While Sony’s first-party release schedule up to April 1st, 2025, looks pretty barren, some noteworthy exclusives like Stellar Blade are on the way. Developed by Shift Up, it launches on March 29th, exclusively for PS5, retailing for $70. For those who didn’t dive into the demo or haven’t kept up with it, what else does it offer? Here are 15 things you should know before playing Stellar Blade.
Inspirations
If Stellar Blade gives you a bit of deja vu, like many other action games out there, it’s not a coincidence. The developer revealed those games were an insporation and made them realize that they wanted to make an action game. Of course, other titles like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice were also inspirations, which makes all the more sense when we get into the combat.
Exploration
Exploration within certain areas is linear as you break open boxes to pick up items, battle enemies, take elevated detours and even dive underwater for crates. Rest spots where you can purchase different potion types and grenades, unlock new abilities, listen to music and restore health and default potion charges. Enemies also respawn after resting, so you can farm the local threats for XP and unlock new skills before progressing.
Semi-Open World Areas
Of course, there’s also the semi-open worlds of the game, which allows for the “experience of a vast world without being completely open-world.” After progressing through the game, players will venture to regions like the Wasteland and the Great Desert, where exploration is freer and complete requests, like retrieving Hyper Cells for the city of Xion’s energy supply.
Enemies
The regular enemies in the demo are interesting because you have the usual fodder and some bigger enemies that require squaring up against 1v1. Some of them, like the Beholders and Cricket Slashers, are adept melee combatants, while others, like the Hydra, fly around and charge you. It’s very Souls-like in that regard, where these enemies aren’t as dangerous as the bosses, but can still chunk your health down if you’re not careful.
Bosses
As for the bosses, they’re uniquely grotesque, deal extensive damage and have several patterns of attacks. A few examples include The Brute, which is straightforward enough. You have an ally to tank some hits, but while it’s slow and methodical, it hits hard. The Stalker, is available after completing the demo in a separate Boss Challenge mode and perhaps the toughest, attacking quickly with extensive nigh-unpredictable combos and charges.
Combat
Some of the fundamentals of combat – Light and Heavy Attacks, which create different combos when alternating between them – are similar to many modern action games. However, the pacing is slower and more deliberate, and functions like evading are separate from dashing. Like some enemies, the player has a shield during combat, which offers damage reduction. Once it’s broken, it needs time to recharge. In addition to melee attacks, the accompanying drone can be used as a wrist-mounted gun to fire at enemies from range. Based on gameplay trailers, it can also be upgraded to unleash lasers.
Parrying and Retribution
Like Sekiro, Stellar Blade leans heavily into parrying, activated by pressing the guard button at the right moment. Doing this negates any damage from an attack but also builds energy for special attacks called Beta Skills. When fighting a boss, you may have noticed a row of small yellow icons beneath its health and shield. Those indicate the number of parries necessary to enact Retribution, a powerful attack which chunks off a large amount of health (and looks cool).
Perfect Dodge
Interestingly, Stellar Blade also leans quite a bit into dodging and evasion, to the extent that it complements the parrying instead of serving as an alternative. Once Perfect Dodge is unlocked, narrowly avoiding an attack will slow down time briefly, allowing the player to counter-attack. It’s not always the best play, but necessary against projectiles and unblockable attacks.
Abilities
As you gain XP and Skill Points, new abilities are unlocked. You can learn new Beta Skills like ranged electric slices, a multi-stab strike, or a rising backflip good against shields. Each has upgrades, some returning energy on successfully landing, others dealing more damage if you hold the button down on the last hit and so on, to further diversify one’s playstyle. However, you also get some survival tools, like an ability for countering unblockable attacks with purple flashes or Blink for teleporting behind an enemy after a successful parry. Even some of the more extensive combos require Skill Points to unlock.
Training Area
When trying out new skills, a training area is available to teleport to and test them. It also provides a great place to test your timing and combat skills against enemies under various conditions, such as when activating Blink, getting the parry time down just right and so on.
Crafting
Though gear crafting isn’t available in the demo, you pick up various materials that can be used for the same, like Polymer Elements and Nano Elements of varying tiers. How the crafting works remains to be seen, especially if you need to acquire recipes and blueprints (which could also be rewards from quests or purchased from vendors), so we’ll need to wait and see.
Gear Customization
Two types of equipment are showcased in Boss Challenge – Exospines and Gear. The former is like a kit with several perks that lean into specific playstyles, like the Protection-Type Exospine for decreasing damage from enemies, raising the shield’s Protection Level and even a chance of regenerating HP for five seconds when guarding or parrying at 20 percent less health. The latter offer smaller buffs like reduced melee damage taken, bonus damage on combos, overall damage reduction, increased attack speed, etc. You can seemingly equip two Exospines in the full game, with a maximum of four gear slots available for minor buffs.
Accessibility Options
In terms of accessibility options, Stellar Blade has quite the selection. You can adjust motion blur and camera shake, HUD size and background, choose different colorblind presets and their intensity, enable High Contrast, adjust sensitivity and even flip the camera horizontally or vertically. There are also options for automatically succeeding at QTEs, auto lock-on during combat, and even replacing the fishing controls (though fishing isn’t available in the demo).
Graphics Modes
There are three graphical modes – Performance, Resolution and Balanced. Performance, as you might have guessed, focuses on 60 FPS gameplay, while Resolution prioritizes a 4K resolution. Balanced mode offers, well, a balance between the two. Based on demo analysis (courtesy of ElAnalistaDeBits), Performance mode seemingly renders at 1440p/60 FPS while the Resolution is 2160p/30 FPS. Balance mode apparently utilizes 1440p with a 4K output via Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling and, despite some frame drops, maintains 60 FPS pretty consistently. Again, this is all based on the demo, so it’s best to wait for the game’s launch before judging the performance.
Playtime
Narrative-focused players can expect about 25 hours of gameplay from the main campaign per the developer. If you’re seeking 100 percent completion, which includes upgrades and potentially side missions, then it can take between 30 to 50 hours.
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