I really enjoyed my time with Stellar Blade.

It's a very fluid, fast and fun action game with satisfying combat and movement. Enemy designs are all super creative and visually amazing. The combat overall feels like a mix of Souls and a game like DMC. The parry system was really fucking fun and it felt so good to just nail an entire combo of parries.

You can customize Eves hair, earrings, glasses and outfit and there's so many options, it's cool to just set a new outfit for each area that you think might fit the theme.

The setting is uh....I guess it's fine? Deserts are never that interesting but the more futuristic settings like the Space elevator and the Dead Space-esque areas were all really cool.

The writing however? Terrible. One of the most nothing stories I've ever seen with entire scenes that are just...words on the screen with very little meaning. The concept is that Eve is a super robo lady from a place called The Mother Sphere. She is designed to fight these horrific monsters called Naytibas and protect humanity from the threat. The story gets way more "twisty" from there but it feels like it kinda drags for most of the game until the last few hours. You spend most of your time collecting Alpha Cores from the big bad bosses. The game for some reason has the slowest Dialogue in the history of games and you can't skip dialogue until halfway through it being read, cutscenes are also unskippable unless viewed once and some not even then. So some boss fights if you lose you have to walk in, wait for the cutscene to be skippable, wait for a tiny bit of pre battle dialogue and then fight. The dialogue being as pointless and nothing like I said before doesn't help with this.

One other thing I don't think this game needed are massive open sections with side missions for the most pointless crap like "Kill 10 Lurkers" like get the fuck out of here, this is just padding for the sake of padding. What's even worse is IF you don't do enough side missions or collect enough memories etc you will get the bad ending of the game. You have to fill a bar that is never explained that appears in the top right corner and once it's filled the game wont tell you beyond the inital apperance of it when you collect specific things.

There's also crafting and skill trees and all that terrible RPG crap that has been forcing its way into action games for the last few years, it's all very nothing to make the game feel deeper than it is.

I want to say that you can spend most of your time easily walking through this game until the last few hours, the difficulty will SKYROCKET for those last few bosses and it's so out of nowhere. I'm fine with a challenge but these enemies felt cheap, they'd consistently gain distance from you and have insane combos of attacks with little to no visual indication of what combo it was going to turn into. It could get very frustrating. Enemies and bosses also became SPONGES for taking damage later.

It may sound like im only nitpicking little bits but I feel it's a decent sign when my only real gripes are smaller issues that I feel can be fixed in any future entries. Stellar Blade overall is ...well Stellar and I hope the company finds success and can make a sequel that is even better.