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While I haven’t been able to see the game through to completion ahead of release, I have put a decent number of hours into playing Stellar Blade during the game’s review period. While the overall game feels somewhat derivative of the games it draws clear mechanical and narrative inspiration from, there is a lot to be impressed with in terms of the game’s accessibility offerings. It’s far from perfect, an accessibility barrier is part of the reason that I didn’t complete playing the game prior to embargo, but there is a lot worth praising in terms of accessibility regardless.
Stellar Blade is a third person action adventure game drawing clear inspiration from titles like Nier Automata. You play an android, sent to a post-apocalyptic earth to fight an invasive force of monsters who have long since taken over the planet, using dramatic dodges and melee combat against huge bosses.
It’s difficult to talk about Stellar Blade without talking about the titles that it draws inspiration from because, at least in its opening quite sizable number of hours, it does so little to establish its own unique identity. From the setting, to the character origin, to the combat mechanics, everything the game does feels barely explored beyond surface mimicry of other games. The opening hours of Stellar Blade barely offer any context for the adventure you’re on, leaving first impressions limited to comparing it to a similar title with a stronger sense of its own identity, and more polished combat. It’s flashy for sure, it’s visually impressive, but it’s hard to see it as much else initially.
Combat in Stellar Blade involves using light and heavy melee attacks, a dodge roll, and special attacks on a cooldown timer in combination to take on enemy creatures. The combat isn’t bad by any means, it’s decent enough, but when so much of the game’s opening hours leave little to do beside looking to its closest competition for comparison, the feel of these mechanics stringing together simply isn’t up to the bar that such comparisons ultimately invite.
While Stellar Blade struggled to really capture me mechanically or narratively, I did want to discuss the game still from an accessibility perspective, as ultimately that is somewhere that the game does manage to shine pretty well in comparison to other 3D action adventure games that it shares a genre with.
Stellar Blade features a dedicated accessibility menu, featuring motion sickness mitigation settings, the option to add speaker names to subtitles and add an opaque background to them, options to increase the size of the HUD and add a slight background behind it, filters designed around the three most common types of colourblindness, camera auto rotation, ranged aim correction, QTE auto success, auto lock on when attacking, high contrast mode support, and an option to remove input sensitivity and button mashing requirements from a fishing minigame.
While most of the game’s accessibility settings are well implemented, well enough implemented that they’re almost not worth going into specifics on, I want to start by going into a little more detail on the game’s motion sickness settings, and their role in my not completing the game prior to embargo.
It’s VERY rare that a third person game of this nature makes me feel as frequently motion sick as Stellar Blade does. I’ve personally been having a tough time nailing down exactly what the cause of this issue is, but I do know it was a persistent issue across multiple play sessions across multiple days.
While the game offers the ability to create a centre screen dot, reduce motion blur, reduce camera shake, and turn off camera auto rotation, even with these settings in place to mitigate the issue I still had to on multiple occasions put the game down and rest from playing for the day, without a clearly identifiable cause.
The settings definitely slowed down onset of motion sickness, but regardless it is the case that for some reason this game set me off in ways that few 3rd person games do, and that feels worth noting.
While I don’t currently have a firm answer as to why this was the case, I do plan to revisit this game down the line, to try and identify exactly what it’s doing that I’m personally struggling with, in hopes of better learning from this game and learning what it’s doing that is setting off my motion sickness.
Putting that aside and moving onto a more positive aspect of the game, Stellar Blade’s implementation of High Contrast Mode is pretty solid. The game offers three differently coloured high contrast presets, and alongside highlighting the player, enemies, and collectables, it also highlights navigation and traversal points such as climbable ledge edges on walls, which is really nice to see.
While High Contrast Mode is supported in “in-engine” cutscenes, it isn’t supported in certain pre rendered flashback sequences.
In terms of traversal assist features, for players not using high contrast mode but still struggling to identify climbable surfaces, a tap of the DualSense touchpad button will trigger a scan of an area, highlighting climbable surfaces for a limited time.
Moving to combat, Stellar Blade features an optional “story mode” difficulty which, if selected, unlocks an optional mode called Action Assist, found in the gameplay settings menu.
While Story Mode does reduce overall game difficulty somewhat by reducing damage, Action Assist is a slightly more involved way of increasing combat accessibility.
Action Assist will, at moments in fights where quick time prompts are required to parry or dodge particularly strong attacks, slow down time and show the required prompt on screen, making it easier to execute.
This mode does force you as a player to not button mash, as a mashed input could cause you to fail this slowdown prompt opportunity before you’ve registered that it is being offered to you, but it does make engaging with some of the stricter timing windows in high level fights more approachable.
That said, I do wish that Assist Mode wasn’t exclusively locked to Story Mode, and that it could be offered as an assist without decreasing the remaining difficulty of combat encounters.
Additionally, you can pause Stellar Blade during combat which is great, but you can’t pause the game during cutscenes which isn’t ideal.
However, one of my favourite assist features seen in Stellar Blade that I wanted to highlight is Passcode Input Hint.
At times in Stellar Blade, players will need to find a password written in greek symbols, then memorise it, and type it into a console keypad. If, like me, you struggle to recall visual information such as these symbols, there’s an option to display the correct code faintly on the input screen once it’s been located in game, removing the memory recall requirement and assisting progress. It’s a simple thing, but I personally really appreciated it.
Again, while many of these assist features are appreciated, and do go beyond efforts seen by other games in similar genres, it’s not a game without accessibility pitfalls. One thing I struggled with, for example, as a person with poor fine motor control was making small character movements. The main character, in my opinion, moves too quickly with minimal movements of the stick, making small precise movements tricky to execute. I more than once had real trouble doing things like slightly rotating to line up and face a button, finding that far trickier than it needed to be. Additionally, there’s no ledge guard available in game, making it really easy to accidentally have your character walk off the edge of a tall surface unintentionally.
While I really appreciate the accessibility settings offered by Stellar Blade in terms of visual content highlighting and combat assists, fundamentally I couldn’t complete more of it in the review period because of the mysterious motion sickness effect it had on me. I will try and get to the root of that problem, but for now it’s just something I have to contend with when trying to engage with the game.
Stellar Blade as an overall game lacks the clear narrative vision of Nier Automata’s opening, or the intense dramatic thrillride excitement of something like a Bayonetta or Devil May Cry title. It’s not a bad game, but it’s a game that hasn’t done enough so far to make itself shine when compared to titles that are easy to compare it to.
It hasn’t been a bad game, but it’s one that I’m not sure is worth me pushing through motion sickness to see to its end, at least from what I’ve seen.
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