![]() While both cutscenes portrayed their respective figures in questionable ways, at least as far as historical accuracy goes, it was at least unique to see an action RPG playing with this period of history and not be part of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. One featured the queen, and the other starred Lafayette-you know, the guy that helped win not one but two revolutionary wars. I experienced one cutscene at the beginning of my demo and another at the end. If there’s one complaint I have about Steelrising’s story and setting, it’s that there just isn’t enough of it, at least not in what I played. But when Louis practically imprisons the queen in a gilded cage, she sends Aegis on a mission to find and rescue her children (if they are still alive) and figure out a way to permanently disable Louis’ new army. Instead, Aegis became a killing machine and Queen Marie Antionette’s personal bodyguard. You play as Aegis, an automaton invented by Jacques’ fictional nephew, Eugene, to function as a dancer. Louis XVI has employed an army of automatons, based in part on the creations of real-life inventor Jacques de Vaucanson, to quell the revolution by any means necessary, with some violent and disturbing results. Taking place in Paris just a month before the storming of la Bastille, Steelrising presents an alternate, sci-fi, “clockpunk” vision of the French Revolution. One area where Steelrising sets itself apart is its setting and story. Steelrising is a soulslike in the most straightforward, obvious way, meaning the developer could refine its inspiration rather than fight against it. And it isn’t The Surge, which overly complicated its gear system for seemingly no reason other than to be different from Dark Souls. This isn’t Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, where the popularity of the setting demanded that the game halfway repressed its soulslike desires. There’s also the sense that everyone involved in Steelrising’s creation was unified in their ideas of exactly what kind of game it should be. I know it, the developer knows it, we all know it. You will fight your way through new areas just to unlock a door that was locked from the other side to give yourself a shortcut back to the bonfire. Combat is all about dodging, counterattacking, occasionally utilizing throwables or special attacks, and not taking on too many enemies at once. You’ve got light attacks, heavy attacks, and bonfires (called vestals) where you can spend souls (called Anima Essence) to level up your character’s attributes. While playing through Steelrising’s opening section, I got the sense that Spiders didn’t have to waste any time trying to cleverly disguise what type of game it wanted to be. Oh, you have checkpoints where you can spend the experience you gained from defeating enemies to level up your character? And if you die, you drop that experience in a big, glowy bundle and will lose it forever if you die again before you can retrieve it? Does your character have a stamina meter that you need to carefully manage while trying not to die from powerful and dangerous foes? Wow, never heard of that before! Where’d you get that fantastic idea that’s not at all reminiscent of one of the most important and influential games of the last 20 years? The same goes for when a project clearly apes Dark Souls’ design without admitting it. I’m sure there are legal reasons why every developer that made climbing and a hang glider integral to their open-world traversal systems can’t admit that they’re just taking cues straight from Breath of the Wild, but it’s just… like, we know where you got that idea, dude. There’s something very annoying when games are clearly taking inspiration from other games but not actually referencing those games. Looking at trailers, it’s clear where Spiders got its inspiration for Steelrising’s gameplay, but it’s not super common for a developer to outright admit that, yeah, it wanted to make a game like Dark Souls. In a brief presentation before letting us loose as a killer automaton fighting against the tyrannical forces of Louis XVI, the game’s reps referred to the game multiple times as a soulslike, both verbally and in writing. Developer Spiders isn’t shy at all about making its soulslike influences in Steelrising obvious, both in and out of the game.
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