Stellar Blade

As much as I respect FightinCowboy, he also intensely disliked Rise of the Ronin for multiple reasons that I'm finding to be rather untrue even now (and that seem to be becoming even less true as I go on in some cases, such as the combat), so... Who knows , maybe this one will actually suck /j

Not that I need to tell you fine folks that you should judge for yourselves first of course, especially in this case where there's a demo

Edit: I should probably mention that I'm not watching his full playthrough of Rise, so he might have walked back some of that criticism without me knowing

Ronin's miles ahead, but it's almost an unfair comparison because it iterates on and works from things that Team Ninja have been working on for a long time. That said, TN didn't get there without feedback from users. If Shift Up are interested in making a good game - and there's probably a good one in there struggling to get out - they should get a survey out there. The more recent comparison is Lies of P: that ended up being really excellent after some tuning from a promising demo. That said, I think that P demo was a fair bit better than this and I liked the setting and ideas of this weird take on Pinocchio more than women in skin tight suits being mutilated for the camera.

Comparing to Ronin, it's a combination of the animations just being much better all around, the move sets are not only more interesting but there's way, way more of them, and the fact the controls are just faster and more responsive. Or rather, the player perceives it that way because of how the animations work. I suspect the underlying code's just fine, but that first attack animation's so slow and the dodge is so linear in terms of how fast you move, that it seems like there's more latency in there.

Going a bit more finely, your character movement isn't reduced massively just by locking onto an enemy, a full run isn't on clicking the stick, dodges actually dodge stuff (because a lot of enemies attack in a more linear and recognisable fashion, not even considering invincibility frames), the parry mechanic in Ronin is extremely clear as to whether you're early, on time or late, you're constantly doing high impact moves more often because of the Ki system (and much more opportunity to surprise enemies) and you've got a lot more toys to play with. In addition, the way it uses the camera to convey impact is both more restrained and clearer when you are successfully attacking and defending. As a result, even when fighting multiple enemies, it's not that hard to use both visuals and audio to work out what's going on in Ronin, while I found single enemy encounters in Stellar Blade to be unclear in terms of feedback and enemies seemed spongey when I was making the right choices in battle.

The biggest frustration I found when playing against the boss enemies was that only one of the four or so different flashes that the enemies can throw at you actually clearly delineated when you do something (the blue blink alert), where as the single one on Ronin gives you it.

Just found the skin suit in the menu. Haha, fucking hell. The tits when you're running. Some absolute panty sniffers made this.

It was a little over three months from the first demo to release for Lies of P, and of course they kept patching after release. For the first Nioh it was nearly 10 months between the alpha demo to the full release and that had some fairly major issues initially that ended up getting fixed.

So the Eurogamer subheader will be "Not-so-Stellar Blade" I'm guessing?

Finally, a female protagonist I can get behind.

Not playing Rise of Ronin, so perhaps don't dislike this as much as some, but it definitely doesn't feel right.

Getting the timing down for the block constantly feels off, with you needing to hit the button almost half a second earlier than you would expect to. Same goes for the dodge. I've just got the easier perfect parry skill and it feels better, but now I'm just left with the realisation that parrying is kind of tedious in this game. Far from the satisfying weighty parry mechanics of Lies of P, that I recently just played through. Having to parry even basic enemies three or four times to achieve anything feels incredibly drawn out. Enemies have too many hit points as well, making your character feel really weak.

Disappointing, as it feels like there could be a good game in here. Not a fantastic one, but with some tuning it would certainly warrant a play through. I'll see what reviews are like, but it feels like maybe a £30 or so purchase (or wait for it to pop up as a PS Plus game)

Sounds like maybe I should pay more attention to Rise of Ronin though.

I finally beat the boss, despite my absence of skill. Vandelay is spot on, parry and dodge need to be pressed earlier than you expect - I even saw the developer on Twitter blame this "lag" on not using your TVs Game Mode, but I reckon that's nonsense and it's just built around anticipating your next move.

Basically actually remembering to block and not commit too much when attacking was enough to get me through, and I did have fun throwing myself at the same enemy repeatedly in a way I'd usually get bored with. There's definitely a core of goodness in there, I just feel like the combat needs a little tweaking.

Holy shit the music on both boss fights are really bad

It was definitely my biggest takeaway from the demo. I guess the question is that was with a pretty much fully upgraded skill tree so how long will it take to get in full game to get to that level.

The former. New boss fight, upgraded tree. There is a new type of evade they don't show in the demo, when you see it flash purple hit back + O

Other gripes:

Automatically locking on to the nearest enemy (within reason) when the previously-targeted enemy dies is a pretty standard feature in melee action games, but I don't think there's an option for it here.

Unskippable cutscenes can get in the sea as far as I'm concerned.

Ranged combat doesn't feel great, for a variety of reasons - it breaks your lock-on, there's no hip-fire option insofar as I can tell, and it's ammo-based (so when you're out of bullets, your gun is useless). Both Nier games did this far better.

I don't think that works in the prologue, unless I'm being even more dense than usual.