Virtual 100 – Game 21
Hey look it’s another Spiders game!
I like Spiders Interactive. They’re a good AA studio, always kinda wedged between an indie studio and a full-blown AAA. I always felt they punched a bit above their weight.
Interestingly enough, I eventually acquired most of Spiders’ titles over the years, and I’ve played through a few of them, but some are still languishing away in my backlog. I thoroughly enjoyed Greedfall, though I do feel like a lot of their quests were little more than messenger missions, where the main character ran literally all the way across the map just to talk to someone, then return back to where they came just to talk to someone else and tell them what the other person said. It was the main drawback of the game for me, but the combat, graphics and everything else were great.
Which is why Steelrising is such a head-scratcher. In today’s gaming world, it seems as though every developer out there feels as if their ARPG needs to have Souls-like mechanics. The genre is getting downright saturated. It’s a rare day in this age to see an announcement for a new ARPG without immediately following with a sigh when they reveal the souls-like mechanics.
I probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with this if I were better at these types of games. I’m just not. I like them. I own a lot of them. But I never seem to get very far. The difficulty ratchets up, and I don’t have a high tolerance for trial-and-error, so I will retry a handful of times before I lose interest.
I could not count on two hands how many of these games I have owned or tried and just never completed.
Spiders Interactive tried their hand at the Souls-like with Steelrising. And I don’t personally think they succeeded. This comes with a positive caveat that I’ll mention in a moment.
The story in Spiders’ games, at least the ones I’ve played through so far, have never been the best. They always seem to lean a bit into politics. Not social politics or general political themes, but actual politics, with old dudes scheming and plotting this or that. In Greedfall, the main character was literally an emissary sent by a governing body to appease other governing bodies. And the result of a lot of those missions was either a happy important person or an angry important person.
This time around I guess is their take on the end of the French Revolution and the last days of the monarchy in France. The twist on it though is that instead of the French storming the bastille, King Louis XVI creates an army of robots that essentially go on a murder spree. They’re not technically robots, but more like wind-up puppets. They refer to them as “tireless” in the game, leading to the idea that they’re not winding down like they’re supposed to.
The protagonist is an automat named Aegis that has… you know what, I’m not going to explain this entire damn plot. That’s what Wikipedia is for.
The whole story is pretty thin at best, and consists of lot of very similar-looking people, men with pale faces and white wigs, who I honestly had a really hard time telling apart. I found myself not really caring about any of it. It was serviceable, but nothing amazing.
What I really had a hard time with was the fact that this game is a Souls-like. Not just because I’m essentially terrible at them, but because this was Spiders’ first attempt at a game like this, and honestly I don’t think they did a very good job of it.
Combat has never really been their forte. Greedfall was good, but it was infamous for how easy it was to break the game by just upgrading your pistol and cheesing your way through every major battle. Games like Bound by Flame were better, but still just resulted in hacking away at something and spamming health potions until you outlasted the bad guy. And let me be clear; I have no problem with that.
The problem I had with Steelrising is that the combat just isn’t very fun. Aegis starts out with a shockingly small stamina bar. She’s barely able to pull off a decent combo at the start, which results in combat against your garden-variety enemy stretching out longer than it should. This is because only some of her weapons have the ability to block, but even then blocking is pretty ineffective in this game. The automats will attack with combos of their own, some of them spanning a good four or five attacks. You WILL take damage unless you dodge. Dodging of course pulls from the same stamina bar that attacking does. So if you dodge, you can’t attack, and if you attack, you can’t dodge. She’ll overheat if you push her too hard, which will happen a lot.
At the same time, the weapons never seem to do as much damage as you feel they should. Large heavy weapons are slow, as they should be, but because Aegis’ stamina starts off so small, you can’t even get in enough hits to stagger an enemy, and her lengthy attack animation leaves her vulnerable to incoming attack.
The problem with all of these Souls imitators, is that they all seem to lack the key ingredient that made the Souls games popular in the first place; Balance. There’s a balance to the weapons and the gear. It’s a whole meta, and a player that knows the genre and knows what they’re doing can tweak their loadout to be an absolute beast. It’s one of the reasons why I’m so bad at these games. I don’t have the time nor the desire to invest in this meta. I just want to look cool and wreck some shit.
But that being said, I have played enough of these games to recognize poor balancing, and I can tell the difference between a game’s shortcomings and my own ineptitude.
Every enemy in Steelrising is fast. They all have long-reaching attacks. Some of them can pack a punch AND take a beating. And sometimes there’s just nothing you can do except chip away at an automat and hope you don’t get aggro’d by more than one or two at a time.
I played through the first few missions or chapters, whatever you want to call them, before I realized just how much time I was wasting with this trial-and-error, two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach. I was about to put the game down for good.
Luckily, Spiders Interactive included something that saved the game for me. And I don’t know if it was there from the start or if they patched it in later, but without it, this game would have been deleted and forgotten.
Buried in the settings, there is a difficulty menu. And it’s not just an Easy, Normal, Hard type tweak, but you can use sliders to determine how much damage you do to enemies, how much damage you take from enemies, whether your attacks drain stamina, how fast your stamina regenerates, if you keep your… “souls points” (whatever) when you die, etc.
I don’t remember exactly what my settings ended up at, but I tweaked the incoming damage a little, bumped up the stamina regeneration, and chose to keep the souls points (whatever) upon death. After just a few small tweaks, the game felt A LOT more like a traditional Spiders ARPG and less like a botched attempt at a Souls-like, and the game was soooo much better for it.
Admittedly, it all ended up being a bit on the easy side. After all, not losing my souls points and all of the early repetition eventually had Aegis a bit overpowered. But honestly I was just fine with all that.
The city streets of the game got a bit too samey, and much of the game takes place in areas that all look pretty similar, with the exception of one or two locations that change it up a bit and actually look pretty cool. They were just too few and far between. Too many city streets, too many hedge-mazes, and waaaay too much “you only need to get from here to there, but there’s a locked gate so you have to walk all the way around” level designs. That’s literally every single area you encounter in this game, and it got pretty tiring pretty quick. Not to mention confusing as shit.
It was also pretty difficult to get excited about any new gear I found along the way. I’m not sure what was going on here, but I found a gear set about halfway through the game that was way better than anything else I found after that. I stuck with the same armor almost the entire way through. And all of the clothing is based upon French Revolution-era styling, which is poofy and frilly and stripey and honestly, ugly as hell. This time period, aesthetically, doesn’t do much for me. Not even Assassin’s Creed Unity interested me much. That’s not necessarily the developers’ fault, but they chose this setting and it’s real-world aesthetic trappings for a reason. It just wasn’t all that intriguing to me.
Overall, I was pretty glad to be done with Steelrising. It definitely wasn’t my favorite from them. I’m looking forward to Greedfall 2 and the direction they’re taking with that game. I’m hoping they realized they’re just not very good at this genre and will stick with their strong suit.
I guess we’ll find out.
