mightymonkeyman

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

How is a score of a 7 mixed or average? oh wait the 10 point scale is actually a stupid concept isn’t it. Anyway Stellar Blade is a great console debut from Shift Up, visually the game is great with some densely detailed environments with plenty of space to explore, occasionally the visuals break up but the sacrifice is there to maintain a great frame rate. Gameplay is also fun at all times with some great enemy variety and a steady stream of boss encounters. The game is a bit too long for my liking, I think I finished up at about 37hrs but I had plenty of fun doing side quests before moving on with the main story line. Musically the games k-pop did very little for me as did the overly skimpy outfits for Eve but this is resolved once you unlock some of the more interesting outfits. But overall worth your time, plenty of fun to be had and it will be interesting to see what we next next from Shift Up.

A slow slog of a totally boring game. 90% of the time all your required to do is push up on the analogue stick, just walking forward. Combat as zero dynamic encounters everything is container to specific set pieces with the sword play is always set in a scene where the background elements are turned off to a blur with 1 only enemy at a time until they spawn in the next for you. At times the fighting mechanics feel like letting the animation play out you kinda loose any sense of being in control. Environmental puzzles involve nothing more than looking at a floating object and holding the right trigger in. The run time isn’t 5hrs but about 6.5 to 7 to see credits and about 8.5 to 9ish to get 1000/1000 achievements (all 11 of them) and no spoilers but you spend a solid hour of this game time slowly trudging through a cave lighting some touches in relative darkness. Graphically it’s fine, Unreal 5 shows some potential but the Series X experience is fairly soft and capped to 30fps creating blur when ever you move the camera, a lot of the ground breaking visuals floating about online are clearly from a high end PC as I never had that playing on Xbox with an OLED display. But the HDR is well implemented even if it does look a little too much like the Xbox HDR configuration setup image.