Steelrising Review: A Royal Mess

thegamer.com:

Aegis dances around King Louis XVI’s clockwork soldiers beautifully, striking devastating blows with such precision that their gears jam, rendering them immobile and open to a deadly finishing strike. I press the attack, quickly snapping to another tin soldier and starting an unrelenting flurry of slashes before Aegis overheats and I perfectly time her venting so that she barely misses a beat. I finish off the second opponent, and a third, until all that remains is scrap. When Steelrising works, it’s a gorgeous, rhythmic action-RPG that I could happily spend hours in. The problem is it barely works, and the combat is its only redeeming feature. It’s a broken clock, and it’s only time for combat twice a day.

Steelrising is set during the French Revolution, only there’s a load of mechanical monstrosities roaming the streets of Paris. This is the revolution that overthrew the monarchy, the one with Marie Antoinette and the let them eat cake line, not the June Rebellion in Les Misérables that everyone thinks is the French Revolution. The French revolted a lot, so it's okay to be confused. I was also confused during the game. Not because of the setting, I was confused as to what my actual mission was.

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Aegis is one of the King’s legion of clockwork soldiers, only she’s different. She can speak, has some semblance of free will, and works for the Queen. It’s a weird feeling playing the barely sentient slave to a monarch, the very height of symbolic inequality, and the game does little to interrogate this despite its monarchy-overthrowing setting. I spent all of two minutes with her maj and one of her servants before she sent me off to stop the King and find