Steelrising

Steelrising is a third-person action RPG from Spiders, published by Nacon, and it launched on 8 September 2022 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. It is single-player only: no co-op, no invasions, no second player, and the campaign plays offline. This review covers the base game, with the expansion called out where it changes how a finished run ends.

Paris, 1789, with the king's machines in the street

Aegis is a Vaucanson automaton, built as Marie-Antoinette's bodyguard and sent out from Saint-Cloud to find her creator while Louis XVI's clockwork army grinds the city down. The game commits to that premise in ways that are hard to shake off. Lafayette and Robespierre are characters rather than references, the enemy roster is built out of the period's own clockwork curiosities, and the Revolution is the plot instead of the wallpaper.

You work through eight districts — Saint-Cloud, the Faubourgs around Les Invalides, the Tuileries and the Louvre, La Cité, Luxembourg, Montmartre, the Bastille and Versailles. Titans are the major bosses; smaller Unstable variants act as mini-bosses along the way, and the side quests around them are more interesting than the genre usually allows, including one that hands you the king's treasury and asks which of two political causes should get it.

Death is the familiar ritual. You drop your Anima Essence where you fell, you go back for it, and upgrades happen at Vestals — rest points that refill your health and bring the district's enemies back. Both your weapons and Aegis herself are paid for out of that same pool, which is why the progression actually lands: you notice the hits getting shorter because you bought the difference. The Echo collectibles are named after the people around the Revolution, and there is more side writing here than the main plot lets on.

Heat is the stamina bar

Aegis has an endurance bar, and rapid cooling changes how you manage it. Her cooling system snaps her endurance back almost instantly, which lets you stay on the attack instead of retreating to breathe, and the trade is that the chill it dumps into her builds up. Vent at the wrong moment and the overheat drags on; lean on it during a long exchange and Aegis can freeze solid in the middle of the king's army.

This is the best decision in the game. It feeds the aggressive play the animations have been selling, it gives the automaton fantasy an actual mechanic instead of a coat of paint, and it turns an ordinary resource bar into a system that answers the question of how greedy you got. Nothing else here is that sharp.

Two systems sit around it. Enough pressure breaks an enemy's stance and opens one devastating hit, so a fast weapon with stun on it can keep a large machine permanently off balance. Elemental special moves — fire, frost and shock — run on a limited alchemical resource that the game is stingy with, and that stinginess creates the biggest hole in the balance: frost can hold a boss in place while you empty a full combo into it. Fast-freezing a Titan is the strongest argument for playing without ice weapons, and it's also the most fun you'll have in the whole game.

The fights, and the Paris around them

Loadouts are broader than they look. Two weapons are equipped at once from a spread of classes — swords and polearms, mallets, fans, chain weapons, firearms and the usual improvised explosives — and each has weak, fierce and charged attacks plus its own special, whether that's a parry, a shield, an aerial strike or a ranged shot. Switching mid-fight matters, especially when your secondary is the thing that reaches an elemental weakness.

Exploration gives you a dash, a grappling hook and a kick, and all three look superb in motion. They are also rationed: the game decides when a grapple point is available, so the verticality is more choreography than freedom. A compass points you at main and side objectives but never at items, which is a good compromise — it stops you getting lost without turning the districts into a checklist. Fast travel arrives with the horseless carriage after the opening missions, not from the start.

Where it comes apart is the moment-to-moment fighting. Swings land imprecisely, the lock-on is unreliable enough to cost you exchanges, and the camera picks fights in tight rooms. The distinctive enemies — trumpeting musicians whose notes damage you, animated candelabras, feline scouts — are memorable, but most of what you actually fight is another humanoid guard with a blade or a gun, and by the later districts the rosters repeat. Boss quality follows the same curve: some Titans are excellent, and some are a long health bar attached to three moves you've already learned.

Assist Mode is the difficulty menu

Steelrising has no easy, normal or hard. It has Assist Mode, and the dials are more useful than a slider. You can cut the damage you take, keep your Anima Essence when you die instead of walking back for it, speed up endurance recovery, or make the cooling system forgiving. Nothing in the world changes; only Aegis does. You can choose it during character creation or open it from the options menu at any point in a run, which makes it a low-stakes way to test where the fights sit for you.

The original version locked some challenge-related trophies behind playing with it switched off. That restriction was removed in the New Game Plus patch, and anything you had already earned was credited after the fact, so the current game lets you use the dials as much as you like.

What has changed since launch

A fair bit, and all of it matters to anyone picking the game up now. New Game Plus arrived on 29 September 2022, three weeks after release, and it needs a completed save: your level, weapons and upgrades carry over, the quests reset, and the enemies arrive with new skins, new weapons and new movesets. There are weapons and one full outfit that only exist in New Game Plus.

The same patch pushed the base game's difficulty up by increasing boss damage, resistances and armour, cut grenade damage and stock, thinned out the life potions and alchemical ammo that enemies drop, and reduced the damage of the Charleville 1789 Shield Musket and the Charybdis Fan. It also fixed an item-duplication glitch. If you're working from a guide written in the first three weeks, some of its numbers and shortcuts are gone.

Cagliostro's Secrets followed on 10 November 2022: a new area in the Hôpital Saint Louis, a new quest in the main story, a new boss, two new characters and side quests that send you back through earlier districts. It is gated behind finishing the Bastille, the Bastille Edition of the game bundles it in, and anyone loading an endgame save to reach it trades away their Versailles progress — that district has to be replayed before New Game Plus is available again. The Marie-Antoinette pack adds cosmetic items, while the Discus Chain is an additional weapon. The verdict here concerns the base campaign.

The pulse

Reception landed where a decent mid-budget soulslike usually lands: mixed to average, and almost unanimous about where the value is. Nobody argued with the setting. The clockwork Paris, the historical cast and the enemy designs carried the game through every complaint, and the cooling system drew approval as a genuine twist on the formula.

The friction was consistent too. Reviews came back to imprecise combat, an unreliable lock-on, dated visuals and a rough technical launch — disappearing health bars, texture pop-in and audio dropping out of dialogue scenes were all reported. The other recurring note was structure: the districts look open and mostly aren't, with invisible walls funnelling you down one route. Expect to finish the campaign in the low teens of hours rather than a long RPG's worth, which also means it's a straightforward run to replay with a different weapon and a different ending.

Should you play it

Yes, if the setting is what pulled you in. Aegis is a better character than her dry, staccato delivery suggests, Paris is a wonderful place to be miserable in, and the heat gauge gives this one an identity the rest of the subgenre's mid-tier doesn't have. We'd leave the ice weapons at home so the bosses get to mean something, and we'd turn Assist Mode on without a second thought if the lock-on started fighting us — the dials exist so you can see the rest of the game.

Skip it if you need the combat to be the reason you're here. It's solid rather than precise, the frame never quite keeps up with the choreography, and several hours of it are spent fighting the same humanoid guard in a different coat. Steelrising is a beautiful, strange game wearing an ill-fitting genre. The fit is the problem, and it's still worth the trip.