Stellar Blade Review – Sony’s Sexiest Time Capsule

In 2019, the world was introduced to a new game and character named Project Eve. Years went by, and eventually, the game resurfaced with a new name known as Stellar Blade. The game was also hit with controversy for being a PS5 console exclusive since the game was initially announced as releasing on all platforms as Project Eve. I was interested throughout this entire process, and now the game is out!

Game Name: Stellar Blade
Platform(s): PS5 (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Shift Up
Publisher(s): Sony Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: April 26th, 2024
Price: $69.99

The premise of Stellar Blade is bleak. The world has had a giant final war between humanity and a branch of monsters called Naytibas. When the dust settled, a large portion of humanity shipped off the planet and lived in a space colony. Every so often, they would send warriors from an Airborne Squad unit to do recon on the planet and see if they could eventually make these creatures extinct to make the planet their home once again. Eve is one of these Airborne Squad warriors sent with the Airborne Squad 7th unit. When they land, everyone is slaughtered except Eve, and now it is up to Eve to survive on Earth and find a way to curb the Naytiba menace.

Living Amidst The Apocalypse 

The gameplay loop in Stellar Blade had to take a bit of time to grow on me, but once I understood and managed my time, it became a unique experience that I had to get more of! The first area is more of a tease of how this game will work overall. Eidos 7 is the first area, and it takes up a good chunk of time to figure out the mechanics of combat and the loop itself. Eve has in her arsenal Beta skills, her sword, her dodges, and parries. The further along you get in the game, the more types of combat and traversal you unlock.

Combat in Stellar Blade is straightforward, and you have access to a normal attack and a heavy attack during combat. You can also combine to create combos to deal massive damage. You can unlock a variety of Beta skills, which do extra damage, and extra combat abilities by using SP at the SP shops, which can be found at every camp you find in the game. These camps allow you to heal yourself, which will result in monsters respawning, as well as your potion tumbler to restock and restock your stored items. This may sound like a Soulslike, but the farther you get into the game, it starts to feel less like one.

The big difference is the exospines and gears. Exospines are augments that will influence your playstyle with Eve You can have a combo enhancement exospine that improves the damage as long as you get a combo of 4 or more hits going, you can also have a camouflaged exospine that improves your ability to remain unseen from enemies as well as extra damage from ambush combo-ing for unsuspecting Naytibas. If you get behind a Naytiba without them seeing you, you can do a one-hit kill and combo from that ambush to an assault strike with heavy damage to another surrounding Naytiba.

Normal areas are filled with enemies that you can try dodging or picking them off. Luckily, they won’t respawn unless you use the camp to rest. Once you get to your destination, there will generally be a giant boss fight. These boss fights are some of the bread and butter of the game. I played the game in Normal mode which is the more difficult mode for your first playthrough of the game. When you beat the game, you get hard mode which makes everything a lot more difficult. Boss fights require you to learn their patterns. They can attack at far range or close range. Certain moves can be parried, some can be deflected back at the boss, and some have to be dodged.

The more bosses you fight, the better you will pick up the signs of these movements, usually indicated by a color that flashes before it starts the movement. Blue flashes allow you to blink behind the enemy if you press dodge and forward at the correct moment, purple flashes will let you have an opening with a ranged weapon if you dodge in time. Yellow flashes will require you to get away from the enemy or be lucky enough to dodge at the right time for a perfect dodge. Perfect dodges will give you a small period that will make you unable to be hurt and slow time down. Perfect parries will mitigate all damage and can stun combos of bosses and enemies.

You can get hurt by not dodging in time of an attack or missing your timing for a parry which will hurt a bit if you have your shield gauge filled in some way. Once that shield gauge goes away though, you have to be extra careful as any amount of damage hurts a lot.

There are a lot of collectibles in Stellar Blade. You have memory sticks you can find from dead humans in the areas. Cans of Soda with different brands, different outfits for Eve, Adam, and Lily, gear to equip, exospines to equip, and accessories such as earrings and glasses. Exploring areas is fun to see what you can find. Memory sticks from dead humans give you the lore of the world and what those individuals were thinking before they died. Cans of soda are collectibles that give you rewards based on the number you find, or you can just collect them to look at them in your collection because they look so cool. Side quests unlock these as well as they can be used to unlock stores to find more collectibles. There is a lot to grab in this game, and it usually feels satisfying… Unless that chest you find is just a polymer material that you were working 30 minutes solving to open. Most outfits you find in the areas of Stellar Blade are designs that Eve can create with enough material found from defeating Naytibas or collecting them throughout secret areas and chests.

The only complaint I have with the gameplay loop is generally the side quests. The structure itself is good. You go to a bulletin board and look at what things people are looking for or what kind of aid they want, and you accept it. You get it and report it back to the client. There are a few clients who have unique stories that keep popping up and building up lore and characterize the city of Xion, the last bastion of humanity on Earth. Most clients, however, are not important or have no payoff. It is just a normal fetch quest in that you find the thing, and they give you money or a collectible.

At the end of my time with Stellar Blade, playing the game itself was satisfying, and it made me feel amazing to understand all the enemies and how they worked in the world. Plus, you have more traversal options and abilities that make areas that earlier felt like death zones just a new area to see how fast you can eliminate everything in sight. Double Jumps, dashes, sliding, and jumping from higher scaffolding make the game a big sandbox of gameplay. I instantly started on a New Game+ run to see how much quicker the first area would be with all my new gadgets and gizmos. You get a variety of bombs and ranged weapon types that make things more satisfying. If you use your whole kit, Eve becomes a joy to play with. It may have its growing pains of unlocking all of the skills, but once you do, Stellar Blade becomes a second-to-none experience in actually playing the game.

The End Of The World Looks Good

Stellar Blade looks incredible. The world has a lot of designs between deserts, broken-down cities, utopias in the sky, and caves. Each locale looks amazing and has a huge draw distance. You can be overlooking hills to see all the enemies on the map with no hurt to the frames at all.

The animations in the combos look fine-tuned and amazing. I took out the long ponytail early on, though, due to how it messed with certain angles of the screen with the character. Heck, it covered Eve’s outfit in cinematics, and I highly recommend removing the long ponytail unless you like looking at wonky hair physics. Another feature I would recommend turning on from the settings menu is auto pick-up. By default, the game makes you manually pick up materials and items off the ground with one of the triggers. If you turn on the auto pick-up setting, walking over the material will cause it to be automatically collected.

My time with the game was in the Balanced mode, which has good visual fidelity and high frame rates. The gameplay was usually smooth, and I hardly noticed any frame rate drop. Speaking of the game’s framerate, Stellar Blade features three visual modes: Balanced mode, as I already mentioned, Performance mode, and Resolution mode. Trying all of these, I recommend playing using balanced mode, just due to what it offers: visuals that look better than performance mode while keeping nearly the same performance while not as sharp as the resolution mode. Still, you aren’t capped at a lower 30fps.

One thing I loved about Stellar Blade was the texture. Not just the variety of Naytiba textures but also fabric textures. You get to see so many outfits, and the fabric on each one looks good. You have your leather, your frills in a dress, your tight fabrics, and more. It reminded me of the joy of seeing the differences in fabrics in suits in Marvel’s Spider-Man. That’s probably more of a small thing for people like me who love to notice the texture quality in outfits, but honestly, it makes it enjoyable when you unlock these outfits and look at the effort made to make the outfits look as good as they do.

Harmony

Stellar Blade is phenomenal in its atmosphere—the sounds of running and jumping, the Naytibas’ screeches and combat sounds. There are moments in the game that are in closed corridors, and it made me scared of enemies that could just show up from the vents overhead or from corners of the hallways.

The soundtrack for all of the areas in Stellar Blade is fantastic. Each location has unique music with atmospheric vocals in the background. This is a soundtrack I will add to my music list.

The Apocalypse

Overall, Stellar Blade is a game I have been looking forward to, and even though it wasn’t exactly the game I expected, it is still a phenomenal game to add to the PS5 exclusives list. It took me a bit to get used to the game, but I couldn’t put it down once I did. This is one of the best 30-hour experiences to be found on the PlayStation 5 – Bosses are challenging but satisfying, the music is amazing, the art and designs of the world are unique and creative, and making builds is fun to try a different way to slaughter enemies in beautiful areas.

Stellar Blade is available on PS5.

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