A Clockwork Revolution.
If you’ve been a follower of this site or checked out Analog Stick Gaming on the G4A podcast, you would know that French Developer, Spiders, is one of my favorite studios across the industry. From Technomancer to Bound by Flame, to their most recent adventure in Greedfall, It’s a studio that primarily puts passion ahead of all else. While their games all fall under the Euro-jank banner, and all that entails, I simply fall in love with their games one after another, and Steelrising is no different.
Steelrising is essentially Spiders’ take on the soulslike, with more in common with Bloodborne than the other games on Fromsoft’s ledger. It offers similar combat and challenge, but with the storytelling chops you’d expect from the inspired developer. While you’ll have notes to dig deeper into the story at hand, as well as discovering certain characters’ motivations, Steelrising’s narrative isn’t told directly through them or via some obscure lore entries or items, but rather via traditional dialogue choices and cutscenes. It’s an alternative historical take on the French revolution, complete with many names you’d find in a textbook, and is both bizarre and yet intriguing to no end.
Spiders’ latest has all the hallmarks of what you’d expect from the genre; shortcuts to discover, a souls-like currency, enemy patterns to analyze, checkpoints to upgrade your kit as well as respawning nearby threats, and a combat system built upon stamina to keep your arsenal in check. It doesn’t look to elevate or improve upon these systems or ideas, but rather to ensure they provide an engaging and cohesive experience, which Steelrising has in spades. When it comes to games that have adopted the Fromsoft formula to create something their own, Steelrising is hands down the best attempt I have seen thus far.
Steelrising places you in the mechanical shoes of Aegis, an automaton bodyguard for Marie-Antoinette. As Paris is in flames, its populace butchered by rampaging automats, she sends you out in need of answers while she remains safe behind the luxurious walls of Saint-Cloud. As Aegis uncovers the truth behind the automats, she will also dig deeper into her own origins and the mysterious nature of why she is different than any other automats she encounters.
What really helps this alternative take on history is how it’s all set in real places with real people. From Marie-Antoinette to Marquis de Lafayette, to Jacques Necker and King Louis XVI, all these people existed at this time, in the very places this game is set. While there are some liberties obviously taken regarding where they were exactly in 1789, and whether or not many of them had ever met, it still holds pretty close to certain events even if actual crazed robots consuming the souls of mankind weren’t actually a thing.
As the narrative turns to tracking down a man with the title of the Clockwork King and putting an end to his automat army, you’ll often find yourself taking on a variety of quests to aid your allies as well as rescuing a collective of characters who are trapped in customized coffins, their very soul powering an abomination that you’ll have to conquer. These serve as the main bosses of each area, only rescued should you track down various items that have a part of their soul imprinted on them. These rescued souls become your allies and certain choices you make with them will change elements of your ending.
As you track down those personal items, Aegis will catch glimpses of their past, fragments of a memory that breaks down into a short narrative tied to certain parts of the story. These have a dark and moody aesthetic as if the world around them is corrupted and bleak. It does a good job at conveying the darkness around them and gives this method of storytelling a cohesive vision that keeps the focus on what it is trying to tell you instead of background elements or the environment distracting you.
The game breaks down its story into a few lanes that vary greatly in quality. When the game is focused on diving into the Aegis herself, I was thoroughly entertained, and most of that is true when dealing with details about the Clockwork King and the larger threat that looms over Paris. When it tends to lean towards your allies and some of their requests, the abundance of French names and places starts to make the tale a bit harder to follow in some cases and isn’t anywhere near as engaging. I think the game is written rather well, but large portions of the story feel like a step back from what was present in Greedfall.
The Paris featured here is deserted and filled to the brim with bodies of fallen soldiers and those who were unable to escape the city, or those caught by one of the mechanical monstrosities that tour the streets. There are brighter and more cheerful areas, but those moments come few as you are never that far from seeing something morbid or bleak. From Les Invalides to Luxembourg, to the Louvre, many of the game’s environments really sell the destruction that this automat army has caused, with several of its survivors hiding and making conversation with you on the other side of a door as you attempt to aid them where you can. While many of them will doubt your intentions, due to the nature of what you are, some are extremely desperate for help and are willing to provide some aspect of trust.
The whole clockpunk motif built around this steampunk wrapper translates to the various creatures you’ll encounter and that of the Aegis herself. While there is some customization to creating your automaton, you’ll also be able to deck her out in a variety of outfits that each have their own stats and perks. You’ll also have a wide range of weapons that work themselves into her design, as one of my favorite weapons, the Volley Mallet would slink back into her arm when not in use and then extract out when you would trigger its heavy slam. This aesthetic is tremendous in its design and gives the game a uniqueness to it that I adore.
The vastness of your arsenal is pretty impressive with a variety of bladed fans, swords, halberds, and guns, to swinging chains that have devious contraptions on their end, almost as if they were a bladed yo-yo. While I certainly settled on my favorites, I never found anything you could wield to feel wasteful or not intentionally impressive to use. Every weapon has the punch you want, the speed that benefits its power, and they all aesthetically look pretty damn cool too. By having such a variety and the capability to equip two weapons at once, not to mention the special attacks each weapon has, combat has a remarkable level of versatility that consistently impresses. And, as you collect various materials, you can also upgrade those weapons to a maximum range, providing more power to your output and making them even more lethal.
Aegis has a similar level of progression as well where you can upgrade various categories using Anima Essense, a currency similar to that of Souls. In typical fashion, each upgrade increases the Anima Essense needed as you increase Power, Agility, Durability, Vigour, Elemental Alchemy, and Engineering. Each individual category affects a multitude of different stats, from your health, your loot multiplier, and elemental damage, to how powerful your special move is. Now, maintaining and increasing your Anima Essense is exactly the way it is in pretty much any Souls game. If you die during your journey, it will remain where you fell, waiting for you to retrieve it. Should you die on the way to do so, it will be lost forever.
Checkpoints called Vestals are placed around each environment that allows you to spend that Essence or respawn the enemies around you, making it extremely viable to grind away at earning more Essence. You’ll also pick up a wealth of different Anima shards that can be consumed to feed into your currency total. Anima Essense can be used to not only level up Aegis and her weapons, but also to purchase healing items, materials for upgrading, and a multitude of new weapons and various clothing items.
While not purchasable, Aegis will also benefit from a few tools that are granted to her upon defeating certain bosses. It is a bit odd that the way you earn these is similar to how you defeat later bosses, but only the first few will grant you a special ability. These tools include an air dash that allows you to bridge the gap on a few jumps, a grappling hook to zip up to out-of-reach places and a kick that can devastate crumbling walls. These are awarded after defeating certain bosses and allow you to get the most out of each environment you encounter, making once initially small levels into giant sprawling locations filled with numerous shortcuts and more.
Steelrising’s combat is very typical of the genre. You pay attention to how the enemy moves, dodge out of the way of incoming attacks and use the variety of weapons you have to cut them down when they give you an opening. While some enemies can be cut down fairly quickly with a quick barrage of numerous attacks, many require a more methodical approach. If you manage to keep up an attack, while also paying attention to your stamina output, you can put enemies into a stagger stage, leaving them vulnerable to a critical attack. Your stamina gauge will require a cooldown should you expend it, but the active-reload flavored mechanic will refill the meter should you time it just right. There are also some assists when it comes to that meter, but we will dive into that shortly.
The various enemies you’ll encounter are all different types of clockwork foes. There are snakes with bladed arms that spew forth fire or electricity, giant hulking goliaths with a variety of different hammers, or even one class that wields a detached pillar, to countless soldier types with swords and spears. Each class of enemy can vary in how they will attack as well as what sort of weapon they wield, changing up that formula consistently. There are even enemies that simply use musical instruments during combat that I found incredibly amusing. Bosses share in that same variety with some pretty standout encounters, especially one that is on the back of a mechanical horse.
Given the nature of the genre and what it demands from you, Steelrising has a few assist features that can make the game cater to your overall skill level. While assist mode currently disables all achievements, Spiders is currently patching the game so that only certain achievements will be disabled, which apparently was the intent from the start but a current bug rendered them all unlockable if even the slightest assist feature was used. These features consist of keeping your Anime Essence even upon death, or simply how much damage you receive from any sort of combat. You can also improve your stamina regeneration and all of these features can be turned on or off at any time; however, turning them off will not negate the inability to earn achievements going forward as you’ll need to start a whole new save to rectify that.
I mentioned before that Steelrising and Spiders’ by default belong to the Euro-Jank classification of games. These are generally lower-budget titles that often attempt to push themselves into the same standard of what AAA is doing, but with far fewer resources to do so. Because of this, you can often see those budget limitations in everything from textures and geometry detail to character animations, and the lack of polish across multiple systems. Not only is this a lack of budget for addressing these issues properly, but these teams are also incredibly small when you compare them to much larger studios that are very well funded. Due to what Spiders is working with, this is where you see some clunky animations or why its platforming can be a bit temperamental. I never found any of this to be poor or part of some bigger annoyance when you combine all these issues, but it’s something I want to point out for those expecting some sort of AAA experience.
That said, Steelrising is still a very good-looking game with an aesthetic that really lets its ideas and setting stand out. The Aegis and her foes all fit within the framework of what the period calls for it, should these machines have actually existed at the time. It’s certainly Spiders’ best-looking game by far with some standout art direction that certainly gets the job done. That said, for an entire game constructed around a robotic menace, its people can often come across as being more robotic than the very mechanized creatures I was just fighting minutes prior. If there is one aspect of this game that just doesn’t cut it in regards to being a modern game, it is its human cast of characters who somehow do not look near as good as what Spiders offered in Greedfall.
One of the game’s biggest annoyances for me was the notes and documents you find scattered about. I have my LG TV set to a very particular HDR custom setting that took me a while to find a sweet spot for making games truly sing. It’s not a vastly high-end TV by any means, but everything I played on it looks damn near incredible, again, for what the TV is capable of. However, the notes and documents wanted none of that and were absolutely unreadable. I swapped to another setting that allowed me to read them, but it really did impact my visual experience having to do this. Had the letters been formatted with a much larger font with a background to make the words stand out better, then It would have been a vast improvement by leaps and bounds. For anyone that has any sort of vision imparities, I honestly cannot see them even being able to comprehend anything these notes say, which is unfortunate.
Steelrising may not evolve the formula it is inspired from, but it uses it as effectively as it can in a setting that gives it a fresh spin. The customized elements of having a robotic protagonist are certainly inspired and make for a compelling narrative when the game is focused on her. The central story has its moments, but it is the combat and clockpunk aesthetic that truly shines here and is easily the selling point of what many are likely looking to this title for. If you can look past its budgetary limits, you’ll find an extremely solid soulslike that absolutely nails its purpose and intent and delivers an absolutely engaging action experience.
Developer - Spiders. Publisher - Nacon. Released - September 8th, 2022. Available On - Xbox Series X/S, PS5, PC. Rated - (M) Blood, Violence. Platform Reviewed - Xbox Series X. Review Access - Steelrising was purchased for review.