Steel Seed Review

Given the landscape of dystopian cyber-apocalypse media of recent times, I found myself pretty drawn to Steel Seed. Seeing demo reactions that likened it to a ‘cross between Batman: Arkham City and Stellar Blade’ felt a great deal like some un-cashable cheques were being written for my expectations – but at the same time, it felt that if it even managed to tickle the concept of those two games in a unified experience, I was ready to find out the hard way.

Unfortunately, it was not unreasonable expectations that led to my undoing – but rather a score of ambitions that just didn’t quite converge in a way that mattered. Steel Seed is a game that wants to be something truly incredible, but never really manages to shoulder its way off the kids table.

Haven’t we all

Waking up in a robot body and seemingly not bothered an inch by this, Zoe is a young woman and sudden saviour of the world – if she can figure out what on Earth happened. The world is a dilapidated mess, and a glowing gold man tells you that he’s been waiting for you to come and set things right. See, Zoe’s father was a pretty spectacular scientist – at least, until things went pear-shaped and the world became a haggard dystopia. The well-read golden man informs you that you must now gather the magical Dad macguffins to sort it all out. Joining you is your very own Star Wars-y floating droid pal, KOBY, who is somewhat endearing in a sort of ‘lost puppy’ way, speaking in that bloopish beepery that is all the rage for the fans of this genre. He serves as a surprisingly helpful assistant, allowing you to take direct control and interact with environments and foil foes – with Zoe even lamenting with proper panic when he takes enough hits to perish.

Throughout your tale Zoe will quip and remark to her mostly-mute companion, and others are happy to speak at you – but it is not the most compelling stuff. It’s not horrible voice acting by any means, it just has this awful habit of feeling mistimed and unsuited to the mood the game is trying to sell. Zoe sharing her thoughts on the tragedy of humanity feels weirdly out of place while she is ziplining above a lake of oil, or barely making a double-jumped gap.

The real crime is that your story motivations never feel compelling enough to propel you forward. I found myself meandering onward in the hopes of uncovering some twist or character-driven motivation that might shift my view, but the narrative path was paved precisely as you might expect. Go here, get a thing – encounter some kind of obstacle. Each step played out like a checklist, and that’s fine for the most part – but it did mean that my curiosity with the game was then relegated to how the gameplay might evolve, because the story wasn’t aiming to shock me any time soon. There’s a comment to be made about what it means to be human, but it comes at the crest of such a painfully obvious twist that I find myself struggling to try and defend it. The writing is on the wall – scrawled in thick red crayon. It’s aggressively fine, and that is really all it is.

You magnificent looming bastard

Gameplay is serviceable enough, and when things are aligning you’ll likely have a great time. You mostly get around via a pretty grouse climbing and clambering system, with helpful RGB lighting showing you where to grab. It’s a tasty morsel that smacks of Uncharted, and I say that with no ill intent – it works a treat. There are then plenty of death-defying leaps from some platforms to another, often feeling a great deal more risky than one would like, if only for the Dreamcast-era camera malevolence trying to trick you into plummeting to your death. One curiousity of the world of Steel Seed was the number of greasy ramps that exist within its odd metallic interior, often serving to slip n’ slide you to another area with no way to return.

When you aren’t cyber-gymnasting your way around, you’ll be inhabiting space with other robotic doofuses that seek to disassemble you. However these blokes are easy enough to take care of if you remain unseen, with a silent takedown doing dividends. KOBE comes out as a true MVP in these situations, serving as a remote pair of eyes for Zoe, and able to manipulate the battlefield to her advantage – such as shooting hazards and marking enemies to track them easier. This is where the Arkham stylings come in, because there is a surprising amount of depth and supporting systems to make the stealth approach quite palatable – because god help you if you try to biff it out with a room full of cyber dickheads. Avoiding detection is done in a traditional sense, crouched low to the ground and dodging lines of sight – but the cyber future of Steel Seed also lets you make use of ‘glitch fields’ as a means of abusing robotic vision blindspots. There are even upgrades that allow you to personally place these glitch fields, so now your method of approach becomes open-ended in how you want things to play out. Strike from the shadows, only you get to choose where the shadows are. Nice.

And this is definitely the preferred method of play – because a quick stealth takedown is massively preferable to fisticuffs. The actual attack animations feel relentlessly pulpy, with hit registration not quite aligning with the girthy swing animations that Zoe can muster. It all felt oddly timed, whether it was me trying to brain one of the chittering bot people or them trying to hit me – leading to that cardinal sin of needing to specifically learn when you can dodge, rather than relying on a straightforward visual cue or animation – because what you are seeing doesn’t quite align with what the game expects of you.

This is somewhat mitigated in ways with how upgrades are meted out, with the game rewarding you for completing set mini-objectives within the gameplay. Hit a few perfect dodges, and you can now access a skill tree upgrade to permanently improve your dodge – meaning that wobbly window you can’t quite nail down is now a matter of necessity.

This feels precariously balanced on a knife edge – equal parts exciting and draining when you try to engage with it. Rather than just hoovering up experience to get your upgrade, the game half-heartedly tries to convince you to mix up your gameplay by placing specific targets on all of them – such as asking you to dispatch 5 enemies in a row without being seen to unlock a glitch mine, which then makes it a great deal easier to dispatch enemies without being seen. The issue here is that for every generously offered upgrade that boosts your dodge ability by dodging well, there is some other arbitrary objective that is locking you out of a fun sounding power boost. God, I spent the first few hours of the game just trying to find five consecutive enemies I could quietly dispatch.

The other side of this is the fact that these upgrades must also be paid for, using the games ‘Glitch’ currency. Loot this off destroyed dorks, smash boxes and perhaps even find a puddle of it in random corners – but know that it accumulates at a glacial pace. It might be divine providence that I found myself just barely being able to afford each upgrade as I managed to bungle through the required unlock procedure, just know that you better keep a hand between the couch cushions for whatever change you can scrounge up. Heck, at one point I had just finished climbing an impressive wall of elevating platforms before I realised I had left a stack of boxes in a corner. I genuinely chewed my lip and considered going back for them.

I went back. For an entire 4 Glitch bucks.

I’m Bat Catman, note the ears

When Steel Seed’s systems hit a harmony, you’ll likely have a good time. But mis-timed subtitles, in-game typoes and odd texture glitches would always yank me back to reality. A few sections even decided to flip the genre slightly, locking my camera and asking me to brawl my way through some baddies – right after I had assassinated dozens of mecha-weirdoes and started to feel like maybe I was getting the hang of it. In other titles, I might find it endearing – but Steel Seed just doesn’t have the level of quality to pull it off, so instead it’s grating. For every great environment to explore, there is likely a stealth section that outstays its welcome by a wide margin. For each cool setpiece moment, there is a devastatingly punishing checkpoint – often discovered from a death that felt waaay out of your control. A competent level of systems just can’t push past the jarring realisations that find you at the worst times, and it sours your time with the game.

Final Thoughts

The ramshackle world that Zoe is trying to save feels a great deal like a metaphor for the game itself. What we have here is a game that, despite glimpses of interesting ideas, ultimately feels visually over-polished and underdeveloped. I see the concept of what Steel Seed aspired to be, and I desperately wish it had hit that mark –the experience on offer is uniquely impressive from a conceptual standpoint, but the execution of it all just asks too much of my patience to vibe with it properly.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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