I’ve been hearing a lot of hype around Stellar Blade – that is when fans haven’t been lamenting the sequel’s awful AI music video the creators decided was a good idea.
I’d heard it was Bayonetta meets Dark Souls, with flashy, acrobatic movement, and carefully considered combat with tight timings. And considering it’s coming to Switch 2 and utilising new technology for the platform in the form of FSR frame generation, I thought we were going to be in for a grand old time.
So when the demo dropped, I immediately took in that information and downloaded it…a day later. And my time with it was…disappointing.
The game tells you early on to hit the block button just before an attack lands in order to parry. So far so Soulslike, but I wasn’t able to get one down at all. It turns out that you don’t hit the block button just before an attack hits, because of input lag.
I wondered if this was exclusive to the Switch 2 version, but nope, the director Kim Hyung-tae confirmed that this input lag was apparently deliberate, and all because it wouldn’t fit the animation otherwise. Sakurai would have a field day.
But the thing is, it’s not just the parrying that is tied to this, nor just the character actions, but everything, including camera movements. The whole game feels extremely heavy and unresponsive for the style of gameplay it’s trying to achieve.
Some of this might be exclusive to the Switch 2 port, because of that FSR frame generation I mentioned previously. The game is (under the bonnet) still technically running at 30fps, so the response time is at best 33ms, rather than the 16ms you’d get at 60fps. You know when you’re playing on a TV at a friend’s house and they haven’t properly engaged game mode? That’s what playing Stellar Blade feels like, even on a lightning-fast monitor.
It’s bloody disappointing, because I was quite curious to see how frame generation would work on the Switch 2, but this added latency (assuming it is the fault of the generated frames) just isn’t worth it. Capcom’s Dragon’s Dogma 2 is going to use it as well, though, so I’ll reserve judgement for the time being.
And it might be the fault of the input latency meaning I have to activate a parry well before anyone would meaningfully expect, but I just found the combat to be dull, especially against multiple foes. Some of them I could barely see on the screen, with no idea when I’d defeated all of them, and very little in the way of feedback when I did try and hit them.
There is a skill tree to unlock new abilities which gives me some hope, though. I can’t imagine this small slice gives us the full picture of how the game plays by any means, but as a demo it really doesn’t do it for me. Let me know in the comments if the combat in the full game has a proper amount of meat on its bones if you’ve played it on another platform.
I can’t deny, though, that apart from the odd pixelated texture here and wonky-looking hair there, the game does look good. Sharp details, bold enemy designs, and as a viewer, the frame generation does a really decent job of filling in the frames most of the time. They clearly spent a lot of time — perhaps too much time — on main character EVE’s model, and it shows. It’s an impressive bit of porting in that sense, but what you can’t fix in a port is the fact that she has the personality of a chair leg.
I know there are going to be more characters in the full game, and hopefully as the story progresses we get to see more depth from the ones we do see here, but my god, every character in this demo has the emotional range of Kier Starmer’s bookshelf.
(And whilst we’re on that, why the hell is it that EVE doesn’t know what a library is but recognises a multi-storey car park the moment she sees it? Why does she know the word ‘rain’ but waits so long before expressing it? The answer is probably ‘It’s a dystopian setting’, which is fair enough, but I still think the dialogue could have been so much better.)
My hopes weren’t astronomical for this game or anything, but it’s amazing how it manages to fumble every aspect I was excited for. The only saving grace is that, from a visual standpoint, it does show off the power of the Switch 2 fairly well, even if half the frames are fake.
Well, either way, the gameplay footage (see the video above if you haven’t sampled the demo) is undeniably impressive for such a small device. If you are thinking of giving the game a go, though, do download and play that demo first, just in case you’re on the same page as me.
And if you don’t share my opinion after that? Well, you’ll at least know you’re going to enjoy the full game.
Have you tried the Switch 2 demo? Played the game elsewhere? Let us know below.
