Stellar Blade PC’s Release Finally Got My Attention, Only For Its Steam Next Fest Demo to Remind Me of Elden Ring Nightreign’s Reign
I finally gave in and tried the Stellar Blade PC demo on Steam Next Fest, especially after seeing it dominate the charts. While the full game’s recent launch might have knocked the demo from its top spot, I was curious...
Đăng bởi:apocagames | 15/06/25
I finally gave in and tried the Stellar Blade PC demo on Steam Next Fest, especially after seeing it dominate the charts. While the full game’s recent launch might have knocked the demo from its top spot, I was curious to experience the buzz myself. This isn’t just a brief teaser; the free demo is quite substantial. It lets you play all the way to the end of the first major boss fight, complete with a cinematic intro, a quick tutorial, and enough exploration to start digging into the game’s extensive upgrade system. Plus, there’s even a bonus boss encounter from later in the game for an extra challenge.
Those two fights were easily the highlight of what I played of Stellar Blade. The satisfying ‘chiiing’ of a successful parry or the balletic red lines of a perfect dodge both encourage a deeper connection with the combat than simply holding down the guard button or spamming dodge-roll. There’s decent weight behind the boss’ attacks, fitting of statures that tend to tower over Eve. The trouble is, I’m fighting through much better bosses elsewhere right now, and this demo is nowhere close to convincing me to make the jump.
I’m working my way gradually through Elden Ring Nightreign with my friends at the moment, and it’s indicative of the problem that I had with Stellar Blade almost immediately. While there’s a competent soulslike in there, it’s very clearly a game that relies on style over substance. That’s clear from its opening cutscene, and while there’s little need to rehash the conversation about Eve’s physique here, Shift Up found many more ways to show off visually than in other departments.
Its flashy, setpiece-filled intro and its gratuitously gory cutscenes quickly gave way to a dark, muddy city that was dangerously close to the iconic ‘PS3 brown’ color palette. Even in that relatively close-quarters environment, performance was an issue, and despite outshining the recommended specs I had to scale the graphics way back before I could get free of some distracting stuttering.
Elsewhere, it wasn’t long before I was being waylaid by level design; having an enemy lying in wait behind a door might have been an homage to Dark Souls, but the floaty physics puzzles are certainly a feature I don’t really need from my soulslikes. The style of Stellar Blade’s big moments is decent, but the substance of its moment-to-moment combat and traversal doesn’t live up to the checks its cutscenes are writing. Eve’s attacks are lightweight compared to her finishing moves, her response to getting smacked around a boss arena disappointingly clunky in the face of her apparent agility elsewhere.
It’s tough not to compare the two when Nightreign is playing in the background while I’m trying Stellar Blade. Despite the chaos and rapid pace of the Elden Ring spin-off, there’s no question which is the better game. Granted, Shift Up is venturing into less familiar territory with Stellar Blade, whereas FromSoftware is adapting technology it has honed to a laser’s edge over years. Stellar Blade is by no means a bad game, nor is it entirely fair to compare it to anything Elden Ring-shaped, but it’s certainly not good enough to have justified the discourse that’s swirled around it, or to convince me to abandon my Nightreign for Eve.
Compiled by ApocaGames
