Whilst I was very excited for Stellar Blade upon the initial reveal of the game, the release of this game snuck up on me, and still managed to set me back nearly £60 between everything else that has committed great atrocities to my wallet. Usually, I’ve been on point with writing and posting my reviews, often the same day I consider it finished, but at best a day or two later. I think it’s been about two weeks since I finished Stellar Blade, and it’s not even because I’ve been distracted putting all of my spare time into Shin Megami Tensei V or the new Elden Ring DLC. Whenever I’ve thought about writing this review, I’ve been quite flummoxed trying to figure out how I actually felt about this game. Even now, at this point in writing, I haven’t even figured out what rating I want to give it.

Stellar Blade is Shift Up’s first attempt at breaking into the AAA gaming scene, and with a huge backing from Sony, publishing the title, having Shift Up’s first AAA title being published as a PlayStation 5 exclusive speaks volumes on the faith that Sony must have for the company in the long term, and what Stellar Blade did offer beneath the hood also gives me faith that we could be in for a lot more quality titles, as Shift Up grows, alongside the development scene for video games in Korea, which has been producing a handful of great titles in recent years.

However, whilst a lot of these squeaky clean components make this engine run smoothly, the trade-off on this complete machine is how it looks on the outside, and glaring into these critiques are exactly why I’ve been very divided on this game.

First of all, similar to a lot of Sony’s published games, the world design in Stellar Blade is stunning. Each region appears to have been built with love, and the goal to create an immersive environment, with each glimmer of light, and spark of dwindling life, the world is gorgeous. The same goes for the character designs, without a massive cast, the majority of the recurring characters offered a distinct flavor that could have meant so much more to me, had it not been for my disinterest in the story.

The story, very standard beat. An alien race known as Naytibas hunts and chases humankind out of Earth, and so the surviving forces of humanity, in an attempt to take back their home planet, send in their own army of Angels, who are man-made soldiers suited to take out the hostile alien race. A lot of the story beats feigned some similarities to NieR: Automata to me, and while I didn’t dislike that games story, Stellar Blades story didn’t keep me so engaged, where its twists and story arcs were more predictable, than anything.

The combat in this game, VERY CLEAN. Operates very smoothly, and allows for instantaneous switching in its styles. I think that the combat in its peak is the most rounded component of the game, which makes it a shame that you don’t get very many opportunities to witness it at the height of its performance. The boss battles throughout uphold that heightened sense of thrilling combat, as the enemies remain active and keep you enthralled in mastering different ways to counteract their combos, but between each boss, is a LOT of standard enemies that aren’t even close to engaging to fight. The common types of Naytibas are slow in combat, not attacking often, and are especially weak for most of the game. I could either wail away with standard attacks, and just kill it, or I could stall and parry enough attacks so I can at least do a cool finishing blow? Luckily, towards the end of the game, the enemies actually become much tankier, so the fights develop a pattern that’s similar to the boss fights.

The soundtrack had some nice pieces, but a lot of the music would get drowned out by an excess of sound effects that would alert you often enough in combat. I also wasn’t the biggest fan of the voice acting, but I don’t want that to be a discredit, given the workload that comes with that side of the industry, however, it was mostly a cast of people that I’m not familiar with, so hopefully this will lead to a lot more opportunities for work for them.

All-in-all, Stellar Blade is a fine game overall, and a good first game going AAA for Shift Up, whilst they had a lot of great ideas with this game, the execution of these ideas is its main detriment, but now that the games been received well, and a sequel seems to have been greenlit, I feel like their future is destined to be a future of great success. Overall, Stellar Blade gets a 6/10 from me, as I’ve finally made up my mind.