Steelrising review

After 2019’s Greedfall, I became an avid fan of Spiders and knew I would be jumping in on day one for their next game so here I am, reviewing their latest release: Steelrising.

Released on September 8th for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, Spiders’ newest game is a Soulslike RPG set in a Gothic/Steampunk version of the French Revolution where things went even more haywire than history remembers. It’s not quite historic fiction – is Steampunk historic sci-fi a thing? Not sure what else you’d call 18th century Paris plagued by killer automatons so yeah, that sounds about right.

You play as Aegis, a mysterious but benevolent automat in the service of the Queen, and your mission is – of course – to fight the robot horde. And while there definitely is a story here – told through a series of cut scenes as well as notes, collectibles, and other environmental elements – the main draw for most players is going to be the combat and gameplay loop (as is often the case with most Soulslikes).

So, the number one question to answer here is: Is Steelrising a good Soulslike?

And my super helpful answer is: Yes/No. Let me explain.

At its core, the gameplay is pretty sound. The controls are responsive and at least on PS5, performance was smooth with a steady frame rate to support the needs of precise action gameplay. You have all the basic elements you’d expect in a Souls-style combat system: light and heavy attacks, blocks, parries, dodges, and so on – all governed by a stamina bar.

However, as you would hope for in pretty much any good Souslike game, Steelrising plays with the formula enough to carve out its own identity. Is it always successful in that experimentation? Not necessarily, but I appreciate the effort and creativity shown by the devs.

First off, your stamina bar doesn’t just run out in this game. If you let your stamina bar fully deplete, you’ll essentially overheat your robot. Obviously, this can lead to some serious issues – rather than just waiting for a bit of stamina to build back up, you’ll have to wait for Aegis to recover a bit before she can do much more than hobble around.

However, you aren’t totally helpless. If you time a button press correctly, you can implement “rapid cooling” to regain the ability to attack, dodge and so on. The better your timing, the more stamina you’ll recover. However, you will incur some ice damage from the cooling mechanic so it’s a bit of a give and take. If you’re familiar with the Nioh series, it functions almost like the Ki Pulse recovery system, but with a bit of a negative status effect tagged onto it if you over abuse the mechanic.

I found this system interesting and refreshing with how it further added to the risk/reward of Souls gameplay. Mastering it helped deepen my understanding of the overall combat, especially as encounters got deadlier and more difficult.

That said, while I will never outright say any Soulslike game is “easy,” I wouldn’t say Steelrising isn’t the most challenging one out there either – so take that as you will. For veterans of the genre who already have a core competency with this kind of potentially punishing gameplay, Steelrising may not pose much of a threat. But for those who are newer to the genre or generally find these kinds of games difficult, it may still well pose a satisfying challenge for you – every gamer is different.

But I digress. Getting back to how Steelrising plays with the Souls gameplay formula, one aspect that I didn’t find quite as satisfying was the way in which the game implements blocks, parries, and counters. These mechanics are all in the game – but they’re tied to certain weapons, so they aren’t always a part of your repertoire.

In other words, some weapons can block, some can parry/counter, and others can’t perform these functions at all. Instead, they may have a special attack or something along those lines. While I get how this can add to the risk/reward factor while adding a layer of strategy to your character’s build, it did seem kind of odd to not always be able to block or parry based on what weapon you were using.

That said, you can equip two different weapons at the same time and quickly switch between them on the fly – so I guess plan your build and loadout at your own risk? Since I tend to favor “dex” builds (aka light and fast damage dealers that end up pretty squishy on the health/defensive side of things), my own build was biased towards endurance and agility, along with weapons that scaled with agility and enabled me to parry/counter.

Another spin on the traditional combat formula in Steelrising is the game’s use of status effects that I hinted at earlier. The game focuses on a few core alchemical elements: fire, ice, and lightning. You and your foes are both vulnerable to these elements. Get hit with enough of an element, and a status effect will take hold. For instance, enough fire will set a character ablaze and cause continuous damage for a time, or enough ice will freeze a character in place – leaving them totally vulnerable for a short time.

These elements could be make or break in a lot of fights (at least, depending on your build/play style) and I found myself abusing ice a lot to great personal satisfaction, so I recommend not shying away from spending some points on an alchemical style build.

Speaking of which, I keep mentioning builds but kind of glossed over the whole levelling system. It’s a Soulslike system through and through. Rather than Souls, Steelrising’s ethereal currency of choice is called Anima Essence. You farm it by killing enemies or picking it up in the environment, lose it upon your death with one chance to recover it, spend it at the game’s equivalent of bonfires (aka Vestals in this case) – tale as old as time.

You can pour Anima Essence into six core stats: Power, Agility, Durability, Vigour, Engineering, and Elemental Alchemy. These stats scale with various weapons, govern your health and endurance, improve your defense and ability to resist or inflict status effects – all the things you would expect.

But Steelrising does do a couple of neat things that you might not typically expect in a Soulslike. For instance, anywhere you can spend Anima Essence to level up, you can also access a shop to buy new weapons or armor, single use healing items (to supplement this game’s equivalent of Estus aka your Burette), and other expendable items like stamina boosters or throwable explosives of varying elements.

In addition to spending Anima at Vestals, you can also spend it at the Horseless Carriage once you unlock it a few hours into game. This Horseless Carriage not only acts like another “bonfire,” it also provides the game’s fast travel among other functions. This carriage is a key part of hopping around Paris for anyone interested in completing the game’s various side quests which are far less esoteric than traditional Souls’ quests.

A big part of this is Steelrising’s inclusion of a compass. You heard me. A compass for actual wayfinding in a Soulslike that shows you exactly where to go for quests. It will even show you where to find any Anima Essence you dropped if you died. It’s magical. Never have I ever been so not-lost in a Soulslike.

And before you get your panties in a wad, if you like the “I have no idea where I am wait am I going in circles or is this actually the seventh layer of hell” style of map exploration inherent to traditional Souls games, then just don’t use the compass.

But if you’re like me and you were born without an internal GPS: rejoice. Your savior is here. Equip that baby and spam it constantly till you’ve completed every side quest and yeeted every robot big bad into the sky forever and ever amen.

Moving on, there are a couple other interesting quirks in Steelrising’s gameplay to discover – like friendly fire that lets enemies damage and stun one another. The game also does a decent job with the more metroidvania aspect that’s inherent to many Soulslikes’ exploration as well.

Not only does it include the obvious one-way, locked doors that loop around and become shortcuts through the levels later on, it includes a lot of environmental hints that make you go, “Hm. I see you. I could totally reach that later, if only I had a grappling hook…” (and then later, wonderfully, you get a grappling hook and other such pieces of equipment that help you backtrack through levels as well as add new abilities in combat).

This made the environments mostly fun to explore not just on a first past, but a second or even third too. At least for the 40 ish hours I played (clearing every side quest before beating the main story), I generally felt like there was always something new to find – whether it was a new part of the environment I could access or a new way to approach enemy encounters, so I will say that at the end of the day, I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game.

Was it the best Soulslike imitator ever? No, I don’t think so. The core combat is fun and I enjoyed the build that I created – relying heavily on high endurance and rapid cooling to keep on the offensive while executing high-damage parries. I used weapons and modules (Steelrising’s substitute for equippable “accessories”) to buff my ice damage, stamina, and parry window/damage and make for some really satisfying late-game play.

But in a year where you have an actual FromSoftware behemoth like Elden Ring and 2D Soulslike indie darlings like Salt and Sacrifice debuting, it can be hard for yet another Soulslike to stand out. As far as my own personal rankings for entries I’ve played in the genre, I would put Steelrising in the same tier as Code Vein for those of you familiar with that title.

The story didn’t do too much for me personally – it’s kind of bonkers at times, but I mean it’s automatons hijacking the French Revolution so what can you really expect? What kind of holds the narrative back for me is how robotic the characters are – and I don’t mean the automats, I mean the historical French figures from Marie Antionette to Robespierre and everyone in between.

This comes down mostly to the writing and the character animations – Aegis definitely ate up most of the time and attention spent on animations for dialogue and cut scenes because the other main characters seem pretty flat by comparison, despite being living, breathing human beings. The English lip sync can also be a little off-putting, but I will say that the voice acting itself does deliver some decent performances across the board.

What I really ended up coming back for time and again was the combat. It may sound kind of harsh even if I don’t mean it to be, but Steelrising is almost like a bag of potato chips. It may not be your favorite snack but once you pick it up you don’t take just one and put the bag away – you want to munch your way through the whole thing. Satisfying in the moment, if not the most memorable of eats.

This is almost a complete reversal of what I fell in love with in Spiders’ previous game, Greedfall. If you look back at my review for that one, the combat was the thing I kind of glossed over more than anything – and what I loved was the storytelling, world building, and most importantly: the RPG of it all. The freedom to build your character and navigate the game’s scenarios in a variety of ways. It almost kind of filled that void that’s been left in the wake of old school BioWare games.

But Steelrising has me feeling the opposite with all my attention on the combat. It’s not the best Soulslike system I’ve seen, but it does just enough to stand apart and create its own addicting loop – at least in my experience.

Another plus I’ll put in Steelrising’s column over previous Spiders’ games is that at least for me on PS5, this was a far less buggy launch than I was expecting. Spiders have traditionally struggled with launching buggy games. Even as a fan, I was totally transparent about the many, varied, and sometimes hilarious but potentially game-breaking bugs I encountered in Greedfall.

But this time around, I found Steelrising to be a mostly smooth experience. No crashes, no major game-breakers of any sort. Mostly, I just noticed a couple texture pop-ins here and there, a couple audio glitches where there was text for a voice line but no accompanying voice, and delayed item notifications when I would pick something up in the environment. Just minor inconveniences that most players may not even notice half the time – so well done in that regard; I’m glad to see the studio making progress.

Besides those little hiccups, I did just have a few quips here and there about the game’s underlying design. For instance, there isn’t much here in the way of accessibility options for players with various audio, visual, or motor needs. You can’t even invert the X axis – just the Y. Y THO. Y do games still do this?! (Ok, I’ll stop now…)

The late game does also start to suffer from a lack of deep enemy variety, but experiences will vary based on how much time you spend running around each area of the map for quests, farming experience, etc. Also, certain areas can seem a little sparse – lacking enemies in spots or having a lot of breakable objects in the environment that time and time again just don’t yield any drops but these are pretty minor quips.

At the end of the day, my personal take is that Steelrising is a cool game. Will it be remembered as one of the standouts for 2022? In all likelihood, no. But for those Souls junkies out there looking for something new to try, I can give this one a thumbs up and a recommendation.

At its best, the gameplay has moments where it sings. The combat animations make you feel like a badass, and the game has enough unique mechanics to make the Souls-y-ness feel fresh and just different enough to create a new, worthwhile experience. Plus, with the addition of things like the compass and the Horseless Carriage, Steelrising might be an approachable entry point into the genre for some players.

If you’re feeling the pull from what you’ve seen in trailers or read in reviews like this one, I say go for it – there’s definitely a fun time to be had here. Spiders continues to grow as a studio, and personally I’m more than happy to keep supporting them and can’t wait to see what they do in their next outing.