Steelrising

Almost exactly a year before Lies of P, there was Steelrising. In addition to both games being third person soulslike action RPGs, their settings are coincidentally very similar as well. Steelrising takes place in alternate Paris during the French Revolution, and like in Lies of P later, automats roams the streets, killing everyone.

Are we human or are we dancer?

Your character is Aegis, an automat King Louis XVI has assigned as a bodyguard for Queen Marie Antoinette. Aegis is an exceptional automat for her lithe and lethal design as well as for being capable of thought and speech. The Queen tasks Aegis to find her children and find out what's going on with the King.

Along the way you encounter various real-life historical people desiring to overthrow the tyrant. The experience was almost like revisiting a city I had been to because Assassin's Creed Unity is set in the same place and time period. Steelrising doesn't have Paris as faithfully and meticulously recreated but the Bastille and the shores of the Seine did give off quite the sense of familiarity.

Like in AC Unity, characters have British voice actors. They keep using various French phrases in the mix and the names of people and places are pronounced in French -- except for Paris which is pronounced every time as in English /ˈpɛɹ.ɪs/ instead of French /paʁi/. That kept throwing me off. Anthony Howell was again easily recognized among the voices.

The narrative being so inspired by -- and the characters so based on -- the French Revolution took away from the experience. I don't find the setting particularly interesting. And I think that lack of personal agency, like there being no humanity level in style of Lies of P, made the journey passive. However, Aegis having a voice made dialogue far more natural: no awkward monologues from the NPCs.

Steelrising has three different endings: who will be chosen to guide France forward after the King's been disposed. This is determined by how you complete certain side quests. Aegis's story ends the same way every time, though. One of the baddies also gets away -- a sequel hook perhaps?

Now with raytracing

I was surprised by the game's system requirements. Spiders had added more bells and whistles to their engine since GreedFall because that one hadn't been as taxing to run. The minimum requirements are pretty much what you need to be able to run Steelrising at 60 fps in 1080p on its lowest settings. The game also crashed occasionally and I ended up trying something I probably should have done a long time ago: I disabled the Gamebar and Nvidia overlays -- no need for either when playing games on Steam. The game did crash once at some point afterwards but disabling the superfluous overlays definitely helped with stability.

The game was far from eye candy with everything on Low but frames over visuals every time, especially in an action game. Considering Lies of P and Unreal Engine 4, though, I think a game like this shouldn't need to have this high hardware requirements. Also: I wish Aegis's face had eyebrows; human(-like) face is so off-putting without them. You can pick her appearance from few different options and I chose the one that had her makeup reach the closest to the brow level.

Functional but not the smoothest gameplay

Whatever your framerate, Steelrising can feel jerky to play. I don't know how much of it is intended: did the developers want Aegis to move like a machine that has inorganic movement? I don't remember GreedFall having the same problem. But even Aegis's running animation seems slightly off. It bothered me less as the game went on, though.

I didn't feel like re-learning nor rebinding RB to light attack, RT to heavy attack controller scheme again, especially coming right from playing Batora: Lost Haven which has mostly face-button ability controls, so I played with mouse and keyboard. The game played just fine but a couple of default keybindings were mindboggling. Why on earth would you have dodge on RMB and heavy attack on Ctrl? It's amazing how often you still see these non-standard contrivances.

Your default method of avoiding damage is dodging but your weapon of choice may give you attacks-blocking Shield or a parry that executes a Counterattack. I started as the Dancer starter class who comes with shielding fans. I switched to the first claws I found for Counterattack and eventually ended up on the Foil-and-Dagger.

The Falchion-and-Sabre don't have a defensive special ability rather than a spin-to-win Blade Tornado that can be devastating. The Bishop of Cité was a ridiculously easy boss because one parry from the Foil-and-Dagger would knock it down long enough for me to switch to the Falchion-and-Sabre and get a full Blade Tornado off to eat the boss's health bar.

Not the toughest soulslike either

None of the game's bosses are difficult, though, and I suppose the overall the difficulty, too, is pretty low due to the rather passive enemies. The Cagliostro's Secrets DLC does have one truly aggressive enemy type that made for difficult encounters, especially when grouped with others.

I even made Steelrising more challenging by right away going for the 'Completionist' achievement that requires beating the game without ever using the Oil Burette which is the game's healing flask. You're not completely denied off healing because there is a consumable that restores health over 20s (not great for panic healing) as well as a module that heals you on parry. Another module would heal from critical attacks but most enemies are destroyed before you get to immobilize them for that.

Runbacks to dropped souls (anima) and bosses are generally easier than in most games of the genre. Enemies can't keep up with your sprint and most don't chase you very far either. There's also an exploit that hasn't been fixed: by constantly switching between your equipped weapons, sprinting doesn't consume stamina. You can dash through a whole map without ever slowing down.

Defeating the bosses of the first three areas (after the tutorial) give Aegis new tools to use in combat to deal damage and to inflict a different status effect build-up. Two of the tools also allow accessing previously blocked off areas by kicking down weak walls/grates or grappling up to preset points. You'll come back to visit most of these areas when doing side quests but not all. So if you want to see every square inch of the maps, you might want to write down their locations when passing by without the tools to find back to them quicker.

The tools and every offensive weapon special needs alchemical capsules to work in combat. They can be bought at vestals (bonfires) but are also found quite plentiful on destroyed enemies, even more so if you've spent points on the Engineering attribute. The game's six attributes are again arranged in the familiar Spiders' hexagon shape but unlike in the previous two Spiders titles, the sell tab at vestals correctly says 'sell' instead of 'sale'.

Another staple of Spiders games are the too numerous, repetitive fights and unfortunately they are in Steelrising, too. Although, with running past being so easy, you don't really have to actually engage with it if you don't want to. I sprinted all the way through the Versailles to the final boss as quickly as possible to get the Completionist and Incorruptible achievements out of the way before reloading a backup save from before the point of no return. But this is definitely not Lies of P that has so many different bosses adding variety to the journey.

Spiders are currently working on GreedFall II: The Dying World which appears to be a prequel despite the numeral -- how silly. The game's been in early access for a year and I don't think it's going very well. They switched combat to top-down realtime with pause from the third person action (with pause) the first game was. I have a feeling Spiders might be in trouble if the project is not a success: they haven't been independent since just before the release of the first Greedfall when Nacon (then Bigben Interactive) acquired them.