Stellar Blade Is Way Easier Than I Expected, And That's A Good Thing

Summary

Stellar Blade feels like a Soulsborne game in many ways, but it doesn't carry the same sense of challenge.
It encourages you to grind, purchase resources, and upgrade your skills whenever you can.
Eve is a character action power fantasy, and I love how badass it feels to control her in combat.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stellar Blade takes a while to get going, but like many character action and Soulsborne titles, this gradual pace works in its favour. The first couple of hours spent with protagonist Eve are trepidatious and challenging as we walk through a rain-drenched city doing our best to slay a range of mysterious enemies. Every corner you turn, you’re greeted by an ambush as some slimy freak tries to slice you to pieces, and tutor⛦ials pop up on screen reminding us that we indeed have the too♛ls to defend ourselves, but we need to learn how to use them.

As I figured out the animations of repeatable enemies, the ways I could dodge them, and which attacks affected those with shields or stretchy limbs, the faster I managed to grow into a formidable killing mac🗹hine. Eve feels timid at first glance, and it takes only a handful of attacks to bring her down in the opening areas, bu🌞t pick up a few upgrades and learn her basic commands and you’ll be dancing around adversaries in no time.

Our own Stacey Henley recently wrote about how Stellar Blade﷽ almost solves the difficulty debate that surrounds Soulsborne titles, and I agree with her. The game is very clearly built around the tenets of FromSoftware, right down to the bonfires and respawning enemies who repopulate areas when you decide to take a break. But it also removes some of these qualities, opting instead for an experience that is more 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Devil May Cry than Sekiro.

Your SP sticks around too, no longer lingering at your last place of death, threatening to be taken away if you die a second time. Stellar Blade wants you to keep getting stronger, to a point where you could easily grind your way out of tough spots instead of gitting gud.

Stellar Blade - Eve looking up at the sky

That’d be a problem in some games - Dark Souls being one of them - but in Stellar Blade, it o𝔍nly leans into the power fantasy it is trying to convey. You can purchase items in bulk over at bonfires and use them in battle, or spend hours in the same area killing enemies who drop all the currency and experience you will ever need. Whenꦿ you feel powerful enough, there is a solid chance you can rock up to enemies who once ruined your day and destroy them. It makes Stellar Blade far more approachable.

I still needed to try and memorise the aღttack patterns of bosses and master my parry timing, but I knew that the skills the game wanted me to make use of would help smooth things over. This is on the standard difficulty, the hardest you can choose in your first playthrough, which hasn’t posed much of a challenge in these early stages.

Stellar Blade - Eve fighting an alien creature

But while Stellar Blade adopts a number of elements from the Soulsborne formula, I’m not so sure if it’s actually trying to be a Soulsborne game. At this point, it appears to be a relatively linear, narrative-driven adventure where I will be given the opportunity to take on side quests and revisit old haunts from a new perspective, and I’ve even got a small yet lovable cast of characters coming along for the ride. It&rsquℱo;s not that original, but it surprises me enough with inventive boss and level design to keep me engrossed.

It isn’t a game I’m coming to for challenging encounters that stop me in my tracks. I want to go into an arena and take down a towering infected behemoth as a scantily clad android with a massive sword as I backflip over caraccases before sinking my blade into awaiting fl🉐esh. It’s a badass power fantasy, while FromSoftware games are otherwise about rising above near impossible odds in worlds that want to make you feel tiny and insignificant, because you are.

That isn’t to say I won’t hit any difficulty spikes it throws at me throughout the story or in repeat playthroughs on Hard - that’s often the case in action games like this. You breeze through it the first time around to appreciate the characters and story while learning mech꧟anics, only to return for a second, much tougher round. Stellar Blade has the potential to walk in those footsteps thanks to its excellent combat and pacing, even if right now I’m breezing through it without a care in the world.

168澳洲幸运5开奖网

TheGamer

Stellar Blade Is Way Easier Than I Expected, And That's A Good Thing

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168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Stellar Blade

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Stellar Blade