Rate top gamesI enjoyed Stellar Blade very much!
Combat sits somewhere between Nier: Automata and Sekiro and is very enjoyable. Basic enemies tend to be on the easier side (once you understand Eve's skills), but bigger groups can be devastating (and occasionally even somewhat frustrating). Boss fights feel pretty great, though quite a few are repeated and two of them have moves that will kill you instantly if they manage to pull them off, which I severely disliked. Checkpointing is rather forgiving, so you can jump back into the fray immediately, but you do have to redo the fight from the beginning.
It's a good-looking game that runs very well and has some amazing animations; it really is one of the few proper PS5 titles at the moment (by which I mean it's not an upgraded cross-gen PS4 game). Though the game is quite high-fidelity, I did find the artstyle to be a bit bland when it comes to the environments: the cities looked pretty nice, but two of the bigger open world sections were orange deserts, which started to bore me a bit too quickly.
I'm torn on character design: on the one hand Eve looks stunning and you can play quite the stylist, dressing her up in a wide variety of dresses, combat suits and other outfits (which also make for good quest and exploration rewards) and giving her matching haircuts and the like, but on the other hand I just don't understand the obsession game(r)s seem to have with sexualized female characters. Eve genuinely looks like the result of someone prompting an AI art generator with "thick Asian girlfriend". Sexy or sexual characters are no issue at all, but Eve is neither; she just has a voluptuous body. There is no story reason for her to look like this - Eve is not a multi-purpose combat and sex robot (but maybe that'll be DLC), it seems nonsensical for the in-game humans to design their weaponry this way - just consider you'll never see an attack helicopter with jiggly T&A, and for all the effort that went into having Eve show off her cleavage and underwear, very little seems to have been put into having her show emotions - in fact, all characters have severely lifeless faces.
The music is alright, but perhaps a bit samey for longer play sessions, combat alternates with platforming and shooting sections often enough to stay fresh and the story is unimpressive but functional.
I had fun with Stellar Blade and I will play it again, perhaps going for 100% completion!
(The Sphere Hunter made a video review on Youtube called "Stellar Blade is Amazing Butt Messy", worth a watch)
Combat sits somewhere between Nier: Automata and Sekiro and is very enjoyable. Basic enemies tend to be on the easier side (once you understand Eve's skills), but bigger groups can be devastating (and occasionally even somewhat frustrating). Boss fights feel pretty great, though quite a few are repeated and two of them have moves that will kill you instantly if they manage to pull them off, which I severely disliked. Checkpointing is rather forgiving, so you can jump back into the fray immediately, but you do have to redo the fight from the beginning.
It's a good-looking game that runs very well and has some amazing animations; it really is one of the few proper PS5 titles at the moment (by which I mean it's not an upgraded cross-gen PS4 game). Though the game is quite high-fidelity, I did find the artstyle to be a bit bland when it comes to the environments: the cities looked pretty nice, but two of the bigger open world sections were orange deserts, which started to bore me a bit too quickly.
I'm torn on character design: on the one hand Eve looks stunning and you can play quite the stylist, dressing her up in a wide variety of dresses, combat suits and other outfits (which also make for good quest and exploration rewards) and giving her matching haircuts and the like, but on the other hand I just don't understand the obsession game(r)s seem to have with sexualized female characters. Eve genuinely looks like the result of someone prompting an AI art generator with "thick Asian girlfriend". Sexy or sexual characters are no issue at all, but Eve is neither; she just has a voluptuous body. There is no story reason for her to look like this - Eve is not a multi-purpose combat and sex robot (but maybe that'll be DLC), it seems nonsensical for the in-game humans to design their weaponry this way - just consider you'll never see an attack helicopter with jiggly T&A, and for all the effort that went into having Eve show off her cleavage and underwear, very little seems to have been put into having her show emotions - in fact, all characters have severely lifeless faces.
The music is alright, but perhaps a bit samey for longer play sessions, combat alternates with platforming and shooting sections often enough to stay fresh and the story is unimpressive but functional.
I had fun with Stellar Blade and I will play it again, perhaps going for 100% completion!
(The Sphere Hunter made a video review on Youtube called "Stellar Blade is Amazing Butt Messy", worth a watch)