In the world of sports, there is nothing more exciting than a rookie. If a rookie shows you just about anything positive in their first year in the pros, your mind starts to extrapolate all the ways that player could become a superstar.
Video games can often feel the same way. When you see a new developer make something excellent on their first attempt, it’s easy to start thinking about all the ways that the next game could improve, and how that studio could become the next powerhouse.
Shift Up Games isn’t exactly a rookie. They were founded in 2013. But they were founded with a focus on mobile games, and Stellar Blade is their first AAA title. There are times when that inexperience shows, but despite being rookies to AAA, they managed to make an incredible looking game that gets almost all the most important things right. It’s not hard to see how Shift Up could become one of the better action game developers out there with time. I would say they are very firmly not there yet, but Stellar Blade is still the kind of effort that shows an incredible amount of promise.
The Combat is Reasonably Sexy
Stellar Blade is probably best described as a souls-lite. Many of its levels have a similar system to souls games, with respawning enemies and checkpoints. However, there are difficulty settings, and while almost enemy can kill you if you aren’t careful, I would not classify this as a particularly hard game when on normal. The game is mostly linear, with some smaller open world areas at a couple of points during the journey.
I found myself vastly preferring the linear sections of the game to the open world areas. A lot of that is because the combat in the game is very well done, and the linear sections of the game allow for better pacing when it comes to combat encounters. The biggest strength is the parry mechanic, which feels great thanks to the excellent sound design around it and responsive controls. If you parry an enemy enough times, you can do a critical hit, which will kill most basic enemies. The animations for those kills are also excellent and add to the reward for successful parrying. I did find a lot of the standard enemies to have pretty basic and repetitive attack patterns, which is the main reason that I don’t find the bulk of the game to be particularly difficult. But thanks to everything else surrounding the parry mechanic, they still feel great and rewarding whenever I did them.
There is also a dodge mechanic that allows you to “perfect dodge” attacks and transition quickly into a counterattack. These can be fun at times, but it never felt quite as rewarding or intuitive as the parry, so I mostly only used it for attacks that I absolutely had to dodge because they couldn’t be parried.
By parrying, dodging, and attacking, you also build up two different special attack gauges, which are your main way of doing damage outside of the parry criticals. Once again, the animations, sound design, and even camera angle choices make all 8 of the special moves that you get feel great. I found myself mostly sticking to a few, but executing on them still felt amazing every time. You also have a mode which can best be described as a “rage” mode (it’s not called that, but the name of it would be a spoiler), where you are invincible and can dish out an unlimited amount of special attacks as well. Between all these things, there is a lot going on in Stellar Blade that allows combat to feel engaging, and that makes you feel powerful all of the time.
All of this comes together very nicely for the boss fights, which are easily the highlight of the combat. The aforementioned basic enemy attack patterns go away for these fights, and bosses throw together a more challenging array of attacks at you. I thought the difficulty balancing was really nice on normal as well, as while a few bosses tripped me up a few times, nothing was completely overwhelming. Parrying and dodging are both at their best during these fights, and it is truly when the combat excels the most.
The only real issue with the boss fights is that the kind of dull amount of basic attacks in the game get exposed a little bit. Perhaps it’s because the design around the special attacks is so good, but the standard attacks in the game never feel great to use. The sound and visual design is much weaker, and I felt relatively limited in the amount of combos that I could use. Getting too involved with the combos that you do have can put you in a bad spot to get countered as well. So combat can reach a flow where you mostly wait to parry, maybe land a few basic attacks, and then build up your gauges enough where you can spam multiple special attacks in a row. And once again, there is a lot of fun in this, especially with how good the parry is, but I did find myself wishing the combat had a bit more natural flow to it, as well as a few more options as to how I could play. With things as they are, and with most of the gameplay clips I’ve seen, I feel like most people play the game in a pretty similar way. That’s not a terrible thing, but it was a bit disappointing. Combat is a strength in Stellar Blade overall, but the times in-between the big moments held back things just enough where I would say that I still preferred several other combat systems from this year over this one.
The Real Culture War Fight Should Have Been Dub vs. Sub Here
It’s a relief that combat is as strong as it is in Stellar Blade because only one other aspect of the game truly operates at a high level, in my opinion. The story really never drew me in even a little bit (outside of one thing at the end that kind of surprised me), and most of it ends up being pretty predictable and generic. Oftentimes, a boring story can be covered up by interesting characters, but the characters might be even worse than the story. Every character is pretty dull, and I had next to no attachment to any of them. The main character, Eve, at least has a fun accent with her voice actor that I enjoyed. No such luck with Eve’s main sidekick, Adam. Adam’s voice actor delivers one of the worst AAA performances I can remember. Every line of delivery is lifeless and filled with very awkward spacing. He doesn’t tend to have long stretches of dialogue, but the few times he did, I almost found myself laughing with how painful and bad it was. I am someone who is almost always going to pick the dub over the sub, but picking the Korean voice actors might actually be the better play here.
The art direction also suffers from being pretty uninspired most of the way through the game. The fidelity in Stellar Blade is phenomenal, so everything looks nice, but I was pretty surprised with how incredibly generic just about every area in the game looked. There is rarely anything interesting going on in the background with Stellar Blade, so despite the game looking nice in many ways, I didn’t even care that there wasn’t a photo mode, as I probably wouldn’t have used it much outside of combat.
Luckily, the music does not suffer from this fate and is actually one of the biggest strengths of the game. Stellar Blade has one of the more eclectic soundtracks I’ve heard in a bit. It goes from jazzy to K-pop to some light rock throughout, depending on the circumstances. Outside of one or two songs, I loved almost everything here. This at least deserves a nomination for soundtrack at The Game Awards this year, for sure.
The music also helped enhance the open world parts of the game in particular since these areas have much slower pacing than the linear parts of the game. Outside of the occasional upgrade and collectible, there is a bit too much dead space in these areas for my liking, given that I didn’t really care to take in the world all that much. Stellar Blade does throw a surprising amount of side quests at you, but unfortunately, almost none of these are all that compelling outside of the occasional quest that allows you to fight a boss.
The open world areas of the game also feature most of the platforming in the game, which is just not good. Jumping is imprecise as best, and it was always hard to predict exactly how far I needed to go to reach a ledge, as sometimes I would grab on with no problems, and sometimes I’d fall short despite seemingly not being that far away. Luckily, platforming isn’t super prevalent in the game, but the occasional sections where they pop up are just not great.
But despite my issues with Stellar Blade, the core of the game is its combat, and that combat is really damn good. It’s not perfect, but it nails almost everything that it really needed to. The last 40% of the game or so is almost exclusively linear, and that was when the game really went to the next level for me, between all the skills I had unlocked and some improved pacing that came with not wandering around a more open world anymore. I’m not sure if I would call this game “stellar”, but it is certainly very good, and worth a look for anyone interested in this genre.
Score: 8.0/10
Big Nerd Gaming 
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