PS5 hack ‘n’ slash Stellar Blade is a return to big dumb fun action games

Arriving onto PlayStation 5 with a coquettish swish of her hair - and a rather less coquettish swish of her eponymous melee weapon - Stellar Blade protagonist Eve stars in an action game that reminds us how brash, trance-inducing and uncomplicated old-school action games used to be.

Currently sitting at an encouraging 82 on Metacritic, Stellar Blade blends familiar Soulslike mechanics like stocking up on your resources at campfires and parrying attacks with a single-minded approach to chucking enemies at you that harks back to PlatinumGames classics of the PS2 era. Close your eyes, and you can almost smell the Lynx Atlantis and hear the clinking of wallet chains.

Well, you might be able to if the raucous soundtrack wasn’t rousing you into a vaguely spiritual trance-like state. There is a story here, ostensibly - you’re a rookie cybernetically enhanced super-soldier zooming down from Earth’s orbit to lay waste to an invading alien race called the Naytiba who’ve razed human civilisation down there - but moment to moment, hack to slash, the story in your head is this: keep mashing the attack button.

That’s no bad thing, either. Even though we dropped the S-word earlier, there’s nothing like the FromSoftware difficulty level to wrestle with in Stellar Blade. Instead, the focus is on throwing you spectacular combat sequences like alley-oop passes, and giving you a steadily expanding arsenal of attacks with which to slam dunk them. It’s a game that, above all else, wants to make you look and feel cool.

It’s a bit of a revelation when you notice this and realise it’s become a bit of a rarity. The likes of Bayonetta and Devil May Cry mastered the art of endless balletic combat moves, but latter day action gaming tends to draw you into fiddlier territory. Managing scarce resources. Preserving an extremely brittle health bar. Watching your protagonist cry about something in a cutscene.

There is some depth here as you progress, you understand. Choosing new perks for Eve gives you a growing range of approaches, from stealthy to ‘what if everything was just constantly exploding?’ Similarly, the various forms of those dastardly Naytiba possess specific strengths and vulnerabilities that get you to pause for just a beat before deciding the most efficient way to turn them into a visceral fireworks display.

Our early experiences on release day have made us hungry for more old-fashioned, flow-state hacking and, indeed, slashing. And that hunger might even help us overlook the sense that the animations might be working harder than our basic inputs are to produce spectacular combat sequences. Or Eve’s less-than progressive appearance, jiggling around like a modern-day Lara Croft, knee-deep in alien guts.

Stellar Blade’s out now on PS5 only. There’s no officially announced release on other platforms as yet.