CLOCKWORK JANK
While playing Steelrising, I keep expecting something to break. At any moment, I imagine my character clipping through the floor, freezing mid-animation, or getting stuck between piles of debris. The animations are sluggish and jerky, and the controls feel just as unresponsive. Invisible walls block my path everywhere. The repetitive environments keep getting me lost. Some interiors are so poorly lit I can barely see what’s in front of me.
The whole production feels slapped together.
It's all such a shame, because the premise is intriguing. In this alternate-history version of France, King Louis XVI uses a mechanical army to crush the French Revolution. But things spiral out of control. All human life in Paris is under threat. Automaton patrols maintain an iron grip on the city. The bodies of soldiers and revolutionaries litter the streets, fires rage across entire districts, and many buildings lie in ruins. Civilians hide behind locked doors, terrified to step outside.
In this post-apocalyptic Paris, the last hope rests with Aegis, a sentient automaton who serves as Queen Marie Antoinette’s personal bodyguard. As Aegis, your mission is to stop the mechanical uprising and bring the king to justice. At first, it shows promise. The atmosphere is established quickly, helped along by a soundtrack that shifts between ethereal and thunderously dramatic.
But these delicate foundations are undermined by an extremely repetitive gameplay loop. Then again, perhaps expectations should be tempered. Spiders is a relatively small French studio. Up until now, they’ve mainly released BioWare-inspired RPGs, though without the quality writing, dialogue, or character work that made those games memorable in the first place.
Steelrising marks a departure — a sidestep into the soulslike genre. It’s an ambitious attempt to broaden the studio’s appeal, but also a painfully clumsy one. In soulslikes, the line between challenge and frustration is razor-thin. Steelrising does strike a balance of sorts, but it feels warped and entirely accidental. Playing it is exhausting, yet rarely difficult. You could argue that the stiff animations are an intentional artistic choice, since the characters are machines. But you could just as easily argue that they chose machines because the animations were stiff to begin with.
The entire experience constantly radiates amateurism. I never felt confident in the controls, the level design, or the combat systems. I ended up relying on the exact same tactic throughout the entire game — a heavy attack, since the quick attacks were useless — and it worked from beginning to end. It quickly became mind-numbingly dull. I hoarded projectiles and elemental bombs — fire, ice, electricity — that mostly just gathered dust in my inventory. At best, they helped shave a few seconds off one of the game’s uninspired boss fights.
As a soulslike, Steelrising contains all the expected ingredients: combat built around patience and stamina management; shortcuts to unlock; different weapons that shape your playstyle; experience points that you lose upon death and can recover later. But every system feels awkwardly implemented. Hit detection is inconsistent. Each weapon only has a couple of attacks or combos, which become repetitive almost immediately. Meanwhile, the enemy variety is severely lacking. You fight the same mechanical enemies over and over again, in exactly the same ways.
The world itself is dull and almost meaningless to explore. The game showers you with healing items — bottles of oil — which can also be purchased cheaply at any checkpoint. Before long, you can heal almost endlessly. At that point, there’s no reason to fully master the combat mechanics — not that they’re particularly satisfying in the first place. You can simply charge in, mash through enemies, and heal afterward.
The game also tries — and fails — to engage the player through its story and dialogue. Despite featuring historical figures like Maximilien Robespierre and Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, nearly every character feels interchangeable, both in personality and appearance. Most exist solely to explain what happened. Some hand out side quests. I completed exactly none of them, largely because the level design is confusing to the point of being outright terrible.
Paris is divided into a handful of maps based on famous locations — Versailles, the Bastille, Montmartre, and so on — but they all look virtually identical. Every area is a tangled maze of streets, plazas, buildings, and debris. Worst of all are the endless hedge mazes. A compass points vaguely toward your objective, but figuring out how to actually get there is another matter entirely. The route forward might be hidden behind a door identical to dozens of others you’ve never been able to open before. You climb onto rooftops with grappling hooks, leap onto balconies, run through abandoned houses, drop into alleyways, smash through fragile walls — only to discover another dead end.
Eventually, I stopped caring. The main story missions at least pushed me from one objective marker to the next, which is exactly how you end up playing once you’ve emotionally checked out. In the best examples of the genre, like Bloodborne, you’re driven forward by mystery and unforgettable world design. You search every dark corner. You glimpse monstrous creatures stalking the distance and wonder what horrors await. You think about how the boss you just defeated fits into the world’s lore. You become absorbed in the setting. You spot a treasure chest on a distant ledge and start figuring out how to reach it. You strike a suspicious wall, and suddenly an entirely new world opens behind the illusion.
Steelrising is completely devoid of everything that makes Bloodborne special. It’s a maze of identical corridors, empty of wonder or imagination. The enemies lurking in the distance are the same ones you’ve already killed twenty times before. The bosses are hollow mechanical shells with no interesting history behind them. You stop caring about treasure chests because everything you find is pointless anyway. You reach a dead end and hit the wall out of frustration. There’s no hidden magic beyond it, no illusions waiting to be uncovered. Steelrising allows for none of that. From beginning to end, I felt like a soulless machine myself.
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