Steel Seed Review (jacob_art)
Don't sleep on this game if you're a fan of stealth. Take it from guy who invested 20h into this game. I put it on my radar on it ever since the demo came out and wishlisted it immediately after completing it. I hardly ever buy games at release and I did for this one. That's how much I anticipated it so that should tell you something.
On with the game, the atmosphere really caught my eye since the beginning. As a sci-fi fan the setting is the game strongest suit. Even though it's a post-apocaliptic story the Earth has healed after humanity had destroyed its ability to sustain life. With us gone machines have taken over and built industrial utopias imposible to make by human hands. One man has stored his conscience in 4 shards you must collect to bring him back and with him, the knowledge to restore humanity.
That's where our protagonists comes in, a construct of machine and human conscience safeguarded to take on the task and well... unfortunately she's not great I gotta admit. She's a serviceable character at best and annoying at worst. She basically is given no depth as her memories of her once human life have been erased and her conversations are mostly with her hovering robot companion which emits beeps everytime she speaks so yeah, the only intelligent dialogues comes from her talks with Savi, the AI in charge of setting things in motion.
Now the game can be devided in 3 gameplay sections:, stealth, combat and platforming. I'd say it's about a 80/20 split you'll be spending most of the time out of sight of enemies. I always take my time in these sections methodically taking out every single enemy on the map one by one. If this is something you enjoy doing you'll be well served here. When s**t hits the fan you must resort to combat, although much improved since launch I'd still advise to flee the scene if the odds of the ensuing fight are heavily against you. Hits now carry more impact both in audio feedback and actual damage dealt so you can hold your own and come out both satisfied and victorious from the few fight set pieces the game forces you into. There are upgrades you can buy but outside of a few gadgets for your drone I'd say most you can do without unless you want to completely trivialize every encounter but that's just the way I like to play, the whole point of upgrading is to make games easier in the first place just bear in mind they're not really essential for a successful playthough.
Now what the game does poorly in terms of the platforming are the chase sequences. They're bad and there's no sugarcoating it. You'll jump and not grab on to whatever you're supposed to hold on to, jump out of time, not see the platform you need to fall onto, hover for too long and ultimately fall to your death, etc. They're eye candy, sure, but I ended up dreading every time my character started to slide and s**t started blowing up around me. Luckily, the devs are still polishing the game's rough edges and there's hope that this can be improved down the line just like combat has been.
All in all is a great adventure, wonderful scenarios, great stealth sections, serviceable platforming, much improved combat and some surprising story twists in the endgame . I decided to write this, my first review, thoroughly trying to make justice to it since, sadly, the most negative "helpful" reviews here can only be considered first impressions and most positive ones are 1 or 2 lines long. I believe the story while not original does develop into its potential by the end and it hits the mark even in a few emotional instances despite the flatness of its main character and brings everything together to a satisfying conclusion. This is a compelling package that deserves the time of all gamers wishing to pick apart enemies unnoticed.