Stellar Blade

Defo trying the demo. May climb a ladder.

You know what you gotta do then JuniorFE!!!

Game I'm looking forward to the most, glad there's a demo, will be all over that later

The demo is now live:

store.playstation.com/en-gb/product/EP9000-PPSA18488_00-STELLARBLADEDEMO

Fresh as a flower is a bit of a stretch, you'd stay up all right but you'd be yawning your jaw off

I like it so far. Design is great, combat feels good and it looks like there's enough depth in combat and tinkering with skills and gear to keep things interesting. Probably not enough for a day 1/full price purchase though, it has too many similarities to too many other games.

Was surprised by how slow this felt, feels like the dramatic slow mo drags the feel of it down a bit. Had more difficulty parrying some of the regular enemies than the boss which went down first try. The boss challenge at the end is the best part about it as there's more skills unlocked so you get a better sense of what the actual game will play like and it feels good and looks even better. Maybe not worth a full price buy tho

I'm really not feeling this. You move really slowly when locked on to enemies, the attacks themselves feel very low impact and borderline unresponsive, especially if you turn down (but not off!) the camera shake to stop it from flipping out. The dodge feels like absolute shit, though the blink skill is quite nice. There's no 'snap' to the animation, which I think is the actual problem, coming from the super sharp Rise of the Ronin. Everything just glides around. Lies of P ended up improving quite a bit between demo and release so it's not impossible to fix.

I hate how items regularly get hidden by the background. If you can just hold down R2 all the time to pick up things, and feel like you have to, then why not just have everything enemies drop get picked up automatically, especially money? Not sure how I feel about them basically lifting the Nights link sound for picking stuff up either. Scanning feels really bad (wait 5 seconds to see stuff for 2) but also extremely necessary. I'm also sure they were trying to be cute when Eve didn't recognise a map stuck on a wall, but I really could do with a map.

I've got the same problem with the music that I often do with MONACA soundtracks where it feels like it's just playing the chorus all the time and screaming at you to feel miserable. Give it a fucking rest for a minute!!

Graphically, it's just all noise aside from your Kim Hyung-Tae greasy woman - see above re: items and scanning. It's not helped by all the stock Unreal 'shit on the camera' effects that you can't turn off. I like the graphics modes though - the 'balanced' option which tries to keep the resolution up at the cost of dipping down to 55fps or so (which is caught by VRR) is nicely implemented.

In short, I'll try an updated demo or see how the PC version ends up after gameplay patches but as is, I'm not buying it. Especially since it's the same week as the new Saga game.

@spookyxelectric Maybe I need to give it more time. I've definitely been guilty in the past of going into demos with serious confirmation bias, and given how excited I've been for Stellar Blade, it's quite possible I'm just seeing what I want to see! Will play some more this evening.

uiruki This won't address most of your issues, but there's an auto-collect option for loot in the settings menu.

I’m getting more of a hang of it. The enemies take a lot of damage if you mistime that parry, goddamn.
The weird NieR meets Gears graphics are throwing me off a little.



Edit: the more I look at it, the uglier to sees to me.  Aside from the character models, this could've been a PS3 game.  Should've been on PS4 also.

Going from a hyper responsive Team Ninja game to something that has a half second wait between pressing attack and the attack animation starting is pretty awful.

Wut? That's the first sin.