Though the style has developed and deepened over time, gacha video games have traditionally not been praised for their depth and complexity, typically being criticised for being thinly veiled playing machines. People were understandably incredulous, then, when Shift Up — the studio behind Goddess of Victory: Nikke — announced in 2019 that it would pursue a AAA ardour project called Stellar Blade. Even more were then shocked a few years later when this wildly completely different, formidable project turned out to be a fairly solidly made motion sport.
Stellar Blade has now been ported to Switch 2 (along with some cheeky new beauty Bayonetta DLC), bringing this titillating and gripping motion expertise to the Nintendo viewers. It hasn’t made the transition to more modest {hardware} utterly unscathed, but this is nonetheless a solidly pleasing and thrilling journey that deserves a spot in your library.
The narrative is set in the distant, post-apocalypse future, when our planet has been overrun by monstrous creatures called Naytibas. Some people escaped after dropping the battle and established a space-based orbital colony called…the Colony…from which occasional squadrons of elite super-soldiers are deployed to attempt to regain a foothold on Earth.
Protagonist Eve is a member of one of these squads and the prologue opens with her touchdown mission, a violent meatgrinder reminiscent of the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan in which she’s seemingly the sole warrior who survives. Aided by a mysterious man who saved her, Eve units out to observe down the Alpha Naytiba and hopefully notch a win for the people.
It’s a decently entertaining story, but one which feels a little surface-level in many methods. Characters — Eve included — lack depth and converse in a stilted means that sounds as if they’re quoting strains at each other, and some of the later plot twists are the kind of factor that you can see coming a mile away. Yet there’s just enough lore here to keep you in the setting and Eve’s ongoing journey and occasional moments of levity help to keep issues from feeling too dour.
Any disappointment with the storytelling is shortly forgotten by the thrill of fight, which feels like a cross between a Soulslike and a character motion sport as Eve deftly combos enemies with her athletic acrobatics and knowledgeable sword strikes.
Enemies hit laborious and fast and can simply stunlock you, that means that even a single average foe can take fairly a massive chunk out of your health bar if you’re not paying cautious consideration and a number of foes at once can quickly overwhelm Eve due to restricted mobility and crowd control choices.
Along with the ordinary combos you can string collectively with mild and heavy attacks, Eve also has a selection of limited-use Beta Skills she can use to flip the tide in her favour. You construct up Beta Energy from attacks and completely timed blocks or parries, and this vitality can then be burned mid-combo to either bolster an attack or use a flashy guard-breaking attack that can put the enemy on the back foot. This system provides a good bit of room for participant talent expression, as you can discover some artistic methods to weave collectively combos and Beta Skills to positively soften foes.
Though even common enemies can put you to the take a look at in certain configurations, this fight system actually sings when you get to one of the many cinematic boss fights against {powerful}, grotesque monsters. These act as occasional laborious talent checks that will forcibly train you deeper information of fight mechanics as you fastidiously research their movesets for transient gaps and be taught (typically across a number of failed makes an attempt) how to best exploit those gaps with your out there instruments.
Eve thus feels both all-powerful and susceptible at the same time, which lends fight encounters a thrilling and electric really feel as you oscillate between slicing enemies to ribbons with practised cinematic aptitude and getting completely folded when you mis-time a dodge. Practice makes good, and there’s heaps of satisfaction that comes from progressing across the hours and going up against more and more more sophisticated and harmful foes with sharpened reflexes and talent.
Yet progress occurs in more methods than just uncooked talent development – there are also some mild RPG components that permit you to slowly form Eve’s construct over time. Not only can you use talent factors to unlock and energy up new fight talents and Beta Skills, but you can also improve stats like max health and attack through discovering collectibles in the atmosphere.
Gear can also be discovered and crafted to give Eve certain passive buffs, permitting you to get more worth out of the playstyle you usually select. These RPG mechanics help to soften some of the more durable edges of the typically unforgiving fight system, giving you significant methods to progress over time even if you wrestle enormously with dropping battles to enemies.
World and degree design initially follows conventional Soulslike tropes, consisting of heaps of claustrophobic halls and labyrinthine paths that typically loop back on each other with unlocked doorways and ladders that lead back to the nearest checkpoint. While the vital path is normally apparent and straightforward to observe, there are typically a handful of aspect areas to discover along the means rife with more platforming gauntlets, difficult enemy placements and additional upgrades and goodies. This design does a great job of rewarding exploration while protecting you shifting ahead.
Then, roughly six or so hours in, issues change up with the sudden introduction of a medium-sized open-world space, crammed with quests, collectibles, and factors of curiosity to scour. Travelling between this space and a close by hub has both gameplay and narrative advantages, as you full quests and bounties to progress varied aspect storylines for NPCs residing there and discover more and more higher gear and unlockables as quest and exploration rewards.
It admittedly seems at first like a bizarre left flip after the opening hours set very completely different expectations, but in the end feels like a worthy addition to the gameplay loop. And even after its introduction, there are loads of returns to the more centered and level-based Soulslike design, which balances out the free but sometimes meandering ranges and quests that can come with the open world.
Graphics look respectable, but not distinctive, due in half to both the total artwork direction and the Switch 2’s comparatively modest {hardware}. Some of the vistas of the ruined Earth can be fairly good to look at from afar, but there’s a lot of muted colors utilised as you trawl through tunnels, sewers, deserts, and destroyed workplace buildings. Environments thus have a tendency to mix collectively and typically lack visually attention-grabbing landmarks or set items, which can make the sections more centered on exploration a little more uninteresting.
Meanwhile, the sport outputs at 720p handheld and 1080p docked, which can lead to visuals that look even more muddy due to the upscaling artifacting and comparatively low inner resolutions.
Regarding efficiency, everything technically runs at 60fps, but there’s a fairly huge caveat with that claim: this body fee is only achieved through body technology. Practically talking, this means that there’s a important quantity of enter lag despite the visuals themselves showing to animate easily. For a sport this centered on fast response occasions and granular motion, that enter lag can be a death knell and does noticeably cut back the playability of this port.
However, there is an option in the settings to flip this off and cut back the sport to what seems to be nearer to 40fps, which feels like a much more acceptable compromise. Controls are fairly a bit more responsive here, while the body fee is noticeably smoother than 30fps. There are some drops that can still occur when panning the digicam around in bigger areas, but it doesn’t overly have an effect on the playability of fight encounters and this becomes less of an subject in the many smaller environments.
All this is to say, Stellar Blade is a sport that seems to be stretching the Switch 2 to its limits, but it’s a completely playable and typically surprisingly handsome port that precisely brings this spectacular sport to a light-weight handheld.
It can sometimes really feel simpler to decide aside a port for its flaws and what it lacks, and while there are legitimate critiques here to be made about the sometimes disappointing visuals and efficiency, it’s laborious to get away from the reality that this is a ‘good enough’ model of Stellar Blade that you can play wherever you need to take your console.
Conclusion
Despite some drawbacks, Stellar Blade stands tall as an spectacular and pleasing motion sport that occupies a good area of interest in the Switch 2 library. Rewarding exploration, thrilling fight, and robust but truthful problem carry this sport far and make it an straightforward suggestion, even if its story can be a bit bland and the visuals aren’t always up to the process.
I’d suggest this to anyone trying for a higher-budget sport that favours exploration and fight; Stellar Blade excels in its implementation of both and makes a great first impression as Shift Up’s entrance into AAA sport development.