Steelrising Pre-orders Open, Hands-on Impressions
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Spiders Studio's Dark Souls-inspired action-RPG Steelrising should be going live September 8, 2022. And since that date is now less than three months away, we're invited to pre-order the game on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store for $49.99 or your regional equivalent.
Here's the game's description:
The city burns and bleeds as it suffers the madness of King Louis XVI and his violent legions of automatons. Aegis, a mechanical masterpiece created by the engineer Vaucanson to be the queen's bodyguard, must save the French Revolution in this challenging action-RPG.
CHALLENGING COMBAT BETWEEN AUTOMATONS
Up against the king's mechanical soldiers, deadly accuracy will be needed. String together dodges, parries, jumps and devastating attacks to fight your way through Paris. Every fight will test your nerve and requires excellent discipline, while the huge relentless machine bosses demand patience and skill.
AEGIS: A CHARACTER WITH EXTRAORDINARY SKILLS
Define your own style and upgrade your abilities as you progress through the game. You can play as a ruthless warrior, a hard-hitting bodyguard, a deadly dancer or a virtuoso of the elemental arts. Take advantage of a wide variety of weapons and skills to approach each fight in your own unique way.
REVOLUTIONARY PARIS IS YOUR PLAYGROUND
Using carriages, grapples, secret passages, a detailed map, and other methods and tools you find along the way, explore a city experiencing its darkest days. Your grappling hook adds a new dimension to exploration and Paris's verticality. Combined with your dash ability, it will provide access to all the city's secrets across multiple levels you can explore over and over again.
CHANGE THE COURSE OF HISTORY
You are one of the main characters of an alternative history where Paris is being choked by a tyrant king. Allies and enemies with unclear motives will cross your path, such as Marie-Antoinette, Lafayette and Robespierre. It's up to you to cut a path through all the plotting and put an end to one man's madness so that the French Revolution succeeds.
On top of that, you can now check out a series of hands-on previews for the game. Let's start with IGN:
Across my three hours I discovered that this combat core can be expanded upon with a range of weapons that influence small variations in playstyle. A pair of metal corrugated fans can be used to slice apart brass baddies, but slam them together and they become a shield (or, more accurately, Sekiro’s Loaded Umbrella) for a more defensive approach. A better offense can be found in the dual-wielded falchion and saber, which sends Aegis pirouetting through the air like a deadly tornado. A more exotic option is what can only be described as a scorching yoyo, which can be slammed against the floor to create a flaming detonation that inflicts damage-over-time. For longer range engagements, a pistol can fire a volley of freezing alchemical bullets that disable enemies and open them up for a brutal melee.
There's also Fextralife:
So this is where you come in. You play as the intelligent and ever so combat-ready Aegis who is tasked to serve as the eyes and ears of the Queen. Your main objective is to put a stop to the King’s madness and unending thirst for war and force by finding out how the Mechanical Army can be controlled, all while investigating the death of her son. It remains to be seen whether or not your choices will make a lasting impact on the war, as is the case in GreedFall. In addition to main and side quests, you will come across Notes scattered around Paris as you piece together the bloodshed that has gripped the nation while instilling fear.
Exploration-wise, Steelrising will have you traverse the entire city as you encounter similar yet hostile Automats. What makes the experience worthwhile is the verticality involved such that you can jump above walls and across platforms and rooftops to get to your next destination. In doing so, however, you will need to figure out where to go next since the map in your possession is not interactive. This means that you cannot track your course. You will need to find out the best routes to take because exploration is not linear. As such, you must discover secrets and revisit areas to check if you now have access to them.
And GameSpew:
As you’d expect, as you progress further into Steelrising Aegis will grow in strength and also gain access to new tools that will further aid her ability to traverse and interact with the world. By beating bosses you’ll unlock a grappling hook which allows you to access hard-to-reach areas. You’ll also unlock a dash manoeuvre that allows you to cover greater distances in-air, and a mechanical arm that can be used as a battering ram to destroy certain objects. All of these can be used in combat, too.
