I’m a games journalist, so it stands to reason I would hate Stellar Blade. This seems to be the latest ideological battle that has been cooked up from nowhere, much like the bitterness with which Days Gone and Ghost of Tsushima are discussed. But I have enjoyed the demo and am looking forward to the full game, and have had my eye on it since it was called Project Eve. However, the way things are going, you guys are just making it embarrassing to like Stellar Blade.

I’ve written about protagonist Eve a couple of times in the past few weeks. Firstly, before she cut such a decisive figure, to say that it’s cool to see a video game character like Eve in the world. Then again, to ask the rest of you to calm down and to stop making it weird. Yes, Eve is hot. No, I don’t have a problem with it. What I do have a problem with is everyone talking about it incessantly, as if not only was Eve’s hotness the game’s sole selling point, but as if celebrating this hotness is a staunch act of political defiance, rather than simply liking hot women.

Stellar Blade’s Eve Doesn’t Care How Hot She Is

We have hot women on our screens all the time. I know you have that too-close picture of a sunburnt Aloy or Mary-Jane smiling ready to go to counter this, but those same games feature Talanah and Black Cat. The argument here is that Eve is sexier rather than just hot, with her skin-tight clothes and jiggle physics, but I’m actually not so sure Eve is that sexy, because she’s way too docile.

Back before Stellar Blade was in the conversation, I wrote about how gaming needed to embrace raunchiness again, and did it without resorting to culture war mud-slinging too. My examples at the time were Juliet Starling from Lollipop Chainsaw and Bayonetta from, well, you figure it out.

Both of these characters are playful with the sex appeal of their designs, and understand what they are wearing. Eve just stands there. The pose she makes when sliding down the ladders is the only recognition that she is a hot girl doing hot girl things, and the rest of the time her behaviour is no different than if she were wearing jeans and a t-shirt, military fatigues, or a potato sack.

Eve is too much of a wallflower for me to care. I understand the base human reactions to an objectively attractive character wearing revealing clothes, but again, we aren’t short of hot people. Despite what some argue, games are still full of them. Movies are full of them. Our headphones are full of them singing about sex. They live in our phones and dance for our amusement. We have easy access to explicit materials as a society. A character staring into the void without a thought in her head is no more compelling just because she has a large butt.

Why Aren’t We Talking About Stellar Blade’s Gameplay?

Of course, we could be talking about things besides how Eve looks. This, ultimately, is how the game will be judged and reviewed by critics, as well as how the wider public will engage with it. Hotness isn’t everything, that’s why Denise Richards doesn’t have an Oscar.

She deserved one for Wild Things.

Stellar Blade’s gameplay is fast and frenetic, and here she has far more agency than in her outfit selection. The hyper stylised combat should be the real talking point - it’s cool and unique (it has always had the air of an Xbox 360 cult hit) and the scale of the battles even in the demo suggests colossal epics await in the full game. But you can see her butt, so who cares?

There is a danger games like these can get repetitive, and it feels as though the game is going to keep you going by constantly upping the ante of its encounters than in changing Eve - the feisty kick-based combat doesn’t lend itself to an arsenal of unlockable weapons, after all. That can work, especially if the battles continue to grow in scale, but it does add more pressure than simply upgrading Eve each time with tacked-on RPG elements. Then again, in not taking the easy way out maybe Shift Up have managed to create something far more interesting.

These are the sorts of things we should be talking about. We’ve known Eve has been hot for a while now, and it doesn’t bode well that this is still all we can talk about. When the game launches at the end of this month, it will take more than jiggle physics and an entirely imaginary one in the eye for games journalists to make Stellar Blade a success.

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Stellar Blade

Action RPG Systems 3.5/5 9.4/10 OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 82/100 Critics Rec: 82% Released April 26, 2024 ESRB M for Mature Developer(s) Shift Up Publisher(s) Sony Interactive Entertainment Engine Unreal Engine 4
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PHYSICAL

Stellar Blade is an action-driven game from Shift Up, originally revealed as Project Eve. It follows the aforementioned Eve as she battles the alien Naytiba invaders, in a bid to reclaim the Earth for humanity.

Platform(s) PS5 Powered by Expand Collapse