Stellar Blade demo is out. How is the game looking?

Gameplay and combat

The game has a third-person view and, at least in the demo, follows a semi-straight line. You can explore and find items and such, but it’s not an open world. It has a system similar to Dark Souls, where you find rest zones along the way, and when you rest normal enemies respawn. Also similar to Souls games, at the start of the game, you have 3 potions that refill at said rest points.

Where the game shines is in its combat. The fights are fast-paced and frantic against more powerful enemies or hordes of weaker enemies. You have dodge, perfect dodge, block, perfect block, and skills in your favor. It’s not usually that common in action games to have perfect dodge and perfect block and that can make the game have a higher skill ceiling. The player also has 4 skill slots that cost BE, the game’s energy system, and can equip upgrades on EVE but there is not enough time to explore much about that on the demo.

There are also some exploration elements. You can find dead human bodies that, like Darksiders’ life and wrath shards, in gathering a certain number of memories/souls (or whatever that is) increase your max health and max BE. However, corpses are not limited to upgrades, they also can contain codes, that can let you progress through the game or open locked chests that contain items.

Graphics and soundtrack

Stellar Blade, as it is usual today on consoles, has a quality mode, a balanced mode, and a performance mode. The quality mode reaches 4k, but the game runs on 30fps. The performance mode runs on 1440p at 60fps. The balanced mode dynamically balances between the two.

I played in performance mode, as I prefer my games running at 60 fps, especially a fast-paced game like this one. The graphics were nothing out of this world, but good. One thing that caught my attention was the animations. They are fluid, well-choreographed, and well-made, both in the cutscenes and in-game. I highlight the combat ones. The visual effects are nice, nothing that blocks your view during the combat, which is good, but at least until the end of the demo nothing astonishing either.

The game shines on its soundtrack. Now musical taste is something very personal, but for me, the music agitates the combat and fits the scenario and world around the player. I’m no music expert but the OST remembered me from Nier: Automata. I think if you like the soundtrack from that game, you will like Stellar Blade’s as well.

Conclusion

To conclude, I haven’t been following too deeply the polemic surrounding this game, but from what I can gather from these 30 minutes of the demo, I can’t say I found a single problem. Nothing bothered me, felt out of place or annoying. On the contrary, I wasn’t expecting much, but now I want to experience more of the game’s combat. So from my viewpoint, this game has everything to be good, let’s hope it doesn’t disappoint on launch. If you are wondering if you should even bother to download the demo: if you liked any of the mechanics or games mentioned above, I think you will probably like Stellar Blade as well.