Stellar Blade [Review]

Stellar Blade was, for me, very easy to summarize:

The bosses are really nice, although with fake health thresholds that stops the battle in weird ways, and the combat mechanics are crisp. Outside of that – the boss experiences – the game can't really shine.

I've traversed through repetitive, desolate and not much inspired 'apocalyptic' environments with the occasional dungeon / mini dungeon that is often too dark and full of “now that you found this door, go fetch the keys” that felt really like a PS3 era style of game design.

All the RPG mechanics aren't that flashed out. After some time, the skill tree gets really uninteresting and there aren't many ways for the player to express themselves through gameplay.

The story is a big contradiction. It is really puritan; almost biblical in its core message. That's not a problem alone, but the characters are regularly really, really hot, and I had these billion costumes to be almost nude, at the same time that the game is everything but sexy or edgy. It is a really shallow presentation, unfortunately, that doesn't care much about its content nor the player.

The main character is using a sexy bikini to fight monsters while preaching that people shouldn't… curse?

Stellar Blade has great boss battles, and it is sometimes pretty with good combat mechanics, but the game itself is very derivative and irritating. The characters constantly recommends what the player should do – if you see a ladder, be sure that your companion will say “look! A ladder!” and there's yellow paint on it. The handholding here is real in both the narrative and gameplay.

There are 4-ish 'big' side quest chains that are nice. All the other ones are really terrible fetch quests or go kill x amount of monsters. Stellar Blade is a game that I sure had fun, but only that. The definition of mediocre.

5.5/10