Steelrising is an upcoming action-RPG from Greedfall developer Spiders, with a release date of September 8th for Xbox Series X|S, PS5, and PC. At Nacon’s Bigben Week event, Kes got a sneak peek at the upcoming game…We recently got to see Spiders’ Steelrising at Nacon’s Bigben Week event in Paris. With Greedfall, the team had a breakout success. From our first look at Steelrising in motion, it looks like Spiders has a denser and more concentrated experience designed to test players — one that was without a doubt the highlight of the show. Greedfall fans rise up — Spiders looks set to keep deliveringSteelrising is an action-RPG set in 1789 — the height of the French revolution. King Louis XVI has gone off the rails and unleashed his automaton army on the revolution in the hopes of quelling the whole anti-monarchy thing. Instead, the blood congeals on the streets as it gets out of control, leaving Marie Antoinette’s badass advanced mechanical bodyguard Aegis to help clean up the horrors unfolding in Paris. As soon as I sat down, it was clear that the game is a touch more linear than Greedfall, but also more vertical. Instead of going big, it is going dense. Aegis whips out a grappling hook and zips up to the second floor of a grubby-looking building, finding a little loot inside. Our main character then starts chaining balconies together, avoiding enemies in the street below. There is a mix of the very real Paris here, deconstructed to have the veneer of the late 18th century, along with something more dystopic and clockwork. With the white, doll-like Aegis always in the centre of your screen, you are always drawn to her eerie (in a good way), stiff, metal-restricted movements, too. While it is hard to talk about performance and fidelity at this early stage, there is no doubt that the art direction is strong here. Aegis then gets involved in combat with some of Louis’ automatons. These creatures are really cool and seemed to have plenty of variety in the demo. The hulking beasts — as I was warned constantly — present a tough fight at nearly every turn. That means you will have to master the combat, which has a pleasant mix of close-quarters, mid-range, and long-distance attacks spread over a variety of weaponry. Fans can emerge from Aegis’ arms, and various trinkets seemed to pop out of her shin bones at one point. It’s flashy, but also seems to require precision and thought. You will need to think about combining elemental combos, as well. Ice and fire were shown off in an area outside of a crumbling Louvre garden. Pinging open a customisation screen reveals a very traditional weapon select screen, which shows that there will be plenty of room for variety across two weapon slots and with each having unique modification buffs. This comes in handy during a later boss fight. This huge beast of a robot looks like a horrifying mix between the aesthetics of a ballerina and the weaponry of a Gundam; there is no grace here as it starts wreaking havoc on you in a small boss arena. This was my first realisation that Spiders is targeting the more Dark Souls-esque approach (I’m sorry, I know it’s overused) to combat situations, relying more heavily on unique, hard fights than repeated and excessive encounters with the same enemies. The guys overseeing the session told me that Spiders expects players to die in these sections. It should be testing and tricky, requiring a few passes to learn how these odd, freaky mechanical beings attack you and alternate between move sets. There seem to be three particular stages in this fight tied to health, though it flew by so quickly I can’t rightly inform you what they were. Anyhow, know that it did look superb, and I’m really excited to get involved in the final game. The developers, rather interestingly, drew attention to the fact that dying is a useful gauge for you as a player to start messing around with difficulty sliders in the menu. There is a huge variety of them here: from damage output to stamina recharge time, it all seems to be customisable. Big news for achievement hunters here, too. If you mess with the sliders, it will invalidate any difficult-related trophy. Now, my impression of this was not that it invalidated your runs on any set difficulty, but requirements that require hard graft. The pair of developers said, for example, there is currently an achievement for completing the game without ever taking any hits — I had the same pullback-from-screen reaction — which would be affected by a change to your incoming damage slider, for example. We could be looking at a new addition to our hardest Xbox achievements list… After crunching the boss to death, the developers showed off the stunning in-game map of Paris to me. It’s a thing of beauty, looking all hand-drawn fantasy city with big labels for areas you can return to with talkative characters. It’s a really neat and clean detail — one that I think might perfectly summarise much of what I took away from my demo: this is a delicously odd world brimming with detail. For example, to upgrade Aegis, you can find little mechanical chairs that spin out of the floor. It’s beautiful animation, one that reminds me of those bewitching mechanisms of those odd gizmos you used to see in the toy shops of big European cities. Finally, the team confirmed the team is on target for the September 8th release and that the aim is for the story to be 15 hours, with a full run-through with side-quests and collectables in the 30-hour ballpark. Again, it is stressed that this is about quality, not quantity. And indeed, of everything that I saw at the Nacon event, Steelrising whirred with quality with each mechanised part on display. I think Spiders might be about to step it up again…Spiders also announced Greedfall 2 at this event, and showed off a bunch of peripherals — Tom even has his impressions up of one of them! We will have an interview with the CEO and lead writer Jehanne Rousseau later this week, too!
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