Shown alongside new trailers for Sonic x Shadow Generations, Death Standing 2 and more, Stellar Blade is attempting to be the next big exclusive for PlayStation 5 gamers. However, the upcoming hack and slash game has an outdated, edgy, PS3-era vibe that isn’t necessarily bad, but weird to see alongside other PS5 hits.
Kicking off the most recent PlayStation State of Play, almost ten minutes of new Stellar Blade gameplay was shown off. Developed by newcomer Shift Up and assisted by Japan Studios, Stellar Blade is a Japanese hack and slash game that’s crawled right out of 2007 and found itself Isekaid into Unreal Engine 4.
Stellar Blade brings back the late-2000s smutty aesthetic found in games like Onechanbara and X-Blade that have been rightfully relegated to the pits of the PlayStation 3. Protagonist Eve is dressed in a variety of skin-tight, figure-compressing bodysuits with plenty of skin showing, slicing open a variety of creepy enemies filled with blood, all the while near-parody level jiggle physics turn certain body parts into jelly.
This is a style of game that has been largely abandoned over the past decade, outside of games like Senran Kagura. It’s a genre of excess: narratives with copious amounts of incoherent fantasy names and B-movie twists and turns combined with combat that is flashier than you’ve ever seen — before so are the outfits.
However, surprisingly, Stellar Blade looks like the first game in this B-movie hack-and-slash genre to actually be anywhere near decent. Alongside the lavish graphical elements from Unreal Engine 4, Shift Up’s new combat system looks like a tonne of fun, especially compared to the aforementioned Onechanbara. (That game is a real dog.)
Stellar Blade’s combat is focused on countering, parrying and dodging enemy attacks to earn Beta Gauge which can be used to execute powerful skills. If it plays how it looks, Stellar Blade is a game of push-and-pull instead of just simply slashing through environments with very basic combos.
Alongside the modern combat system and graphics, Shift Up has also created an open, exploitable world for players to experience. Furthermore, awesome movement techniques such as wall scaling have been introduced to give exploration the same level of depth as combat.
It’s weird: Stellar Blade is likely what this genre of game could’ve always been with a huge budget. That doesn’t mean Stellar Blade will be a commercial success — it certainly seems like a game that will have niche appeal, and may be shooting itself in the foot by staying exclusively on PlayStation. (It certainly seems that the game would succeed more on PC.)
At the end of the day, it’s a game from another time being transported into 2024. It’s not a game for me, although I’m certain I know a handful of people who would shamelessly enjoy it. (Cough, our Persona 3 Reload review writer, cough.) But there’s an audience for Stellar Blade that has been stuck dealing with some pretty awful slop for more than a decade. If some virtual smut is going to be released, at least make it a good game.
Stellar Blade releases exclusively on PlayStation 5 on April 26, 2024.