I know Exactly What were you thinking after reading this title. Why would you play a game expecting it to play like other games you like? After all, there’s no point in burdening us with expectations of playing another character, especially if it never clearly established itself as a spiritual successor or anything else.
However, developer Shift Up’s upcoming PS5 action RPG Stellar Blade has always given me a Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice vibe, and I’d bet that has a lot to do with its blocking combat. . So I couldn’t help but go into the Stellar Blade demo with that mindset.
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When you first pick up Sekiro, the game seems to push you into a defensive strategy. One of the first things it teaches you is how to parry, and you do this by watching your enemy’s attack cycles so you can better predict their movements, deflect what you can and block the rest. However, you soon realize that to do well in Sekiro you actually need to be more aggressive than the game initially suggests.
Stellar Blade starts in a similar way; with an emphasis on prediction and defense. However, due to some unfortunate shortcomings, it didn’t translate into a driving force for the other half. The readability of enemy attacks is the most obvious. This is an element that the game often gets wrong. Done right, it can make you feel like Neo in The Matrix; always one step ahead of your opponents. Done wrong, however, and you’ll constantly question your ability to truly predict your enemy’s actions.
The faster they attack, the harder it is to tell if you’ve mistimed your parry, or if they shouldn’t have been parried at all. Having to spend time guessing whether it’s you or the game is never a good thing.
Starblade’s tutorial explains that you need to parry enough attacks to stun your enemies, giving them the opportunity to perform a punishing move that inflicts serious damage. This approach is fine on paper, but it reduces the effectiveness of each parry and robs you of the fleeting feeling of satisfaction you get every time you parry an attack in a game like Sekiro.
It feels unnecessarily clunky, and I really wonder what kind of combat Stellar Blade is trying to create. The game’s emphasis on animation first puts it more in line with the Souls-like style, but the style and flair of the animation itself gives it the look of a spectacle fighting game or character action game.
Character animation and general action suffer from the same dichotomy. For example, it takes a long time to bounce back after being knocked down, and the presence of an item wheel means you’ll frequently pause the fight if you want to pick up healing items, grenades, mines, and whatever else is available. Give you a helping hand in the battle.
Animation priority and a certain amount of input lag may make sense in one subgenre but not another, and I don’t think Stellar Blade feels confident enough to bridge that gap. Even Sekiro has to choose its battles, which ultimately results in it being further removed from the typical Souls mode than any other FromSoft game before it.
Starblade finds its identity in trying to look stylish, but constantly undermines itself by introducing moves that require the type of player skill reserved for the Souls class. Games like Devil May Cry obviously require skill, but they reward players by rating their performance rather than killing them outright. Stellar Blade’s Blink and Knockback are effective alternating dodge moves that look great in motion, but don’t feel great to use because they rely on moving the left stick in one direction while the button is pressed, and they This can only be done in response to certain specific circumstances. enemy attack.
Not only does this create a binary, rocks-beats-paper approach, but it again slows down the fight as you try to cycle through the mental stack of six moves you’ve learned and decide which one is which speed. is appropriate in this case. A better approach would be to give the player the choice to unlock (or not unlock) these abilities and let them decide when/if to use them.
The more I dissect every moment of Starblade, the more I realize it has one foot in character action and the other in soul. It’s not forgiving enough, or relies on style rather than skill to get into the former camp, and its animation lacks the clarity and finesse needed for the latter to create consistently fair fights.
I’ve played the demo (including the bonus boss) a few times just to try and get a feel for the rhythm of combat, but I couldn’t easily find a rhythm that worked well. Smaller details, like not being able to tell which attacks can be canceled into a block and which attacks can’t, make it difficult to get into that comfortable rhythm.
It’s probably too late to expect Stellar Blade to commit to one of its core influences, but I just hope the final version is at least more polished. I’m glad to see it where it’s at, even if it’s the Wonder Fighters and soul-like chaotic creatures.