Steelrising
French Slike.
Set in France.
During the most French point in French history.
Surrounded by well-known French figures.
By a French studio.
And a gratuitously French aesthetic.
Except.
No French dub, just English with some French words.
And really, that whiplash of expectation in the first few seconds sets the tone that carries through this game from minute 1. Not just because I always play in native language if possible either - even the body language in the cutscenes honestly feels like they were animated in French, in that typical "they're saying something, but emoting just out of sync" way. Thanks outsourcing.
We're in the early days of the Revolution (before everyone turned on each other), as the handmai-d-roid mannequin dancer-bodyguard of Marie Antoinette, fighting an automatron uprising. A.... Steel Rising....!
The story is pretty uninspired, I just have to say "guess what the androids are powered by", and you can probably already guess what the midgame reveal of this soulslike is, even before the second item description you pick up basically confirms it in under a minute of gameplay. Other than that, it's hardcarried by it's setting. Though I will say the earlygame is frontloaded with the least interesting and most generic setpieces, the mid- and late-game regions are far more varied and aesthetically pleasing as you do a Tour de France Paris, hitting up tourist hotspots. Game is split between 8 regions - 4 "major" cityscape regions that you frequent a lot, and 4 regions that are closer to one-way levels +1 DLC level. My main gripe with that is that I honestly feel like this would have been better as a proto-open world, rather than split up, especially within the 4 main areas of the city - you can see the landmarks the maps are built around from each location, and they're all pretty close-by. The 4 major regions have a lot of back-tracking, side-areas, quest areas and (pretty nicely) completely optional areas that have no incentive other than bonus exploration, but I feel like unlocking a sewer grate only to find it lead to a previous region would have been a seamless addition. I do respect the chunk of genuinely optional side-content and exploration otherwise, it's nice.
Despite my many criticisms of the game, you can feel the common denominator is squarely in the direction it was led. I was actually surprised to learn that this game is an offering from the same developers as Greedfall (a game I tried years ago, and dropped within a few hours, because it was dogshit) (I guess them holding me to the end this time is an improvement?), but I can vaguely remember similar problems. They seem to have a capable enough studio, and certainly enough to make a great game if they had someone who knew what the fuck they wanted, but you can constantly feel like the choices in direction speaks to weak management who have no fucking clue what they're doing. Example: I remember seeing (I think in a Crowbcat video) that the developers of Left4Dead made sure to pay extra attention and expend extra resources to the gamefeel of killing zombies (ragdolls / death animations / gibs / gore / blood splatters, etc), and focus less on shit playtesters didn't bother with - because that is something the player is going to see over and over again and pay extra attention to, so the management who understood this, focused on it. It speaks to a clear vision and well-managed resources.
Conversely, in Steelrising, it feels like, despite the clear talent employed, there is no clear vision - rather, 50+ people with a vague idea of what the end product is, but nobody whipping them all onto the same page. These guys definitely hopped on the Slike bandwagon because it was the in-thing. The main gameplay loop is fighting mobs, yet you don't ever need to adjust your playstyle really. There's ~15 enemy types, each with 3 variants, but despite their varied designs and wide array of attacks, your approach to all of them is almost identical - bait an attack, rush in, dodge out, repeat. You don't seem to have much in terms of iframes, so you can't really stick to their sides. There's no loot-goblin enemies to pull you into obvious traps. There's no hyper-aggressive enemies. No frontal-defense-backside-vulnerable enemies. There's no enemies that chase dashes or punish disengagement. There's no (common) fast unblockable attacks / command grabs that keep you on your toes in a crowd. There are no parrybait enemies, or relentless attackers that a shield would do well with. The only exceptions to this are two of the three spider-variants (which Shield / Heal their allies respectively, so need priority) and two of the three DLC enemy variants (a zoning-caster which can create a curved damaging ice-wall you can't pass through, and a thunder-necromancer). But the DLC enemies don't show up in the maingame, only the DLC region well...
Actually they do.... - and in earlier versions of the game too, pre-DLC. Locked off, in areas that are impossible to access without keys that you find in the DLC. Which, if I had to guess, we're dealing with content that was cut from the maingame, to be sold months later as DLC. I'm extra-suspicious about this, because the DLC details exactly how the machines were created - meanwhile in the maingame, this is just "figured out" by an NPC.... the same NPC you use to access the DLC. As if they cut his questline. Except, nobody gave a shit about Steelrising, so the scam didn't work, nobody got to play the DLC or see the content (it's not even in pirated repacks, I had to manually patch it) and all that was left over was a DLC that nobody played, which added nothing much, which was at the expense of cutting some nice content from the main game itself.
And worst of all - since they're all robots, they have these heartbreaking clank-animations which just leave them immobile, wide open for damage, or even interruptions for the attack they're winding up. Earlygame, it's not a problem, but later on you can kill them before they get a chance to respond. The worst of this is the not!secret boss (it's not really a secret boss, but it is the optional pre-final tough one) - I had the thing nigh stunlocked down to 30% health, because it kept pausing to try to change phases, until I took pity on it and backed off just so I could see what attacks it had. Which were pretty neat, and dangerous and would have been great if it dictated the pace of the fight (not me).
Back to the misfocus on questionable design decisions, and poor direction.
I vaguely recognise the sound of some of the voice actors, and checking the credits, a lot of them are semi-big-names in British period piece dramas, I've probably heard them in some movie. Setting aside the fact they didn't choose French voice acting (or even offer them as an option) (which I'm emphasizing, because it's fucking stupid, and should have been a priority), the amateur performance wasn't their inability to voice act (they're trained professionals), but rather, whoever was directing them (and whoever greenlit that to go into the main game) failed to reinforce the focus of their script, or tell them to re-do lines that didn't fit the scene. The biggest example of this is the lead character: a robot. At the start of the game, she sounds..... like a robot. Unemotional + Deadpan. Perfect for the character, since she's got a great android design and her animations are spot-on for being a mechanical dancer. And then you get into the side-quests, the responses, the midgame, the everything else. In some scenes, she's robotic (great), in others she's slighlty bleeding emotion in or adding words a robot wouldn't say (not great) and in others she's nearly crying her eyes out (wtf). And this isn't any kind of progression (eg, the robot becoming emotional trope) - it swaps between the three states, and is jarring every time. A good director would not have allowed any of this shit to slide. There would have been a vision. This is one of many examples like it - where the ingredients were fine, the result was not.
The Bonfire-substitutes for the game are intricate high-tech servicing stations, activated by a statue-like mechanism. Beautiful. Why is there one in a run-down field, surrounded by pigshit and horse stables, clipping through a tree, or 200ft underground in a mine. Because somebody didn't think it through. Not quite all-style-no-substance, but there's examples of it.
On the topic of the robot: character customisation? A complete waste of resources, and any options other than the default just looks worse. The marketing shows a strikingly designed, pallid-white porcelain mechanical doll.... but apparently it was a priority that you can make her porcelain browner, or her hair blonde, a messy bedhead instead of a powdered wig, or her trim a shiny green. And you only get to change this once, at the start of the game. Why? Well.... ???.
Oh and her fashion!
She looks amazing.
Period-perfect armor sets, from doublets, to lace, to leather.... but you'll never use ~80% of them. Because the best armor you have access to is better than other sets in every way, and you only get better armor a few times. They do come with small perks (more Stamina, faster ammo-recharge, more loot etc) - except the best armor also has the best perks. At least it's one of the better looking ones. Whoever the fuck was directing this let someone spend ages on these beautiful clothing designs, but didn't realise that 75 armor points is better than 3-10 armor points (and +5% poise isn't going to save the latter's usecase), or even implement a transmog. It's another example of wasted development time, contrasted by something that obviously needed more effort. What a waste. Playing dressup at the end of the game in the morning light feels like "see all the shit you could have worn!".
The balance in this game is even more fucked than that. Weapontypes: There's Fans, Duel Rapier-Sabers, Claws, Batons, Duelling Pistols, Ball&Chain, Halberds, Wheels and Warhammers. Like the enemies, each are split into a few variants with different unique special attacks, usually boiling down to an Element-Buff / Shield / Parry / Ranged Attack / Channeled Attack. All identical within their class otherwise. And, the kicker is that the only remotely usable weapons are the Fan, Batons and Rapier-Saber, and the best weapon in the game (bar none) is the Rapier-Saber. It's the third fastest weapon type, widest sweeping, has generous split-scaling (so benefits the most from the softcap-ended levelling), and is the only weapon where all three attacks have a solid combat use. Aside from the aerial attacks. This game has a jump button, but it doesn't dodge anything, there are no aerial enemies and all aerial moves clunkily freeze you in the air, making you a sitting duck - so if you accidentally aerial attack, you're basically fucked for 2s while you un-pause your fall, and can use your actual moveset. Not just a pointless addition, a detrimental one. Pistols are laughably weak and take ammo away from your tools, Claws are so poke-y that they can't deal with crowds (on top of being a 1-attack-wonder) and everything else is too slow without any benefit. To that extent, the game is ridiculously DEX-ended - the STR weapons aren't just slow to the point of unfun, they're fucking unusable. Elemental weapons require Dual-investment (Alchemy for DPS, Engineering for Status Buildup), only to kill enemies slower than Raw anyways. This shit wasn't playtested. Oh, and STR / DEX also have additional properties. STR can interrupt low poise attacks, while DEX builds up stagger for a high-damage critical attack. Guess which is better. Not that it matters, because the Rapier-Saber is split-scaling, so it gets both anyways. You see my point?
Oh yeah, and you get a not!TitaniteSlab like 25% into the game as a main-storyline reward. The game is the tedious kind of slow damagesponge difficult to begin with, evening out into easy as shit. The game peaks if you do a sequence break and go for the second custscene boss first - well designed and just the right difficulty, but not good enough to play the game for alone. Play in order, and it's a bore.
There are no difficulty roadblocks.
I was actually looking forward to the elemental gameplay - what being it's apparent main draw compared to other slikes it competes with. Wasn't that a fucking disappointment. You've got Fire / Ice / Thunder. It's not a Rock/Paper/Scissors, so you can't tell which enemies are going to be weak to what, you have to waste ammo to try all three of your tools on them, then see which had more status buildup. And since enemies are forgettable and either buildup status too slowly early on, or die too fast anyways later on, outside of the spiders and the biggest bruiser-elites, there's no point remembering who's weak to what. Don't get me wrong, the tools you get over the game were pretty fun both for combat and exploring new areas in previous areas - the thunder-hook is a neat mini ranged tool that complements your choice of weapon Rapier-Saber, and the other two actually have a useful status (because Thunder only shreds armor for future Thunder damage which isn't much anyways, and does nothing otherwise - meanwhile Fire is a DoT that pauses their stance recovery, and Ice is a fucking 10 second long Freeze which sets up a massive damage wakeup for any Raw damage). But making a build focused on any one of them is pointless, when Raw does it all (for free / no ammo) anyways. Would it have been far more interesting if you were forced to interact with the elemental system, with no Raw options? 100% yes. Is that what Steelrising is? No. Whose fault is that? Direction.
I'll give props that Steelrising is the only game in recent memory where you can use a historically accurate Breaking Wheel's moveset yes, I am aware of Bloodborne's Logarius Wheel, no that doesn't count, it's moveset is shallow as fuck, but I would have preferred it to have any +1 usable option instead of something that just looks cool.
And to top it off: these weapons are split between Medium and Heavy..... but there are no Light weapons, and Medium / Heavy doesn't affect anything like your dodge speed / distance. At all. It's just a pointless classification. lol?
All that's left is performance.
Dogshit optimisation.
It's 3 years old, I'm on a strong rig, 1080p no upscale, I still had to make concessions to get it to run, with some slowdown when loading in. Very obviously made with NVidia dev tools, some patched together frameworks (can't quite elaborate, but just a feeling, and I got the feeling that some assets were from third parties (even if they were blended in well). I'm running MonHun Wilds just fine on Ultra - but this game is temperamental on High.
That, and there's very minimal quality control (the game has no gamebreaking bugs or crashes, but is rife with textbook AA jank - souls at the bottom of a bottomless pit, enemy return-pathing issues, enemies clipping out of sight after a backstab, terrain blocking a stealth backstab animation, visible-invisible light sources, slightly-too-snappy movement when locked on, detailed character menu but barebones template-tier pause menu). I could go on and on and make it sound like a bigger problem than it is, but it was honestly more a wide range of meaningless annoyances and visible jank, ~1 per hour, but nothing that got too much in the way.
I will take the time to say: I did respect the lighting. Increasingly rare example of a game having the balls to be very dark when it's time to be dark (you could even say it has artistic clair obscur) - and it does impact gameplay, fighting barely visible mechanical enemies by the dim lit shine of a small lantern is cool. If there's one place raytrace bullshit does well, it's making marble and brass reflect cinematically in low light and dynamic conditions: which is an immaculate fit for this game. But. BUT. Turn that shit off, and all of a sudden a lot of things turn to play-doh (especially the human characters). Playing this game on a lower-end rig / lower settings would look hideous - and just in case you weren't aware, you've got NVidia's logo on the front screen, to remind you that the game was made with RT in mind. Pains me to see playthroughs on YT with a jacked up brightness setting on Low making everything cloudy mush, when the game is clearly designed for RT. Pains me more to see them use the difficulty slider settings to let them oneshot everything, but that's normalfags for ya, there's a reason why games need painted walls to tell you where to jump.
At least it's on an in-house engine? Would have preferred Ultra settings at 60fps without hitches.
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In summary. This game is AA. The definition of a AA game.
It's got production value. It's higher budget than indie 1man devs. But this is not a AAA experience at all. It does some things well, but it's dragged down by the many things it does amateurishly. There's some thought put into it, and honestly the studio could do better, but the lack of direction bleeds through. Despite being an unapologetic pirate, I still checked the price, and while they weren't dumb enough to charge $60, $45 is still overblown compared to it's $30 value.
But I'm not a pessimist. I'm critical. I still had an alright time with the game. If I didn't, I would have dropped it.
This game is ideal for two types.
One type (me), interested in an entry-level companion-piece to learn about the basics of the French Revolution. Have Wikipedia open, Alt-Tab to look up names as they're mentioned. At first I felt it was biased, considering the endings are split by the political ideology you allow to take over, alt-history style (especially when one of the earliest NPC's is a shoehorned-in representative of Le Amis des Noirs and the only guy here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Friends_of_the_Blacks#Notable_members who is the odd one out, with the shortest article, and no portrait because he wasn't really relevant - guess who, guess why, guess for what obvious reason), but as I went through, it became more and more obvious that it wasn't as revisionist as much as it was just.... juvenile. Aimed at kids who don't care about the depth or complexities of the period, and who need an essay done by the end of the week. Compared to Nioh being as careful as to even have historically accurate NPC bloodspills, and I feel like there was massively missed potential for the frogs to brag about their history. Their loss, not mine. Honestly, I would recommend it to schoolkids if anything - better than studying some gay textbook.
Second type is guys with a doll fetish because holy fucking shit the A R T I C U L A T E D J O I N T S on this bitch holy fuck I might not be a dollfag, but if you're the type that gets a hardon in a boutique, I can tell 100% you had a guy on the inside for this game and you WILL bust a fat nut to this game. I can recognise a niche fetish when I see one. Sound design, animation work, the little details. Nailed it. Sex sells, niche fetishes sell, and if Toy Chica is enough to get a notable coom-base I'm aware of, Aegis deserves a few posts in some backwaters /d/egenerate dollfag thread too.
This slike is a very stable 5/10, if not slightly less. It gets a passing grade if you like the genre, but it's not hard and it's not got a French dub. If you're interested in either of the above two reasons, it won't be a waste of your time, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else in our limited lifespans.
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Nioh 3 vs Code Vein 2 showdown next month. Hype?
I need a short game so I don't get burnt out. Apparently Thymesia is just that: the Plague Doctor slike.
thx 4 reed'n like+scrubsrribe