The Gooner Game is Actually Good??? - Stellar Blade Review

Preface

As always, this post is actually just the script of the video on youtube. I actually got Stellar Blade a year later, since I didn’t really want to brush my PS5 off just for one game. Not gonna lie though, I was so taken by surprise at how goddamn good the gameplay was considering everything I heard about this game was “gooner game”. Anyways, I really enjoyed myself and I’m super excited for the second game that just got announced! Hope you enjoy the read!

Introduction

So, Stellar Blade is a game developed by Shift Up and published by Sony. I heard so much about this game last year when it first came out on PS5, but I didn’t know the devs so I didn’t want to invest in a game I wasn’t certain I’d like, especially since I much prefer playing on a PC over a PS5. That being said, when it came to PC this year, I took the leap and bought the game. I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s a character action game or even Souls-like, but I feel like the term has kind of lost its meaning at this point. I’d personally err on the side of this game being somewhere in the middle, with a strong focus on fast and stylish combat but not as much freedom of skill expression as Devil May Cry and other character action games. As usual, I’m not going to withhold my assessment and let me say right now I think this game is an easy recommendation for me.

Let’s start with the elephant in the room shall we? The game sexualizes the female characters, especially Eve, a lot. Many people call it a gooner game. I jokingly called it the gooner game when I was going through on my stream. However, I don’t even honestly think it’s that bad now that I’ve gone through the game. I’ll expand on it more later in the visuals segment, but you have complete control over how Eve dresses and styles her hair, which helps bury the gooniness of it by a lot if you aren’t fond of those aspects.

The game gives you the option to start in Easy or Normal, and if you are crazy you can dive into options and enable Hard right away. Easy and Normal are the New Game difficulties and are quite appropriately scaled for such, while Hard Mode definitely feels scaled for New Game Plus. I would strongly not suggest playing on Hard for your first playthrough, as everything WILL one or two shot you, making it very hard to learn the movesets and you won’t be doing enough damage for it to feel satisfying even when you play well. That said, the option is there if you’re one of those Khazan players.

In overall setup and gameplay, Stellar Blade reminds me a lot of Final Fantasy 16, but I actually think that Stellar Blade pulls off the formula better than how Final Fantasy 16 did, other than maybe the story and the scale of some of the bosses since the Stellar Blade bosses tend to be closer to human size. To be clear, I loved Final Fantasy 16, but there were a lot of issues with that game. Stellar Blade in the simplest terms is a cinematic action adventure game with a lot of places to explore and fight in, and I think that it pulls off what the developers wanted to do spectacularly. The footage I’ll use is only from the early segments of the game so that any spoilers we show won’t be too major.

Story and Presentation

Stellar Blade is a story set in ages far beyond our current time. In the story, humanity escaped to space following a conflict with a race called the Naytibas who have overrun the planet. Under the guidance of an AI called Mother Sphere, humanity sends squads of elite agents known as the Airborne Squad to defeat the leaders of the Naytibas and reclaim the Earth. Eve, the main character, lands right in the middle of an ongoing battle with the Naytibas. Despite some initial success, the mission goes sideways very quickly due to an unidentified Alpha Naytiba and Eve herself becomes the only survivor of the squad after being saved by a human survivor named Adam. The rest of the story shows Eve’s journey to hunt down the Elder Naytiba and forge bonds with the human survivors in the city.

The main crew in your party consist of Eve, Adam and Lily. Eve is the protagonist of the game, a member of the Seventh Airborne Squad and an extremely competent fighter. She is quick on her feet and able to adapt to almost any situation the game puts her into. Adam is the human survivor who saves Eve from the battle after everyone else gets wiped out. He stays out of the action but assists Eve using a drone that acts as his eyes on the field. Lily is the team technician that Eve saves in the early stages of the game. She is part of the Fifth Airborne Squad and is the person who provides Eve with her upgrades in game. The character interactions between them can be quite endearing, but nothing that is particularly standout compared to other similar games.

Personally, I think that the story of Stellar Blade is fine, but not stellar (haha get it? Okay let’s move on). I think the big picture story is interesting, but I do feel like the moment to moment story is kind of eh. There’s a lot of cool plot twists over the course of the story, but most of them are relatively predictable. I’ve heard from many different people that the story is essentially the same story as Nier Automata’s story, except not as well told. I cannot confirm or deny this as I’ve still not played Nier Automata myself, but that’s what I’ve heard.

The format of the story is essentially there’s a straight main quest path that you can go through, with side quests that provide a lot of background lore and NPC stories as well as some boosted up versions of bosses you’ve fought before, or even new ones. This is also tied to one of the endings so if you’re trying to do everything it will be worth it as well. I’ll explain more of the format in the gameplay segment. The more notable side quests actually do feel like they matter to the characters and they do well in getting you to care for those characters. The NPCs are actually easy to empathise with and I really enjoyed the general writing of the game. I didn’t care for every side quest, but there were quite a few that I was actually invested in.

Visual and Sound

Visually, I think that Stellar Blade is an extremely pretty game, with a nice art direction, though perhaps not a unique one. The general style of the game is what I would describe as stylized realism, I don’t know the actual term that would be used so please feel free to let me know. The main crew is extremely visually appealing which creates a strong contrast with the desolate post apocalypse world and grotesque enemy design. Speaking of the world, there is a huge variety in the areas that you progress through, with ruined cities, desert wastelands, flooded sewers, train stations and underground bunkers being just a few of the first environments that you go through.

As far as the main crew are concerned, we have some level of customization that we can do.

Eve has the biggest amount of clothing available to her at over 80 different sets of clothes to play around with. This ranges from her skin suit, which shows a LOT of skin, to swimsuits, to clothes you’d actually wear in real life. I personally have a preference for clothing that fits the situation that the characters are in for the most part, so I ended up sticking with this cool jacket and jeans set (show the set). I actually had another one I liked more (show Biker set) but I felt like the setting needed glowy sci fi bits on her clothes/body, and the biker set didn’t have that. Rosair made a comment about how I was on a mission to cover girls in every game I can choose clothes for and hey, get off my case alright. In addition to the clothes available, Eve also has many hairstyles that you can change into easily once you unlock it, and I quite enjoy the variety we have. Oh, we also have earrings and glasses. There’s just a lot of customizability.

Adam and Lily have a smaller amount of clothes to choose from, with a lot less variety in the styles that they have access to. I assume that it’s just due to them not being the playable character, but considering we see them as the drone more, that may also count. There are also options to customize how the drone looks, though like with Adam and Lily there isn’t as much variety as what you get with Eve.

Cutscene choreography and fighting and traversal animations are absolutely phenomenal. I think that every fight action in cutscenes and cut-ins during fights are extremely cool. The only animation that feels out of place is the pole swinging one, which feels oddly muted compared to how cool and over the top the rest of the animations are. I have to give a bit of a shoutout here to the animation that Eve does when you open crates, lockers and vending machines. She deadass just kicks it open, and it’s the most entertaining thing I’ve ever seen. Her first reaction to everything seems to be to kick it and I just love that so much.

Let’s move on to the combat aspects of the visuals and sound design. I think that the telegraphing done in this game was quite well pulled off, with most attacks being quite readable and reactable. Some of them ARE quite tricksy, but it feels like it is intentionally so, and the difficulty of the game is not so high that that’s an issue. There are specific attacks that you’ll have to react with a dodge forward or backward depending on the color and those WERE a bit confusing for me timing wise. I don’t think that this is a game design flaw, but more of my brain thinking if it blinks I need to react immediately despite all of them needing a delayed reaction of about a second or two. I got over it after a while so it’s not something you won’t adjust for over time.

In terms of sound design, I think that the developers have done a fantastic job. The perfect block and dodge sound effects are immensely satisfying and you can tell when you pull it off by the sound alone, though of course the animations show it off as well. The enemy sounds are generally fitting for what they are and not intrusive, and the previously mentioned forward/backward dodge attacks give out a distinct sound cue as well so you know what kind of attack is coming. Not much to say on this front, generally really good.

The music that’s available in the game has a lot of great tracks, especially in the later parts of the game. I don’t have too much to say on it honestly, but they were generally good and have a large amount of variety.

Gameplay

I feel like my videos having a very long gameplay segment is going to become a running theme but here we go. As usual, I’ll talk a bit about everything that we’ll have access to so that you have a clear picture of what you can expect. In a game like this, I think it’s also really important to know, since personal expression through combos is a huge part of the enjoyment many players have for these kinds of games.

In terms of combat, we have a large amount of options with combos and skills that we get access to that flow well into each other. The basic combos we get from the start are quite fluid and can be used for different situations well, in addition to looking really cool. They don’t do a lot of damage unless you build for it, but they’re easy to get in between enemy attacks.

To react to enemy attacks, you have access to dodging and blocking. You can generally cancel most of your basic combos into a block similarly to Sekiro, with a few exceptions. If you time your blocks to the enemies’ hit, you’ll parry the attack. This will reduce their balance, and throw them off balance for combo enders, letting you use follow up counters or your own combos. If you manage to deplete their balance, then you’ll be able to land a finisher with an awesome animation that deals a large amount of damage. Different enemies and bosses have a different amount of balance, shown under their health bar.

Dodging can only be done between attacks as far as I can tell. If you time them well, you’ll get access to counters similarly to parrying. You can also use your Beta or Burst energy to boost the counters even further for a cool spectacle. One attack type of note is that if the enemy flashes yellow before the attack, it means that the attack cannot be blocked or parried, so you’ll have to dodge the attack.

That leads us into Beta skills and Burst skills. Beta skills are your basic skills that use your Beta energy that you’ll naturally build as you attack, defend and dodge. They’re quite spammable if you’re constantly applying pressure and parrying or blocking their attacks. Burst skills are in a similar basket, but use Burst energy that you gain only through dodging and activating finishers. These skills are massively powerful and a cool spectacle but are also not as easy to build the Burst energy to activate. Both Burst and Beta skills start as single skills you throw out but once you progress further you’ll be able to unlock follow ups or more powerful variants of them as you get further into the game or in NG+.

There’s also a unique kind of dodge that works similarly to Sekiro’s Mikiri counter, which I mentioned previously as the forward or backward dodge. If they flash blue, you wait until you flash then dodge forward, and same in reverse for purple flash. You can only do it to specific attacks and if you do it too early you’ll miss the chance to do it and likely get hit in the process. It looks and feels cool when you successfully do it, and if you successfully do it to purple attacks you’ll open up their weak spot for extra gun damage as well.

Did I mention you get access to guns? You get access to a variety of different guns. They’re not super interesting, it’s essentially just a drone upgrade where you equip it on your arm and shoot with it. You have to manage ammo and can swap ammo types based on what you’re fighting. There’s a few segments in the game where it shifts the vibe to a more survival horror style similar to Resident Evil and you can’t access your sword in those segments. However, because of how agile Eve is by default, I don’t think these segments ever really felt threatening even lacking access to the sword. If anything I was kind of annoyed cause I can’t aim for the life of me with a controller and I strongly dislike how aim assist feels in any game.

There is also a Devil Trigger style mechanic that you’ll be able to access later in the game, but it’s far enough in that I don’t want to show it here, and it’s also a bit of a spoiler too. I feel like I’m not too fond of how it is implemented here, as a lot of the new attacks you get while in the mode are pumped up versions of your normal attacks, but you have to spend skill points to unlock them again in the mode. Obviously there are still uses for the mode, as you still do a large amount of stagger and you can keep whatever you’re fighting stunlocked for a decent while and buy you some time to breathe and think.

Progression in Stellar Blade is done through the use of a skill tree, with exp earning points for the player to use on that skill tree as you keep playing. It’s quite simple and can unlock new moves or counters as well as upgrading what you already have. You unlock more things to spend points on after you hit NG+, not much to note on this, it’s not innovative but implemented well.

You can also choose your approach to the game using Exospines and Gear. Exospines will form the core of your build, allowing you to lean into different mechanics in the game. Gear will let you enhance specific stats and reinforce what you use with the Exospines, or allow you to adjust things that aren’t addressed in Exospines such as attack speed or experience gain.

Let’s move on to the enemy side of the equation. I think in general enemy design is quite good, with pretty large variety and most being generally fun to fight. Most of the time they’re placed well and you don’t end up getting swarmed by too many threatening enemies at the same time, so you can isolate them and pick them off one by one. Sometimes fighting them in groups is fine too, though it can be hit or miss depending on where and how the fight is taking place, as especially in open zones sometimes you’ll have enemy groups wander into a fight you’re already in and blindside you from off the camera.

The main pain points to me are that ranged enemies are a bit hard to react correctly to due to projectile time, and shield enemies tend to be fine to fight alone, but once in a group they become the most annoying thing in existence. This is especially prevalent in later parts of the game where it felt like the developers kind of gave up on enemy placement and just started copy pasting enemies into small zones with not a lot of space to move. There are elite enemies which are boosted versions of the normal enemies you face with bigger stats and some new moves, though the big surprise was the stats since I’ve been one combo’d from them multiple times

Onto the highlight here however, and that is the bosses present in the game. There are a large variety of bosses and they all feel generally pretty unique, with late game adding stronger variants for earlier bosses. The bosses in the game are genuinely extremely cool, with grotesque designs and attacks utilizing aspects of their designs.

In general they’ve got interesting movesets but not overly complex. Especially towards the end of the game there are some amazing bosses that are really cool. Unfortunately, as I am not showing things towards the middle and end of the game, you’ll just have to take my word on it. I will say though that I adore those fights and have fought them repeatedly for fun many times after I finished the game. There are some bosses that have quicktime events at the start and end of fights as well, which usually sets the tone for the fight or act as finishers. If you fail the end QTEs they usually heal back a bit and continue fighting.

The world design is generally pretty simple in Stellar Blade. There are a lot of different zones you’ll traverse through and it alternates between simple zones that you’ll push through like in many action games and large open zones that you can explore and quest in. You’ll be returning to old zones for quests but sometimes there will be twists on them like lowered water level giving access to areas you weren’t able to go to before. I don’t think there’s anything innovative here, but it is done well enough that I don’t have any complaints honestly. There will also be puzzles or exploration you’ll have to solve in both the open zones and smaller zones to open your way through, which are generally pretty simple. If you haven’t managed after a bit, they’ll ask if you want a hint and you can open it up. The fact that they give you hints is fine, but some of the hints that they give are plain unhelpful. Yes game I know I have to find those keys in this zone, but where in the zone do I look???

Progress through the areas are checkpointed by bonfire-esque camps that always include a chair to sit and reset and a vending machine to stock up on consumables and resurrect items as well as skill upgrading machines to access the skill tree. There are also some big camps that have access to a workbench that will let you upgrade your sword, drone and healing item as well. Respawn point mechanics work similarly to how Souls bonfires work, except you don’t lose anything once you die, so not much else to expand on here.

There are a lot of collectibles that serve different purposes as you go through the different areas. Some of these collectibles are required and will contain codes for locked doors, as well as others that will give you lore and backstory on the world and the characters whose body you’ve found. You’ll also be able to upgrade your health bar and beta gauge through finding the bodies of other Airborne Squad members who have died as well. All of these collectibles are easy to find as long as you’re actually looking through the area, especially since you have a scan that you can do with a short cooldown. This is absolutely amazing for me because I have the perception of a goldfish and will miss things literally right in front of me.

The last bit of game design that confused me a bit is there are parts of the game that get introduced and then they seem to never be utilized again afterwards. The first one introduced is quite early with an enemy that can go invisible so you have to scan to reveal them, which is a cool mechanic but that enemy type is the only one that will do that, and it is never used again other than if they show up, which happens quite rarely. Another one is introduced super late in the game, essentially skateboarding on Eve’s sword, but it’s so late that it’s utilized like twice before the game ends. It also felt like there were parts earlier in the game that would have fit well with the mechanic but it wasn’t utilized at those points. There are probably other bits like this that I forgot, because honestly it feels like the devs are as ADHD as I am and forgot about it themselves.

Conclusion

So, what do I think of the game? I mean I already said so in the intro, but I think my tone over the course of this video is also pointing towards a recommendation as well. The game’s moment to moment gameplay is fantastic, and the story side of the game is decent enough that it’s not an active detriment to enjoying the game.

If you’re a fan of character action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, you’ll likely enjoy your time here as a less complex but still stylish and fun action game. If you’re a fan of the gameplay Final Fantasy 16 tried to do but felt like there was something missing on the action side, I think that this game will appeal to you the most. The number of options available to you as a player lets you play in the way that you want to and really show off what you can do.

On the other hand, if you wanted more RPG in your FF16, this game is probably not it for you. If you’re looking for a game to be immersed in and focus on the story, I don’t think this game will be for you either. The story isn’t awful, but it’s not really anything special either.

If you’re somewhere in the middle, I’d suggest giving it a try and see, and refund if it doesn’t click.

This game is going to appeal to a lot of players, even if it isn’t everyone. I would suggest considering what you’re looking for in a game since this game has some very strong points but also some weak points that can matter depending on the kind of gamer you are.

I actually went in expecting something more akin to DMC, but as I played I realized it was more of a cinematic action game like FF16, which I do really enjoy. I’m a big fan of what they’ve done, and I genuinely loved my experience playing the game.

I hope that this helped you decide if you want to try the game or if you didn’t! Hope you’re having a fantastic day and I’ll see you next time!

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