I didn’t set out to play a bunch of soulslike games really close to each other; really I didn’t. Thymesia just so happened to fill a gap in my schedule even though I wasn’t super convinced it’d be worth my time and then, it just so happened, that my favourite forever B-grade developer Spiders released their next game: a soulslike. Now I am not one to turn down an opportunity to play yet another game from this developer, even if I’m playing it for all the wrong reasons. I am somewhat excited (and ashamed at myself) to say that it seems little has changed with Spiders who continue to have a reach that exceeds their grasp. Whilst the fundamentals of a souls game are in there so many other aspects of the game fall so irrevocably flat that I really can’t understand how Spiders keeps managing to get funding to make games like this.
It’s Paris, 1789: the beginning of the French revolution. However in this timeline Louis the XVI has a tireless, merciless army of machines at his disposal which he puts to good use to flatten the rebellion before it can get off the ground. You are Aegis, one such automaton who has the sole purpose of protecting and serving the Queen. She then commands you to go and find out what happened to her son, whom she hasn’t heard from since she was put in lockdown. The quest that follows sees you making the most unlikely of allies, especially in a time where all automatons are feared as lethal killing machines.
Spiders continues down the (routinely ill-advised) path of using their own in-house engine Silk which, strangely, somewhat fits with the soulslike aesthetic of always being a half-ish generation behind in terms of graphics. There’s little reason for this though in Steelrising as there’s nothing really to stress the frame rates, save for the poorly optimised areas. I mean, to be fair, there are some times when it looks good but then you get pulled into dialogue with someone or get forced to watch an extremely janky cutscene and you’re quickly reminded that this was (or I hope it was) done on a very limited budget. To be fair to the rest of the game though the aesthetics aren’t the worst part of it, far from it.
Steelrising follows the soulslike formula pretty closely with some rather strange deviations that would take some explaining from the devs to understand. You’ll still be doing the usual killing enemies, gathering souls (anima), unlocking shortcuts, finding weapons/armour and upgrading those using various materials you’ll find around the traps. Combat follows the same telegraphing attack and dodge/counter/block loop that we’ve all come to know and love with their take on mana being “Alchemical Capsules” which are effectively just ammo for special weapon abilities. There’s the main campaign quest, side quests and the usual array of errands you can run to unlock special items and other secrets which may or may not be of use to you. At a fundamental level I’d rate it as competent overall but there are so many strange missteps that it doesn’t have a hope of ever reaching beyond that.
Whilst the combat loop retains the core of the souls experience it suffers from janky inputs, inconsistent hitboxes and a distinct lack of variety in enemies. Starting out the combat is definitely challenging, tickling that part of my brain that always gets lit the fuck up by these kinds of unforgiving combat challenges. However it quickly deteriorates to a very repetitive slug fest, a game in optimising just how quickly you can get past enemies rather than an actual challenge of trying to fight them. To be sure, the enemies do change over time, but it’s nothing more than adding another move to their set or giving you a different elemental variant. Worse still the mini-boss fights are just the same normal enemies with more health, lacking any other feature that’d make them distinct in their own right.
So, when faced with a repetitive array of enemies and a vast number of tools to deal with them, you’d look to mix it up with different builds right? Well on that, you can’t really experiment too far beyond the norm because there’s no way to respec your attribute points. For someone like me, who dumped a bunch of points into power and engineering early on, I was kind of locked into a specific build without much opportunity to change it, lest I just randomly dump stats in the hopes it’d work out. Faced with that I did the only thing that I know how to do in this situation.
I broke the fuck out of the game.
Game guides seem to focus on counter builds and other things that require skill. Why, pray tell, would you want to use skill in a game that doesn’t reward it in any way I ask you? Instead I got the Volley Mallet, a strength based weapon that has a 6 fucking guns attached to it and, when fully charged, can basically one shot most normal enemies in the game. Not only that it’s effective against bosses too, meaning most bosses didn’t last more than 10 seconds against me. Oh, it has a long wind up? Who cares, a couple frost or stun grenades (no boss or enemy is immune to both, hilariously) has them locked in place whereupon I can unload 2 or 3 fully charged shots into them, usually ending the fight there. Quite honestly from about halfway through the game there wasn’t an enemy I couldn’t clear my way through with either a couple regular attacks or one charged up bllllllllaatttttttttttt from the volley hammer. It was glorious.
I also kept the Avarice module (which, from what I can tell, only has level 1) slotted for the entire game whilst also pumping points into engineering which meant I was always swimming in anima whenever I wanted to upgrade. It also meant that I took basically no damage from most physical attacks which, for some unknown reason, seems to be the majority of damage in the game. Combine this with my near unlimited number of ordinary oil vials and I was basically unkillable unless I was doing something absolutely stupid, which I was routinely.
What really gets me about my experience about this was how accidental a discovery this was. I literally was just looking for an upgrade to the starter weapon and the volley hammer was it. Before then I was just relying on the frost pistol to stun enemies so I could take them out but once I had the Volley Hammer I didn’t have a reason to switch to anything else. To be sure this did endear the game to me somewhat, being ludicrously overpowered for so much of the game is just funny, but I can’t help but note that it likely wasn’t the intended experience for a “challenging” soulslike game.
There’s also a litany of bugs, glitches and general weirdness that plague Steelrising. The facial animations of the characters in cutscenes is just plain whacky, with them often defaulting back to a sad face for no discernable reason during dialogue. They also have a tendency to glitch out completely, disappearing from view during the cutscene and usually taking their spoken dialogue with them. Many sections have unoptimised areas in them, dropping the frame rate to the floor until you leave the area. Enemies routinely bug out, standing in place and not reacting to anything you do to them (convenient at times). It’s the kind of game where you’ll get reminded often enough that it’s clear they didn’t have the budget or time to polish out all these issues as they’re not things that’d just slip past play testers. Indeed the glitches got worse the further you got into the game, indicating that the latter parts of the game did not receive as much testing attention as the start did.
Then there’s the narrative which, I’ll give some credit for, is fully voiced. Although that’s weirdly executed as well, with random bits of French interjected in every conversation for no discernable reason. Weirder still those bits of French are spoken perfectly, indicating that these are native French speakers voicing English lines which are then subtitled for the French parts. It’s just…why?!? Why not do the whole thing in French or English, why put these random French bits in? I understand that the devs are French but still, it just seems out of place.
Oh right I was supposed to be talking about the story. There’s really not much to it, the characters being utterly forgettable, the core driving force being paper thin and the main character lacking any real table stakes until far too late in the game. It’s much like the rest of the game itself: a confused, strange facsimile of what a game like this should be.
Which is why I say I always enjoy Spiders’ games for the wrong reasons. They really should know better at this point, having made a good number of RPGs which have all had the exact same issues. I know, I know I’m part of the problem here, buying their games when realistically I should be voting with my wallet, but it’s so rare for a developer to continually get fundamental shit like this wrong so often and then still get called back to make yet another game. Will they do it again? Probably. Will I play it just to shit on it mercilessly? You bet your sweet ass I will.
Rating: 6.0/10
Steelrising is available on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 right now for $69.95. Game was played on the PC with a total of 16.6 hours playtime and 53% of the achievements unlocked.
