Stellar Blade PC review - a slick but hollow action RPG

Stellar Blade opens with a pod hurtling through the atmosphere before crashing to Earth. A woman, our protagonist Eve, is released from the pod and emerges in a slow-motion flourish, long ponytail streaming down her arched back and her improbable, techno-supermodel figure framed by the explosions of flying battleships in the distance. Soon enough, Eve is thrown into the action. You learn to dodge around insectile creatures, parrying blows from their outstretched limbs and chopping into them with the agility of a fencing master. Everything is technicolor and hyperreal.

In Stellar Blade's sci-fi future, Eve is designed to serve a specific purpose. Her job is to defeat monsters that have overrun the planet, forcing the beleaguered remnants of civilization into an urban enclave that offers scant protection from the threats of their dystopian world. When she meets an ordinary person, they often address her as 'Angel' for her martial prowess and descent from space to the fallen world below.

Eve is also designed to serve a similar purpose for players. She's meant to be a wildly capable warrior, exciting to watch as she carves through enemies and flits across the battlefield with superhuman acrobatics. And she's also meant to be an attractive figure for a presumably drooling audience to dress up in various costumes or ogle as the camera obsesses, as it does in her introductory cutscene, over her body.

Stellar Blade is good at accomplishing its goals, for better or worse. Though a large portion of it is spent traversing sprawling post-apocalyptic environments, climbing, swimming, and running through the rusted-out ruins dotting a deserted landscape or spelunking through abandoned facilities, the heart of the game is its combat.

Eve is an accomplished fighter, and Stellar Blade models her talents through fluid design that sees her acrobatically dispatching enemies with nimble dodges, leaps into the air, and a range of combo attacks. The game doles out new additions to these systems - guns and extra varieties of special melee abilities - at regular enough intervals that the fighting is neither overwhelmingly complex nor dully repetitive. The animation and sound work lend a welcome sense of impact to every hit, the variety of enemies is wide enough that there's a consistent need to learn new tactics to employ against them, and the interplay of systems governing enemy and player shield and health bars are all well considered.

The audiovisual spectacle of these fights, either when ripping through weaker enemies or taking on more powerful bosses, also helps keep them engaging. Stellar Blade is an impressive game in terms of fidelity, often in the look of its creatures and post-apocalyptic scenery, too, but many sections of its semi-discrete environments take so long to pick through that they wear thin before the next one opens up.

There are nice touches here and there that elevate a strained hour of running through a damp sewer system or the verdant ruins of an abandoned metropolis, dotted with crumbling statues. The city of Xion, with its labyrinth of narrow alleyways and streets filled with shops, eventually hums with life in a way nowhere else in the apocalyptic setting does. Its architecture alone illustrates its place in the plot as an oasis in the vast desert of a devastated Earth.

There are also moody levels that lead into overwhelmingly large chambers of research stations, built on so enormous a scale that Eve is dwarfed by distant ceilings and far-off walls. On PC, it's all especially good-looking and capable of showcasing the game's strengths in combat and visual fidelity in a way that enhances what's best about playing it.

Some of the character designs are exceptional, too, like the wizened Orcal, whose flesh gives way to knotted wires and metal machinery, or the sad-eyed singer Enya, whose body consists of a skeleton and head propped onto a robotic carapace until repaired by Eve.

The monsters that make up the majority of the game's enemies are wonderfully grotesque. They charge or shamble about as if uncomfortable in their own strange anatomies, bodies resembling bugs and sea creatures, animate chunks of rock or abstract growths of diseased-looking flesh. Mostly, though, the characters consist of absurdly idealized human beings, with the main cast featuring a strong-jawed man and a line-up of plastic-molded women. It's over-the-top enough to read almost as a parody - especially when encountering an otherworldly, angelic guardswoman dressed in latex and lace lingerie or when noticing that Eve, despite scaling high walls and teetering on broken scaffolding over perilous heights, is always wearing high heels.

Despite the effort expended on surface sex appeal, though, it's a remarkably chaste game in terms of characterization and plot. There's nothing beneath the surface of its characters, either in their dialogue or across the events of the plot, to make them come across as anything but digital objects. Stellar Blade is a game filled with dolls, not people, and, like dolls, its cast doesn't ever seem like much more than an approximation of humanity. They're plastic representations who don't convincingly express any of the thoughts or emotions that might make them into characters with whom you could develop any meaningful connection.

Because of this, the game's plot - a serviceable enough sci-fi tale without any outstanding elements - ultimately falls flat. It's a hodgepodge of apocalyptic themes and musings on technology that have been repeated enough in other media to be instantly familiar. Even acknowledging that Stellar Blade is, in part, a reflection on what being 'human' might mean in a world far different than our own, Eve and the rest of the cast are far too one-note to resonate. Without a believable set of characters to anchor its ideas, the plot, no matter how it twists and turns to complicate itself, doesn't cohere into anything truly memorable.

There's enough in Stellar Blade to recommend it as a solid action game, but the experience, on the whole, is as hollow as the depiction of its main character. Stellar Blade, like Eve, is flashy and capable of thrilling fights, even if there isn't much beneath the surface capable of speaking to the player on more than the most shallow of terms.