Stellar Blade

Shift Up released Stellar Blade on PlayStation 5 on 26 April 2024, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The PC version arrived on 11 June 2025 through Steam and the Epic Games Store. This review covers the base game, everything added in its free updates, and the two paid crossover expansions.

Four defensive answers, and a colour for each

Holding Block reduces damage from guardable attacks coming from Eve's front. Time the block just before impact for a Perfect Parry, which avoids the hit and reduces enemy Balance. A well-timed dodge triggers a Perfect Dodge and creates an opening to respond.

The rest of the language is colour. A red flash means a parry is the answer. A yellow flash marks an attack you cannot guard, so it wants a Perfect Dodge instead. A blue flash and a purple flash are different again: blue wants Blink, purple wants Repulse, and both of those are moves you unlock in the Skill Tree rather than buttons that work from the first fight. Until you buy them, a blue or purple cue is a warning to move. A few attacks are worse than all of that, because they cannot be blocked or dodged at all; those want the drone, aimed and fired before the wind-up finishes.

Balance, shields and the punish window

Every enemy carries a Balance bar, and Perfect Parries are how you empty it. When it runs out the enemy is groggy and open to a Retribution. That is the route to the biggest single hits in the game, and the quickest way to learn the timing.

Other enemies hide behind shields that reduce damage until you break them. Shattering a shield stuns the target and interrupts whatever it was about to do, which makes shield-breaking a defensive tool as much as an offensive one. Repulse does a related job: land it and the enemy's weak point opens, so the drone can do heavy damage from range. The loop is short and readable. Read the tell, take the exchange, spend what you earned, repeat. Where a fight drags, it is usually because you are answering with the wrong flag rather than because the numbers are stacked against you.

Two gauges, five trees, one camp kiosk

Attacking builds Beta Energy, and Beta Skills spend it to upgrade the basic strikes into wider arcs, shield breakers and shock waves. Perfect Dodges, Blinks and Repulses build Burst Energy instead, and Burst Skills are bought from a kiosk at a base camp. A third resource sits underneath both: SP, earned from kills and from searching corpses, spent at the same camp kiosks on five separate trees for Attack, Beta, Burst, Tachy and Survival.

Tachy is the one worth naming, because it is not a weapon upgrade. Equipping Tachy's Memento lets energy build during a fight, and when it fills you can enter Tachy Mode and borrow a different set of attacks for a while. Most of the trees, though, are honest about what they are: a wider toolbox rather than a build to optimise. Stellar Blade is not an RPG that rewards spreadsheet thinking. It rewards knowing which answer the game is asking for.

Camps, Xion and the wide middle

Rest happens at Camps. You activate one with a Vitcoin, and it heals Eve, refills the Rechargeable Tumbler and saves your run, in exchange for bringing the ordinary enemies back. Supply Camps carry more devices than an ordinary Camp, including the Repair Console that upgrades the weapon, the Tumbler and the Exospine.

The structure around those camps is uneven in a way worth knowing before you start. Xion is the hub city, and the Wasteland and the Great Desert beyond it are the game's semi-open middle: wide areas with side quests, Bulletin Board requests, scavenging and collectibles, broken up by the missions that push the story forward. The last stretch drops the open ground entirely and becomes a straight line of set pieces and boss fights, which is the best part of the game and arrives late. If you like a compact, dense campaign, the first half will test your patience. If you like having somewhere to wander between objectives, it will not.

What arrived after launch, and what it costs

Stellar Blade has been supported well enough that the launch version is no longer the whole picture. The Boss Challenge mode arrived on 24 May 2024 and turns the fight list into a ladder: the base game's 19 bosses, your own gear or a preset, and a report afterwards that counts your time, your Perfect Parries and your dodges. Clearing every boss on Normal or above earns the Neurolink Suit. Mann, the leader of the Sentinels, joined that mode with the PC release.

The NieR:Automata crossover and Photo Mode landed on 20 November 2024. Emil's floating shop sells eleven crossover items, paid for with Stellar Tears found out in the Wasteland and the Great Desert, and Photo Mode does what you expect across poses, filters and lenses. The NIKKE expansion does more than cosmetics: it adds the Scarlet boss fight, shooting-range minigames, a shop run by Volt, and collectibles you fish out of the water.

New Game Plus is generous for a mode that most games treat as an afterthought. It carries over gold, items, gear upgrades, skills and costumes, and then adds on top: 34 new outfits for Eve, five accessories, cosmetics for Adam, Lily and the drone, extra Beta and Burst skills, drone skills, Mk2 upgrades for existing gear. Weapons extend from 15 to 40, Body and Beta cores from 6 to 9, and the Tumbler from 5 to 13. Harder difficulties can change enemy placements. Later PC patches added three epilogues that follow a specific ending, and extra arranged tracks from the game's soundtrack.

Where it lands

Critics and players do not fully agree on this one, and the split is instructive. The critic aggregate sits at 81 from around 134 critic reviews, with 113 positive and 21 mixed, and the PC version tracks slightly higher at 84 from 33 reviews. On Steam the picture is much warmer: roughly 94,600 user reviews with about 88,650 of them positive and a Very Positive summary. The user score sits at 9.1 from about 8,500 ratings.

Common criticisms focus on the story and the pace of the wide middle. The combat core, the boss design and the art direction are where the praise lands even from reviewers who were cool on everything else. It is a character action game wearing the clothes of an action RPG, and it is at its best when you stop treating it like a stat sheet.

Should you play it

Yes, if you want a parry game where the timing is the content. Stellar Blade is at its strongest when a boss finally clicks: you read the red flash, take the parry, empty the Balance bar, land the Retribution, and the whole exchange feels like a decision you made rather than a combo you memorised. The coloured-cue system is unusual, and once it sinks in, the fights read clearly without the game ever drowning you in menus. Very few action games are this legible this quickly.

Skip it if you want the RPG half to carry the weight. There is no build to plan beyond a handful of gear and Exospine slots, no loot worth farming, and the skill trees mostly sharpen tools you already have. Skip it as well if you play these games for a story with real branches; the plot is fixed, and what choice exists is saved for the ending.

Three things worth knowing before you buy. The Complete Edition is the full game plus the two crossover expansions, the Deluxe cosmetics, the Captain suit for Eve and the Fluffy Bear drone pack, so it is the only version that needs buying if you want everything in one purchase. Both crossovers can also be bought separately, as a Twin Expansion Pack bundle or as individual episodes. It is a single-player game with no co-op and no multiplayer, so there is no second player to carry a wall. And the accessibility options are unusually deep for the genre: adjustable difficulty, simplified quick-time events, control and tutorial reminders, colour alternatives, high-contrast visuals, and a practice mode you can drop into at any point.