Stray Blade

*This review was machine translated from Korean to English. Stray Blade Gorgeous to Look At, Misery to Play: An Action Game Without Common Sense 🎨 The Saving Grace: Decent Visuals and Motion Variety To be fair, the game looks decent. While the combat itself isn’t mechanically smooth, the developers didn’t just copy-paste the attack strings. Instead, they put effort into designing distinct animations and execution moves for each weapon category. It gives the combat some visual variety and makes trying out new gear okay to watch. The world is also reasonably well-designed and nice to look at. The art direction does its job, creating a solid backdrop that functions well enough. The developers at least knew how to make a game look presentable. 🎮 Clunky Movement and a Baffling Control Scheme Right off the bat, the game feels fundamentally sluggish. Attack movement has a noticeable delay, and the hitboxes are completely disconnected from the actual animations. When an enemy attacks, you're better off just blindly blocking or parrying because visual cues mean utterly nothing here. But the absolute worst offender is the default control scheme. It’s downright baffling. Every single c…

Finished Stray Blade after about 18 hours. It’s a classic “jack of all trades, master of none” soulslike. The game tries to be an open-world Metroidvania with crafting, weapon mastery, and interconnected areas… and ends up being mediocre at almost everything. Here’s my honest review: POSITIVES: - The world of Acrea is genuinely beautiful — large, varied, and atmospheric. - Performance was fine on PC (smooth 60 FPS the whole time; the issues that exist never felt game-breaking). - Lore is delivered in proper soulslike fashion through item descriptions and scattered notes. NEGATIVES: - Navigation is terrible. The world looks great but is a confusing mess to actually move through. There are way too many looping shortcuts that just send you in circles, and because it’s only semi-open, you constantly get lost. - No map markers + Metroidvania ability gating is a brutal combination. Good luck remembering where that one spot with the special rocks was after you’ve explored for 10 hours. - Weapon-mastery leveling system is awful. You can only spend skill points tied to a weapon after you fully master it. Hate daggers but they gate health upgrades? Too bad — you’re forced to gri…

I think this game deserves a play. It has its faults, bugs, some maddening ones but also its charm. I finished both the game and the short DLC to get all steam achievements, which means a lot of running around, looking at every corner to find the hidden collectibles and there are tons of them. Game is as it is, developer studio made the game, then disbanded. Its discord is no longer maintained, spam/scam-fest. What did I like: Atmosphere, music, hoarding loot and fights with the caveats below. What I did not like is somewhat broken stuff. Camera / targeting can act weird when fighting multiple enemies. It has its own mind, can jump to irrelevant targets turning your back to the enemy you are fighting. Performance is not terrible but does not feel great either. When I move camera side to side to see enemies surrounding me, it gets a bit blurry/jagged. There is also funny laughable bugs, like if you are fighting on a small platform, enemies tend to jump back and fall to their death. If you are close to perimeter/corner of an arena, you and boss/enemy may get stuck, neither of you can move and you exchange hits lol. If you are thinking about trying it out at this …

Stray Blade gives off a good first impression with it’s weapons mechanics and cheerful World of Warcraft aesthetics, but the more time I spent with the game, the less I enjoyed it, and by the time I reached the end credits I was more than ready to put it down. The hook that drew me to the game in the first place is a good one. In Stray Blade you amass xp by killing enemies in traditional soulslike fashion but all this actually does is reward you with skill points. The only way to truly grow stronger is to invest these skill points into stat upgrades you unlock by mastering the game’s various weapons. So clear enough combat encounters with a spear, for example, and you’ll unlock the opportunity to invest a skill point in health. Kill a bunch of dudes with a pair of daggers and you’ll eventually be able to increase your stamina. It’s a really neat idea as in most soulslikes I usually play around with a weapon or two before picking my favourite and never touching the others, but here you don’t have a choice, you have to try out every single axe, blade, scythe, and hammer you come across or you’ll be left severely underpowered. You occasionally find blueprints for weapons in che…

Baby's first soulslike. Not difficult by any stretch of the imagination, but not bad either.

Yes I recommend this. Has some junks but the game is great, the story, the world and the gameplay that can be tweak to fit every playstyle. It reminds me a combination of Ashen and Kingdom of Amalur.