![]() Soulslikes can get away with an obfuscated or poor story so long as the gameplay, enemies, and bosses are compelling enough, and Steelrising tries its hardest to carve out a small foothold in that space. Steelrising struggles to nail that balance. Successful alternate history games such as Wolfenstein: The New Order introduce key historical players, without needing a history lesson to understand what’s happening. I was certainly willing to learn about these figures and their importance, but the pace at which the game introduces them before tossing in even more names to learn only serves to muddy the plot. The cast is made up of historical figures and major players in the French Revolution and prior knowledge of them is required to really get the game’s impact. This process repeats itself, introducing so many characters for such a brief time, that it’s hard to keep track of them all.Įverything that interested me about Steelrising‘s plot and setting came from pre-release material. They knew of someone else who is a friend of someone who might know. When I didn’t find him at the first location, I learned about someone who might know where he is. Your primary mission is to find the man who created the Automats to try and find a way to stop them, but the path to him is a drawn-out series of sidetracks. That’s because of how the story is delivered. Only near the end of the game are there any actual decisions to be made, but by then I had checked out of the narrative. You get some dialogue choices when speaking to some characters, but these just amount to what order you want to ask questions in. Her goals are always following orders without question, completely betraying what supposedly makes her different. Aegis, for nearly the entirety of the game, never does anything of her own will. That last point is stated but is not shown, and that’s a common thread in Steelrising. However, Aegis is different from other Automats in that, for reasons no one seems to understand but are painfully obvious very early on, she can speak and think for herself. The main character, Aegis, is an Automat (the shorthand used for automaton in this universe) who is charged with protecting Queen Marie Antoinette. The nugget of a good storyĮverything that interested me about Steelrising‘s plot and setting came from pre-release material describing the game rather than the game itself. Without that, uninspired gameplay and technical performance issues make this another uneven release for a studio that’s always sitting on the verge of success. The unfortunate reality, however, is that for every good idea Steelrising has on paper, nearly none of them are realized in the final product. I see potential in that premise, especially from a team whose prior games had little but the story to call great. We play as the lone intelligent automaton seeking to stop his rampage. It is set in 1789 in Paris during an alternate history where King Louis the XVI gained control over an army of automatons, quelling the revolution that would eventually lead to his execution in our world. It’s a Soulslike, but with perhaps the most interesting premises any of these imitators have had yet. This odd experiment feels almost intentionally left in the dark.
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