‘Stellar Blade’ Review (PS5): EVE Protocol Uplink In Bio

I’ll admit I did not have all that much interest in Stellar Blade initially, passively observing the butt-focused marketing campaign and the extremely annoying discourse that followed. I didn’t play the demo, but I found myself with a review code, and after putting a frankly absurd amount of time into almost 100%-ing the game, yeah, it’s uh, pretty good after all.

I enjoyed my time with Stellar Blade, a sometimes-linear, sometimes-not actioner that’s more Sekiro than Devil May Cry which does indeed have engaging combat, albeit with perhaps not enough tools in its box. The worldbuilding is better than the script. The character modeling is better than the environment. But there’s a lot to like here, and I think it’s going to do well.

I do not really see the point in dancing around this for twelve paragraphs, so let’s just dive into the Eve of it all, the central heroine who is a member of an elite fighting force sent to help earth defend itself against the monstrous Naytiba who roam the landscape. Think Dead Space’s gangly aliens mixed with Halo’s Flood. Though the exact nature of what the Naytiba is one of the game’s central mysteries. And the same is true of Eve herself.

The driving force of the discourse around this game pre-launch is almost wholly consumed by Eve’s appearance, crafted from scans of a real-life Korean supermodel and given clothes to match. One thing you’ll quickly learn is that Eve is not Bayonetta, exploding out of her clothes for super-moves and oozing sex with each step. Despite her appearance, Eve is not a sexual character in the same sense at all. I am not sure anyone in this game has ever even heard of sex.

As such, Eve’s body and the outfits that show it off are purely for the player. The same is true for voluptuous androids and lingerie wearing city guards. Everyone in this game is either hot, wearing a mask, or has a robot head. Those are your three choices.

A large part of the pursuit of the game is collecting little outfits for Eve that require somewhat pricey crafting materials, but offer no combat benefit. There are a few dozen of these, and I was actually surprised at the range. Yes, of course there are ultra-revealing ones, but if you want to focus less on Eve’s…attributes, there are more normal clothes as well. A jacket and jeans. A Kill Bill-inspired sweatsuit. There are also glasses, earrings, hairstyles and colors. So Eve is really whatever you want to make of her from a visual perspective. Though again, her hyper-attractive appearance is totally detached from any story components whatsoever. She is hot for its own sake, though I suppose that’s hardly a new concept across the media landscape.

I don’t think this detracts from the game other than some of these outfits being so over the top it’s a bit goofy for cutscenes, but you don’t have to wear them. So, whatever. A longer debate about all this is probably best saved for separate articles. I think the point is that it’s fine for Eve to exist and look like this, but not every woman in a video game needs to, and the overall diversity we’ve seen in character design lately is welcome.

I’d say I only got really interested in the story of Stellar Blade about halfway in, where we get deeper into the “everything is not what it seems” conspiracy, and there are some genuinely interesting reveals by the end. But I don’t think the game does much with character development until perhaps its final moments. Eve is mostly a blank slate and her banter with her two crewmates is overwhelmingly surface level. There are a few compelling sidestories with game-spanning sidequests like a shopkeeper trying to find her sister or a singing android with a partner trying to rebuild her body. But this is hardly a top 10 cyberpunk apocalypse storyline, to be sure. I’m told it pulls way, way too directly from NieR: Automata, but as I haven’t played that, I’ll leave those comparisons to others.

I enjoyed combat and hunting down secrets in the different locales of the game. Yes, the structure here is compared to Sekiro or even (sigh) Dark Souls with “save camps” where death will set you back a ways. But it’s not nearly as difficult as any of those games, particularly if you’re keeping up with massive XP boots that completing sidequests give you, and in death you won’t lose found materials or XP progress. By the end, my Eve was maxed in every way possible, almost overpowered for the final stretch of the game. But I can see how it would be much harder if you didn’t grind all the other content out or explore every nook and cranny like I did, which made for a longer experience, probably pushing 25-30 hours.

I did enjoy “buildcrafting” Eve to a certain extent, even if options are somewhat limited. I went with a whole lot of upgrades to constantly allow me to output beta attacks, special moves that charge on hit or parry, and do the most damage to enemy health bars, shields and stances (erase shields and enemies take more damage, deplete stance charges and enemies will be open for a huge, gutting super attack). Another body upgrade let me increase the timing on my parry windows so they were practically automatic.

Some aspects of combat work less well. You get a gun-like thing at a certain point in the game and it just does not flow when used in combat along with your central sword. It also requires constantly buying ammo, ammo which does not get returned to you if you die, so managing that was just sort of annoying and I rarely used it. Also, I found the game’s “super saiyan" mode it eventually gives you to be less compelling than it could be, and often less useful than my normal parry and strike play as it doesn’t charge your beta attacks while using it.

Eve having essentially just a sword and a not-great gun gets a little repetitive. Almost every fight is just about getting as many perfect parries as you can, whereas perfect dodges are much more annoying to execute and half the time during “dodge window” attacks from bosses, I just found myself sprinting away rather than trying to bother. Combat is fun however, and the things that it gets wrong are overwhelmed by it being quite enjoyable in moment-to-moment play.

Many of the linear sections are pretty good and I enjoyed making my way through them, finding secrets as I went. But these sections don’t have maps, and when you are asked to return to them for sidequests later, re-navigating is irritating. This is in contrast to the open world zones, which are a lot better for exploration (thankfully they have actual maps), but there are only two of those, and both are just Desert 1 and Desert 2, so there’s not a ton of biome diversity there. Still, there are some beautiful sequences in the game, especially toward the end, and as you may have already seen, a ton of work has gone into character modeling here. Both for Eve (outside of what they reveal, her outfits are beautifully crafted), but also with most characters you meet.

I enjoyed my upgrade hunting, buildcrafting, combat, secret-finding and lore unraveling. I didn’t enjoy somewhat limited tools, mostly forgettable characters and a less-than-enthralling script. I liked collecting the little outfits. So sue me.

Stellar Blade is a good game, not a (don’t say stellar) fantastic one. Its peers do a lot of the things it does but better, though that doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable in its own right. Don’t go in expecting a revolution, but this may be the start of a solid series and could make Eve a Bayonetta/2B-esque star. The ensuing discourse about this game is going to be exhausting, as it has been already, but divorced from that, the game itself is solid, and that’s what matters the most.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.