Bosses in Stellar Blade have distinct monstrous designs and require you to be quick on your feet and smart about when you choose to stop being defensive and attack. To be clear, these fights are nowhere near as difficult as the ones in Soulslike games, even though Stellar Blade adapts a few tenets from the genre and presents them in a more accessible way. But these encounters are always thrilling and fun, and the excellent visuals and rousing music help sell a sense of scale and a feeling of “this s**t is epic and cool!”

Stellar Blade’s boss encounters are thrilling and fun
Photo Credit: Shift Up

But what I enjoyed more were the moments of idyllic relief that punctuate these kinetic encounters. Before and after taking on big, mean bosses or groups of enemies lining a particular section of the level, you come across camps that let you rest and replenish your consumables. These camps essentially act as bonfires from Dark Souls, offering a relief from the dangers that litter the map, but also respawning Naytibas you’ve slain in the level once you sit down and rest.

Beyond the functional purpose of the camps, however, I was more taken by their aesthetic appeal every time they popped up in a level. They are presented as a curated space evoking a nostalgic idea of recreation. There’s a cozy chair, a record player playing chill tunes that you can cycle through, a vending machine that acts as shop for items and consumables, and a giant parasol covering it all to give a sense of a beach vacation or a lazy weekend in the backyard. The camps themselves aren’t novel at all, but their visual juxtaposition against the monster-infested ruins of planet Earth creates an interesting motif.

Camping out in Stellar Blade
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

Stellar Blade shines in the visual department in general, too. Even if there’s little personality to the art design, there’s a staggering amount of polish to everything on screen. The game’s representation of a post-apocalyptic planet is rarely fresh, and you can see it borrowing ideas from different forms of media that have come before. But it all looks so good! Walking through ruined city blocks and dimly lit, dilapidated interiors is an immersive experience. And Stellar Blade also often pauses at certain points to let you admire the apocalypse, presenting stunning vistas of a devastated planet. The linearity of the game, too, lends itself to the graphical fidelity seen across levels, each of which brings a distinct aesthetic.

Stellar Blade is not an open-world game, but it does open up after the first act of the story when you reach the last surviving human settlement of Xion. Here, the game lets you indulge in some dull and repetitive side quests and presents, for the first time, a map of the open section to let you explore the city and its surrounding wilderness. It’s telling, but not surprising, that this open area feels lacklustre compared to the more compelling visual aesthetics and design of the linear levels. Stellar Blade is a PS5 exclusive and the performance on the console remained consistent for me, with expected framerate dips in demanding sections. It would, however, be an ideal candidate for a PC port down the line, with its slick graphical presentation an ideal fit for the platform.

Stellar Blade often pauses to let you admire the apocalypse
Photo Credit: Shift Up/ Screenshot – Manas Mitul

When it comes to action-adventure titles that put their combat systems in the spotlight, Stellar Blade has entered a very competitive field. By de-emphasising narrative, characters and ancillary gameplay features, it attempts to go toe-to-toe with games that focus on real-time melee combat. But it also pales in comparison to action-heavy games like Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Nier, and Final Fantasy. And it doesn’t help Shift Up’s cause that these titles also bring more than just fun hack-and-slash combat to the table.

DMC and Bayonetta games have always had a distinct personality, and Final Fantasy, despite leaning towards real-time action combat in recent titles, has always placed its strong characters, meaningful RPG systems and sprawling stories front and centre. Stellar Blade doesn’t do that. Shift Up has also clearly tried to appeal to a certain sensibility with its lead character design. However, a protagonist provocative on the surface, but completely unremarkable in every other layer beneath can only carry the allure so far. Eventually, Stellar Blade is held up its fun combat and slick presentation, but it’s consistently held back by almost everything else.

Pros