initially, passively observing the butt-focused marketing campaign and the extremely annoying discourse that followed. I didn’t play the demo, but I found myself with a review code, and after putting a frankly absurd amount of time into almost 100%-ing the game, yeah, it’s uh, pretty good after all.
I do not really see the point in dancing around this for twelve paragraphs, so let’s just dive into the Eve of it all, the central heroine who is a member of an elite fighting force sent to help earth defend itself against the monstrous Naytiba who roam the landscape. Think Dead Space’s gangly aliens mixed with Halo’s Flood. Though the exact nature of what the Naytiba is one of the game’s central mysteries. And the same is true of Eve herself.
I’d say I only got really interested in the story of Stellar Blade about halfway in, where we get deeper into the “everything is not what it seems” conspiracy, and there are some genuinely interesting reveals by the end. But I don’t think the game does much with character development until perhaps its final moments. Eve is mostly a blank slate and her banter with her two crewmates is overwhelmingly surface level.
Some aspects of combat work less well. You get a gun-like thing at a certain point in the game and it just does not flow when used in combat along with your central sword. It also requires constantly buying ammo, ammo which does not get returned to you if you die, so managing that was just sort of annoying and I rarely used it.