Steelrising Is Looking Like a Surprisingly Good Bloodborne Tribute

ign.com:

Developer Spiders is best known as something of a BioWare tribute studio. Its most successful game, GreedFall, is the latest in a modest line of RPGs that draw heavily upon the likes of Mass Effect and Dragon Age. But Spiders’ next game, Steelrising, is nothing like a BioWare game at all. Instead, it’s an ode to FromSoftware. Specifically, it is Bloodborne set in the French Revolution, with Yarnham’s beasts swapped out for Parisian clockwork robots. As a pitch, it sounds a little derivative (at least mechanically). But despite seemingly minimal innovations, playing Steelrising reveals something that has genuine promise.

At a recent hands-on event I was able to play around three hours of Steelrising, which covered the opening locations and the first major boss. Playing as Aegis, a clockwork automaton ballerina-turned-bodyguard, I explored a small variety of twisty rural village and Parisian city locations that knotted themselves together with shortcut routes. As I tore apart robotic enemies with blades and bullets I collected Anima Essence, a resource that I could use to upgrade my stats and improve my weapons, provided I didn’t lose it upon death. Upgrades were conducted at ‘Vestal’ checkpoints, which also refilled my health restoring oil burette with a fresh supply. If it’s not already clear, Steelrising plays exactly like a FromSoftware game.

It’s easy to be cynical about this. Where, exactly, is Spiders’ original work here? But look at FromSoftware’s own library, and it can often be difficult to see the difference between Demon’s Souls and Elden Ring. The Soulslike formula seems fated to remain as ‘pure’ as possible, and so it’s in the details that we find each new game’s differences. With Steelrising, those