Steel Rising Review

[Michael {United Critics}]

About the Game

Steel Rising is an alternate history Souls-Like single-player, third-person action game, where you play as Aegis, an Automaton tasked with stopping the mad tyranny of King Louis XVI and his automaton army.

Story

You play as Aegis, an automaton created to protect Marie-Antoinette during her lockup in the Tuileries Palace, while the King deals with the French Rebellion in Paris, but the Queen feels like she is there as more of a prisoner, than someone who is being protected, and feels the King has gone mad and tasks Aegis with stopping the King, which ultimately results in you assisting French Revolution.
Some historical facts and figures do not fit their real-life narrative at all, even being polar opposites of what they were, which can be excused saying it’s alternative history, but will for sure bother some.

Gameplay

Like most souls-likes, you play in a third-person perspective, slowly hacking and slashing your way through enemies, and the occasional bosses, each weak against a certain style of play.

You can find just over 30 different weapons, a lot of which don’t take too long for you to come across and fit different styles of play from speed to strength and range focus.
With this many weapons, the game leaves a lot of space for testing out various builds and tactics, but you sadly cannot respect which can limit your options of trying different builds later in the game.
Of course, you can also find different kinds of armor sets, each being better resistant against certain kinds of damage. (Ultimately didn’t feel like they made much of a difference)

You of course have a stamina bard, which results in you overheating if you use it up, but you can cool it down with a press of a button after exhaustion, which regains a certain amount of stamina, which allows you to keep moving as if you didn’t run out, but at the downside of afflicting yourself with frost, which slows you down if you do it too many times without waiting in between.

Every time you die, you respawn at a checkpoint at which you can upgrade your weapons, level up your character, and unlock new Module slots (if you have the required item), which allows you to equip more Keys, which give various buffs to your character (can also be upgraded.)

Visuals

This one comes to a difference in subjective opinion, and to me, the game looks great with a nice touch of detail on the environment and characters, but some others criticize it, saying the graphics are low resolution but that may be because I don’t care too much about having the best graphics known to mankind.
The game does have some performance issues, and can stutter even on lower graphics on modern specs, but it’s not very consistent, as sometimes it runs smoothly, and other times it drops in the same areas.

Audio

The game has voice acting for both Aegis, and other characters you come across, and the voice acting is at the very least decent, but some may have issues having to listen to a mix of English and French in the same sentence, which can make dialogue feel janky and annoying.

Pros and cons;

Pros

• Decent variety of weapons,
  
• Interesting story concept, although not executed too well,

Cons

• Combat wasn’t overly enjoyable, and heavily favours agility over other styles,
  
• Playing felt a bit boring and was difficult to get into,
  
• Sometimes enemies just glitch around while standing still sort of teleporting on the spot.

Conclusion

The game isn’t as bad as some try to make it seem, but it certainly isn’t that good either.
It felt very difficult to get into, and I can’t really say I particularly enjoyed it, but that’s likely as a result of comparing it to some other soul-likes while playing.
If you don’t go into the game with the expectation of higher standard games of the same genre, you can still enjoy it, so I would recommend it when it’s on a discount.

Rating: 5/10
Reviewer: xSaitoHx