"Vive la révolution"

The developer of Steelrising Spiders studio always make games with interesting settings. I used to attribute this to the games being fairly mid tier budget wise to a small publisher allowing them more creative freedom to stand out but I feel that may do them a disservice as artists. They have made interesting RPGs in Faery worlds, Cyberpunk dystopian Martian settings and 16th century fantasy. Too many games feel a bit like they are bland and designed by committee for the largest engagement after focus testing that they are flavorless. For all their flaws, Spiders games are anything but that and their most recent title Steelrising follows that trend but rather than a party based RPG is a single player souls like based on the French Revolution. An alternative history where King Louis XVI has an army of clockwork soldiers. You take the role of an automat called Aegis, a dancer turned bodyguard to Marie Antionette who is sent out to stop 'the clockwork king'.

As a French studio itself I can imagine Spiders had a lot of fun making this. The setting and art design are wonderful for such a small studio and there is a great attention to detail in many ways I found surprising. The way when Aegis uses oil to heal herself her arm snaps back robotically to apply it to the cog in her back. The period buildings, French flags, the way even the street lights have a winch system for lowering the lanterns to light them all look wonderful. It includes various famous figures from that period such as the Marquis de la Fayette and Maximilien Robspierre. It's such a shame the entire atmosphere is let down a bit by the lack of a French dual language option because A) It would have added to the games atmosphere and B) The English voice acting is just a bit sub par though not terrible. Characters lack flair and throwing in the odd French word pronounced badly by English and American voice actors only hurt the atmosphere the art design otherwise conveys. It's unfortunate.

That aside though the actual gameplay is very fun but then I love Souls Likes and am pretty easy to please with them. The combat is good, there is a large variety of weapons from dancing fans, wheels, tonfas, halberds, muskets and chain swords to name a few. Enemies look great, especially the bosses with their 18th century artistry with ornate heads and pieces. The enemy variety towards the end of the game starts to wane off and bosses and enemies become a bit to easy once you find the right build but regardless I still found it extremely fun to explore on my way to the end of the game.

So I like it quite a lot, the exploration, the style, the combat and some voice acting niggles aside why only a 3.5 / 5 ? I had some technical issues that by the end were getting really frustrating. I played the PS5 specific version and kept having dialogue audibly start half way through a sentence or sometimes not at all so I had to rely on subtitles. While the game ran very smoothly at a solid 60fps I would still here and there get freezing or hiccups especially when it autosaved. I can't complain about the autosave frequency too much though as the game hard crashed on me kicking me back to the dashboard 9 times. 9 times! and thanks to that I didn't lose too much progress but I found the technical performance simply unacceptable. It's a real shame because I feel this is possibly Spider's best game in a lot of ways. There is less asset reuse, it's design is tighter and less janky than previous titles and getting to play a clockwork dancer fighting against King Louis XVI? Who doesn't want that?