Steelrising Review (PS5)

Steelrising is the newest games from Spiders, the French studio that brought us the GreedFall, a massive RPG that was well received by both players and media. If you’re not familiar with Spiders, they typically create narrative-focused RPGs that put story right and center. The studio’s portfolio includes games like Technomancer, Of Orcs and Men, Mars: War Logs, Gray Matter, and Bound by Flame.

I played most of the games Spiders released and there’s one thing they all have in common: jank. Steelrising is a departer from the studio’s standard formula and while the idea of having a soulslike game set during the French Revolution is quite appealing, the execution leaves to be desired.

In Steelrising, you play as Aegis, an automat with a conscience who fights other automats controlled by an evil mastermind. As the Queen’s bodyguard, you must prevent the King’s nefarious plans while unraveling the mystery behind the sudden appearance of the automats.

Throughout your adventure, you’ll meet some iconic characters from France’s history, including General de La Fayette, Robespierre, marquis de Mirabeau, and a few others. While they have their own agendas, these esteemed gentlemen are united by a common cause and enemy: the occultist Comte di Cagliostro.

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A period of radical political and societal change in France, the French Revolution began with the Estates General, and these are more or less faithfully integrated into the game. Although the game starts pretty slow story-wise, things are starting to pick up half-way through.

However, that’s not its main issue since you’ll probably be hooked by the combat mechanics anyway. Steelrising copies everything from Dark Souls and adapts the formula with the French Revolution era. Instead of bonfires you have vestals, and instead of estus flasks, you’ll be using oil burette. Anyway, all the mechanics that you’d expect from a soulslike game are there, just the terminology is different.

As far as combat goes, controls are pretty tight with pretty generous iframes (invincibility frames). There are no less than 40 weapons split into 8 categories in the game, so that’s quite a lot. The one thing that I really didn’t like is how Aegis actually moves. Perhaps developers wanted to retain the clunky walk of an automat, and for the most part they managed to do that, but in contrast with the smooth combat moves, it looks quite bad.

All weapons in the game have a special attack and they can be upgraded to level 5. Based on attack speed, there are three types of weapons: heavy, medium and light. As you can imagine, the heavy weapons attack very slow, while the light weapons are the fastest. I found that the medium weapons are the best in the game because they can do almost the same damage as the heavy ones, but faster. I have tested several light weapons and found them underwhelming in the later areas of the game where enemies have a lot of HP.

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Even so, all weapons that I have found in the game seem very interesting and they’re quite varied, so I fairy certain that everyone will find something that fits their playstyle. Apart from weapons, Aegis will be able to equip three different tools that will allow here to access areas that were not accessible before. These tools are automatic drops from certain bosses in the game, so you won’t have to worry about missing them because you didn’t explore certain areas.

Speaking of exploration, Steelrising is a linear game, it’s not an open-world soulslike game. The levels are very well designed with plenty of shortcuts, so you won’t have to backtrack too much. The addition of a compass that will show you where your next objective is makes your life much easier. I’d usually recommend exploring on your own when playing this type of games, but in this case, I’d suggest using the compass whenever you can.

Combat-wise, Steelrising is definitely on the easiest side even without the Assist Mode enabled. This is one of the few games that I know to include an Assist Mode that allows players to tweak the difficulty of the game. For example, you can reduce the damage you take (0% to 100%), improve stamina regeneration (0% to 300%), or choose whether or not to lose XP upon death. However, enabling Assist Mode will prevent you from obtaining some difficulty related achievements and New Game+.

I do not consider myself a soulslike expert, but after switching from an alchemy build that uses light weapons to freeze enemies, to a soldier build that uses medium weapons, I only died 2-3 times the entire game. It took me 20+ hours to finish Steelrising, but I did all the sidequests in the game because I found them interesting. You’ll be missing a lot of story bits if you decide to skip much of the side content, so if you truly find the experience appealing, I’d suggest finishing the NPCs quests too.

Overall, I did enjoy the story, setting and combat mechanics, but I think the game needed a bit more time for polish. There were days where my game would freeze my PS5 for 10 seconds every 2-3 hours of gameplay. On the bright side, Steelrising saves quite often, and I didn’t have to backtrack too much any time the game would crash.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion