I have been pretty busy lately. Not just with the normal business that comes with having a newborn in the home, but I have been busy playing Stellar Blade on PS5.
I had seen previews for this game for a while before it was released on April 26th of this year. Everything I saw was showing this game to be pretty amazing looking. I tried not to get my hopes up because lately, it seems that games have been over promising and under delivering.
Well, the good news is that Stellar Blade is an amazing game and well worth the $69 price tag. I guess this game would be considered a Souls-Like because it is difficult and has the normal souls formula where you rest at checkpoints to refill your health and potions and the monsters respawn.
In the game, you play as Eve. She is a robot that was sent to save humanity from some alien race that is taking over earth. The story is pretty basic and not much to it, but once you can get past that, it is a really cool game that takes you on a crazy adventure to some really cool environments.
The game is full of a bunch of really cool boss fights with some crazy enemy design. The enemies in this game don't look like anything I have come across in other games. It was really cool to see the developer's imaginations come to life in the boss battles.
The game is from a Korean development company called Shift Up. I've heard they have mainly made mobile games and this was their first game of this type. They swung for the fences with this game and did such a great job.
The graphics in this game are amazing, especially for such an unknown development team. Over my 40 hour journey with the game, I never ran into graphical issues or any crashes. You can't really say that when playing most AAA games nowadays. It seems like the big development companies just care about putting a product out and they don't care how good it is.
The entire game is full of really cool places that you can tell were crafted with care.
The only gripe I have with the game is the map and quest system. It can be hard to find out where to go for a lot of the quests because there is no way to locate quest objectives unless you are in the area where the quest can be done and you have the map data for the region. So when I beat the game, I had a bunch of quests left to finish because I didn't want to spend a bunch of time trying to fast travel to different zones and locations.
I had originally planned on completing every quest in the game, similar to what I did with Final Fantasy 16 and Rise of the Ronin, but I didn't want to look up each quest and figure out where to go. Plus this game took me a lot longer to complete than I had anticipated and now I am like three games behind. There have been so many cool games releasing lately and having a newborn in the home makes it difficult to play more than 30-60 minutes at a time.
The final boss arena reminded me a lot of the final boss in Elden Ring. I was a bit worried because I thought I would have problems beating the boss like I did with Elden Ring. I still haven't beaten Elden Ring and I was hoping that I wasn't going to be stuck. I got to the final boss last night, and died a few times before giving up for the day. But this morning, I was able to defeat him on my first try. Some times you just have to walk away from these types of games and come back later so you don't get frustrated.
Overall, this game is one of my favorites. The combat is super fast and very well done. The combat in games like this is why I keep playing. I love the challenge of these games, especially when they aren't too challenging. Some of the bosses in these types of games are way too hard and I just get frustrated and quit them. But this game did a great job balancing out the difficulty so it doesnt seem impossible.
If you have a PS5 and have been on the fence about this game, I highly recommend it. It is a fantastic game that is very enjoyable.
