I liked a lot of games this year. While not as full to the brim as 2023, there were still a lot of excellent options out there, whatever your genre persuasion. I liked enough that when I put together my top ten, I needed to save space for another four honourable mentions. Stellar Blade was not amongst that 14, and yet of all the games that came out over the past 12 months, it’s the one I’m most interested in what it does next.
Things were pretty weird before Stellar Blade released. It feels like gaming discourse has only grown more disingenuous since then, as we saw with The Witcher 4’s reveal trailer featuring Ciri. There was this swirling idea that game journalists were plotting to bring down Stellar Blade, that it spat in the face of our woke ideals.
It was odd to observe, as someone who has often been described as woke and was hotly anticipating Stellar Blade’s arrival. When it launched, it was met with solid reviews and felt like a game with potential it didn’t quite realise. Many games have walked that path before, and that’s why Stellar Blade’s next step is so interesting.
Assassin’s Creed 2 Is The Sequel King
The obvious game that comes to mind in this regard is Assassin’s Creed. The first game? Pretty good, with some fresh ideas that were ultimately let down by a dull protagonist and an inability to separate from overused gameplay tropes. The second game had a new charismatic star, fully committed to the parkour lifestyle, and launched an empire. Assassin’s Creed 2 would not look out of place amongst gaming’s elite. It’s a sequel that all sequels aspire to. It’s a sequel Stellar Blade must be shooting for.
Obviously, you hope every game is better than the one before. You hope every game turns out to be the greatest game you’ve ever played, even though that couldn’t possibly be true. But this is not as simple as ‘I hope the next Stellar Blade is good’. It has all the ingredients, and that’s why I’m more interested in it than the idea of a Balatro 2, or Metaphor: ReFantazio 2, or even an Astro Bot 2. Those games are already great and if they get sequels all I’ll want is ‘more please’ like I’m a cockney urchin. I don’t just want more Stellar Blade. I want better. And I believe it’s out there.
Eve was Stellar Blade’s downfall. It has nothing to do with her being ‘too hot’ – I thought her design was excellent for the story the game was telling, and it just about justified the designs of the outfits within the narrative. It has some fantastic fashion, an element sadly overlooked amidst all the drama. Then the Nier: Automata outfits take it too far into silliness that devalues both games.
And that’s kind of the problem. Everything Eve does detracts from her cool design because she is the most boring character I’ve ever encountered. Her personality is… that she’s pleasant most of the time? It doesn’t lean into the emotionally-starved droid angle, it doesn’t give her any sass or confidence or flaws or anything beyond shallow exposition. They have almost everything right, and it feels like they got caught in the middle of who Eve was going to be.
Stellar Blade Still Has Huge Potential
There’s room for the gameplay to step up too. Stellar Blade is torn between being what we now call a character action game and being a Soulslike, and as a result feels too derivative of both genres to really shine. Given we have so many Soulslikes these days, and FromSoftware seems to be on a generational run of pumping out new experiences, a sequel would be far better off committing to stylish, rapid-paced action.
It’s easy to forget that it takes about ten hours of Stellar Blade before you unlock any abilities that feel transformative in battle, and that’s right as you encounter the difficulty spike and are thrown out of the free-flowing action combat into a series of blocks, parries, and dodge rolls to chip down a meat sack’s health bar. It doesn’t need to be easier, per se (it’s already far less tricky and complex than full blown Soulslikes), but it should let Eve be on the offensive far more often than she’s forced to play tactical defence.
A sequel is a great chance to put all of this right, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to expect it. Now that Eve is a more established character, there’s more room for her to develop individually, and less reliance on a mysterious twist that the game needs to keep secret. It also seems to have won more fans for its combos and attack animations with a range of abilities rather than its technical precision, so you’d expect a sequel to lean more heavily on these elements. I’m not sure it will be as good as Assassin’s Creed 2, and it doesn’t need to be, but could be as transformative, and that’s exciting to think about.
I feel the same way about Ghost of Yotei, due to arrive on our shores in 2025. Tsushima was a good game, if not quite as good as its reputation sometimes suggests with its pairing against The Last of Us. Fun to run around in, with a couple of interesting side quests (and great visuals), but very dated in its progression, collectable system, and general traversal. A game very good at doing an impression of great games that came out several years previously. A crowd-pleaser, closer to Horizon than any other Sony game. But the sequel seems to be more ambitious thematically, and has cast off the safety harness. Between it and Stellar Blade, it seems the way to get me excited for a sequel is to make sure the first game lets me down a bit.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
82/100
- Released
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April 26, 2024
- Developer(s)
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Shift Up
- Publisher(s)
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Sony Interactive Entertainment