Steelrising has a great, unique setting and is very accessible. This is offset by technical weaknesses that depress the rating
Steelrising is a Soulslike from AA developer Spiders and offers pretty much what you”d expect at first: Heaps of action-heavy combat, losing your currency when you die, leveling up at rest points. All of this comes in the usual quality of the small developer studio behind Greedfall: competently made, but not quite flawless, with a few quirks and not quite on the level of its AAA role models, but not junk either.
If you”re in the mood for a Souls-like game with a very cool, wacky setting that is comparatively easy and, if you wish, becomes a piece of cake thanks to its freely configurable difficulty level, the game is well worth a look. At least if you can meet the very high hardware requirements and still live with frame rates that are sometimes well below 60 frames per second.
Table of Contents
Are you ready to Barock?
In Steelrising you take on the role of the robot lady Aegis and fight in a modified version of the French Revolution, in which you have to deal with the crazed robot hordes of Louis XVI. The city is burning, mountains of corpses are piling up, and only you can stop the mad king.
In addition to a few visual adjustments, you first select your starter class, which influences your character attributes and your equipment at the beginning of the game and thus your first hours of play. In addition to the exotic scenario, the option of many switchable helpers is unusual for the genre.
This way you can reduce the damage of your enemies right at the beginning of the game, deactivate the loss of your “experience” (Anima) when you die and recover energy for evasive manoeuvres and special attacks more quickly. This makes the game ideal for all those who find games of this kind interesting in principle, but find the hard difficulty level typical of the genre too frustrating.
If necessary, you can also adjust these options in the game at any time. Meanwhile, veterans of Souls should be warned: although you can deactivate all help, Steelrising will still be child”s play for experienced players after the first few hours and hardly represents a challenge.
(Too) Deadly Arsenal
You slaughter and shoot your way through the mechanical masses of enemies with claws, fans, blades and muskets. The gameplay is pleasantly fluffy, especially with the gamepad. Your tools of the trade are fun and interesting and always offer special abilities such as an activatable shield, a particularly devastating special attack or effects such as fire, ice and electricity.
Some of these are so overpowering that they trivialise the game: A boss that you can freeze from a safe distance with an icy blunderbuss simply doesn”t pose much of a threat. You will find the necessary ammunition generously distributed in the game world. Alternatively, you can buy it for anima at special rest points, where you can also level up your attributes and upgrade your weapons and healing gear.
On top of that, you can buy endless additional healing potions and grenades in all elemental flavours at these points, which you can use to easily bomb away even the fattest bosses in the game. They tend to be resistant to some effects, but they are also always particularly sensitive to at least one effect, which you just have to find out by trial and error.
Although the boss robots are nicely staged, none of them will be remembered in terms of game mechanics. Apart from weaknesses in balancing, the combat system simply lacks impact. You won”t find the brutal weapon impacts and stunningly animated finishers of an Elden Ring here. Even Aegis himself reacts less and less to enemy hits later in the game and with better equipment. That”s why the fights are by no means bad, but they never really thrilled us.
Flat development
Depending on which character stats you increase, you will receive additional armour, stamina and health points, more resistances or improved damage effects with different weapons. Because this is a comparatively short adventure (you”ll be through after about twelve hours), the increases are kept within manageable limits. You can only increase each attribute to a maximum of 20 points, and these increases have less and less effect with each upgrade. So you don”t have to rack your brains over hundreds of status points, it never gets really complicated.
You can also upgrade your weapons up to five times if you have the necessary raw materials. You can usually get them from killed enemies in the game world, but later you can also simply buy them at rest points if you have the necessary anima. Along the way, you will also find new pieces of armour, which in most cases are direct upgrades to the armour you are currently wearing. You never have to balance agility and thicker armour like in Dark Souls. All this is great for players who don”t want to think too much about character development and don”t want to run into any dead ends. Meanwhile, those who prefer to pump 250 and more levels into their character will not be happy with Steelrising.
Comprehensible story
Also rather unusual for its genre, but quite welcome is the storyline told in many cutscenes and (exclusively English) dialogues set to music with mostly good voice actors. It”s not cryptic and confusing like From Software”s, sometimes you even make decisions in side missions that sometimes even have a little effect on the end of the game.
But the changes are not so dramatic and the plot not so gripping that you necessarily want to play through Steelrising several times. As part of the story, you fight your way through visually very varied and sometimes impressively beautiful city districts, all of which you visit several times. In the course of the game, you unlock a climbing hook and a dash manoeuvre that allows you to reach previously unreachable places, similar to a Metroidvania.
Occasionally you will be trolled by the camera during jump passages, but thankfully Aegis automatically pulls itself up on platform edges when you just miss jumps. This makes exploring the very open areas fun, even if you go through them several times, and it always offers new discoveries. Unfortunately, this part of the game is not without a few weaknesses.
Despite strong hardware and two test systems with RTX 3080, the frame rates oscillated back and forth between 40 and 80 frames per second and occasionally fell significantly below that in certain areas. Changes to the graphics settings did not even begin to alleviate the situation. Spiders specifies an RTX 2060 as the minimum requirement. With the graphics options turned up to full, the game requires a good 13 gigabytes of VRAM and also crashes if you don”t meet this requirement and don”t lower the settings.
Why so hungry?
With such high demands, one actually expects quite a graphics bomb. And Steelrising is by no means ugly, some panoramas are even really impressive and worth seeing. If you have ray-tracing hardware, you can even see a real-time reflection of Aegis in some of the windows, if you notice something like that and pay attention.
But none of this justifies the sometimes massive drops in performance. And while the somewhat stiff animations certainly suit the mechanical protagonist and her robot adversaries well, the human characters and especially their unnatural facial features in the cutscenes seem very stale and unconvincing.
The sound is passable, the musket, for example, bangs in an absolutely marvellous way and makes the game room shake, some melee weapons, on the other hand, seem very weak and simply don”t have enough power. The big boss fights are accompanied by the dramatic music that is so important for the genre, even if it sometimes completely gives up the ghost as soon as you die.
This would all be much easier to get over if the combat system were more convincing, the technology more stable, the balancing better and the playing time longer. If you”re really into the setting or would like to play a comparatively simple Souls-like game, you can still risk a look, but then we”d advise you to pick up Steelrising in the next sale.
Editor”s Verdict
I like Spiders. Games from this studio are always okay, never really outstanding, but they don”t cost the earth for that. I know that I will be well entertained for my money. I don”t have that feeling with Steelrising. Yes, French revolution with robots is great, the weapons are inventive, the environments are worth seeing and the bosses are great. But the game is still really lousily optimised in places, even if you exceed the exaggeratedly high hardware requirements. The fights have that AA feeling that lacks the final touches of a really good system, they lack the impact, that wonderfully satisfying feeling of completely crushing an enemy. The presentation of the characters in the cutscenes feels outdated.
I love the optional help and simplifications, by the way. I”m not a Souls purist, so I don”t mind games having options that allow less experienced gamers to get their money”s worth. But that doesn”t excuse the generally weak balancing in this game. The first one or two areas are reasonably challenging, then Steelrising becomes a self-runner without any challenge worth mentioning. You don”t have to be bothered by this at all if you like comparatively easy games, but Steelrising in its current state simply costs 20 euros too much for what”s in it.
