French developers Spiders and publisher Nacon have teamed up to release a new third person action RPG that has gameplay design typically found in the Souls-like genre. In Steelrising, players control Aegis, a sentient automaton with combat skills, who is determined to repel the evil King’s automaton army in an alternate history take on the French Revolution of 1789. The mad king (Louis XVI if I recall) and his cohort have taken a robotic technology that was intended to help the people of France and turned it violently against them, crushing all opposition in a far-reaching power grab. Fortunately for France, the Queen takes action by dispatching Aegis to battle against the king’s army to restore peace and order, over the course of a long night.
When the game begins, players have some customization over the appearance and character type of Aegis. You can choose from several different faces for example, and throughout the game different armor can further change her appearance (more on that later). There are four character types including a hardened warrior, a dancer, or one more adept at the alchemy aspects that make up a large part of the gameplay. I chose the dancer type as this character type seemed to be a good balance and less-tank like. I knew I wanted to leverage some lighter, quicker weapons that wouldn’t tax my endurance meter as much. Regardless of what character type you choose, I don’t know that it makes much difference as you get into the game and begin to trade in anima essence to level up your characteristics.
Spiders are known for their RPG games, so its no surprise that there are lots of RPG elements to Steelrising that come in the form of choosing how to spend your XP on character upgrades, weapon upgrades, items, other character upgrades (known as Modules) — and with no limits on the amount of gear you can carry or how much you can level up (at least no limit that I have found, and I ended the game as a level 38), there’s a lot to spend your XP on. Not to mention there are eight weapon varieties with five variants each, so you will discover or be able to purchase chains imbued with fire (my favorite weapon), large hammers, muskets, batons, fans, and other types. Early in the game I settled on the Fire Chain and the Halberd whose special ability was to shoot, and though I sampled all of the other weapons, these were what I used for probably 90% of the game to great effect.
Aegis will also come across a variety of armor, but as with the weapons, what I found in the first four hours or so of the game was what I used the entire game (which was roughly 18-20 hours, though I didn’t keep close track). Most of the armor is cosmetic, and offers just a little resistance boost to one of the three alchemy elements (Fire, Ice, Fulmination). I sold every piece of armor that didn’t actually give me a generic armor boost, as I personally wasn’t too concerned how Aegis looked beyond that initial setup at the start of the game.
After the opening cutscene that begins to set the stage of an impressively deep and wide story with a lot of compelling NPCs, Aegis takes to the field for battle. R1 and R2 are you light and heavy attacks, L2 is your special attack. Circle for dash, X for jump, L3 to sprint, R3 to lock-on — the control scheme was tight and familiar. Unlike Thymesia that I recently played through and reviewed, Steelrising uses an endurance meter such that nearly every action you take consumes some amount of endurance. You can upgrade your endurance, get vials that restore it quickly, modules that improve it passively, and also leverage a sort of mini-game where, depending on your precision of pressing Triangle at the right time, you can get some of your endurance back. If you fail to press it at the right time you will sustain some frost damage, enough of which will cause Aegis to be frozen in place for several seconds, though button-mashing can help her break out of the ice quicker.
As you would expect, sprinting, jumping, and dodging all consume endurance, as do attacks, so you have to get into the right cadence with your actions. The ‘Heavy’ weapons (which are marked as such in the menus) are slower, and take more endurance to maneuver. This is all well and good and familiar to anyone who has played games like this before, it’s part of the challenge and the strategy. This gameplay element isn’t too hard to get used to, but it is important to get familiar and comfortable with as you play. As with other Souls-like games, should Aegis die in battle, players are warped back to their last save point and have to get back to where they died to reclaim their lost Anima Essence (XP). On that note, I thought the distribution of the save points in Steelrising was very balanced and fair. Many times in the first several hours of the game the save point looked like an oasis in the desert — I was so relieved! It’s at these save points where you can spend your XP and buy and sell items. Careful to make sure you don’t actually sell goods when you intend to buy, I did that twice. And while I had the option to buy the items back, their price went up sometimes ten-fold. However, somewhere around the 2/3rd’s point of the game, it didn’t really matter anymore, and I’ll explain that shortly.
I found Steelrising to be a lot of fun and I was impressed with the amount of effort Spiders put into the story, the side quest story elements, the characters, and the dialog. Lots of cutscenes explain key plot points, and players can also find (pretty easily) many Echoes that give more backstory to major events and NPCs. To draw one more comparison to Thymesia, the entire lore, codex, NPCs, story, all of that was far more developed and robust in Steelrising than Thymesia. The voice-acting is very well done, and I liked the inclusion of a lot of the French language mixed in, too. I liked the sandbox or open world design that allowed me to revisit areas with newfound abilities and objectives as well. These three extra abilities add another layer to gameplay. Aegis gains a grapple hook, a flying kick, and a dash/air dash move that let her reach new areas. Every new area gets a little addendum in your codex that provides a little background to it, by the way. These abilities can also be leveraged in combat and each has their own alchemy perk as well (if you dash into a foe, it will deliver some Frost damage, for example). That said, these moves and most of the special moves (each weapon has one, be it a block, ranged attack, combo, etc) consume Alchemical Capsules, which are purchasable in large quantity and cheaply at save spots. Plus, most enemies drop these Capsules so you’re not likely to run out. I always made sure to have at least 30 of these, and then later in the game I kept at least 150 around because it was so easy to do so.
Some areas where Steelrising lacks would be in the graphics, level design, and the difficulty and balance. I’ll attempt to explain what I mean for each of these, beginning with the graphics. In terms of fidelity, I thought Steelrising looked pretty aged on the PS5. I’m not entirely sure what to attribute this too, but it just didn’t have the visual oomph that I was expecting. Most textures seem to lack detail and crispness. There can be some difficult camera angles and clipping at times, and draw distance is often pretty limited; still, the framerate was smooth, so that was a plus. I liked the UI and HUD as well. The color palette felt limited, too; there are an awful lot of drab browns and grays, tons of wood and stone buildings. I can’t tell you how many hundreds, if not into the thousands, of empty brown barrels and brown boxes I destroyed in the pursuit of item drops. Now, there are a lot of greens as well with trees and curated gardens and things, but overall the visual impact was fairly underwhelming.
Likewise, several of the eight total levels look and especially feel really similar to another, and that gets a little bit tiresome. Most of the levels have an underground sewers area for example, with hallways and ninety degree turns, and then also the city areas look and feel really similar to one another, too. I will say that once the side quests start to really pour in from the NPCs, I was really thankful that it was easy to run past enemies I had previously defeated. I wasn’t really excited about revisiting and replaying through the same areas, so being able to run past them was nice. What was also really nice of Spiders was to introduce Carriage Tokens that warp you immediately back to Aegis’ horseless carriage. This carriage, introduced pretty early on, is used to travel between the different levels at your leisure to level-grind, explore, do side quests, or what have you.
In terms of the difficulty and balance, I thought the game was very well balanced in the first few hours as I got used to gameplay and started gradually leveling up. There came a point, though, probably just after the halfway mark, where “suddenly” I was really overpowered. I had just turned a corner, I guess, and there was nothing the game would throw at me that I couldn’t beat with incredible ease. Now, if I got sloppy then I could still get killed, sure, because enemies can do a lot of damage when they land their hits. Still, I no longer had any concern over facing a mid-level boss or a Titan — I had upgraded my character, my modules, my weapons, and I had a huge stock of inventory including many dozens of healing vials and all matter of grenades. The game became grossly unbalanced, to be blunt, and I could literally walk into what was supposed to be an epic boss fight and steamroll through it by keeping a little bit of distance, spamming grenades to immobilize the foe, and then getting in close to land some big melee hits. This strange shift in the balance of the difficulty soured the experience for that last third or so of the game. I still enjoyed the story and completing the main and side quests, don’t get me wrong, but a huge part of the experience (the combat and RPG elements) were rendered not quite moot, but at least were a lot less compelling than before.
Despite these few, but significant, issues, I really enjoyed playing through Steelrising and look forward to continuing it with the DLC that’s due out in November. A New Game+ mode is also supposed to be on the way, but I don’t see myself playing that given how easy the game got to be in the latter stages. In sum, there’s a lot of good to Steelrising, I had a great time doing a thorough playthrough, but a few significant drawbacks temper the overall experience and keep it from getting into that upper tier of greatness.
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