Stray Blade Review – An Unepic Journey

For better or worse, the formula of FromSoftware’s Souls series has become so popular that it seems like every big or small development studio is trying to incorporate some of the franchise’s key elements, such as challenging combat and environmental storytelling, in their games. While it is undeniable that these elements make for compelling experiences, their proper implementation is tricky, and only a few developers managed to create games that could rival the quality of FromSoftware’s games.

With its bright and colorful setting, Point Blank’s Stray Blade already set itself apart from the grim and dark competition and definitely had the potential to stand out from similar games thanks to much better accessibility and some unique combat mechanics, but unfortunately, their execution falls flat, resulting in a game that is way too often more frustrating than fun to play.

Unlike other games inspired by the Souls series, Stray Blade features a well-defined character called Farren. At an early age, they got a job as a translator on a trade ship, and since then, they became interested in learning more about the people of the world, so much they eventually became an anthropologist. Their studies of different cultures made them realize that three of them have claims on the valley of Acrea, which is where Farron eventually makes their way.

Acrea, however, isn’t just any regular old valley that was contended by different groups for years. It is a magical valley where all those who set foot in it become immortal, at the cost of their freedom, as no one, once inside, is able to leave it. With no choice but to go forward, Farron starts exploring the valley, meeting the elementally enhanced half-wolf, half-Xhinnon being Boji, not knowing how the mystery behind Acrea is much deeper than they might have expected.

While action RPGs inspired by the Souls series are hardly focused on story and character development, Stray Blade offers a breath of fresh air in this regard. What is usually a lonely, silent journey through mysterious locations becomes something different in this game, as both Farren and Boji are extremely talkative, constantly providing new information not only on themselves but on the world they live in, the different people that populate it and the history of Acrea. At the end of the day, it is not anything particularly inspired, but it is undeniable that the development team put quite a bit of care into creating the setting and the lore, which is ultimately enjoyable if expectations are kept in check.

The Stray Blade setting and characters, however, are not enough to carry the whole experience. While some of the game’s features do sound interesting on paper, their execution ranges from flat to outright bad, resulting in an experience that is often not all that enjoyable.

Despite being labeled as an action role-playing game, the Stray Blade experience is more focused on action and combat rather than role-playing. Taking the stamina-based combat seen in the Souls series as the basis, the game builds upon it with some unique mechanics, such as perfect parries and perfect dodges mechanics. All enemies in the game are capable of unleashing different types of attacks that must either be parried or dodged, signaled by blue and red flashes respectively. If a perfect parry is performed, the enemy will receive massive Poise damage, making it easy for Farron to deplete it completely and execute surprisingly gruesome execution attacks. On the other hand, if a perfect dodge is performed, Farron’s energy will be restored, allowing them to go on the offensive using their equipped weapon’s light, heavy or special attacks.

On paper, this creates a unique blend between the typical Soulslike combat and the parry systems seen in games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and even Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin that should keep players always on their toes, but the execution of this blend is middling. For starters, while all attacks are signaled with the aforementioned colored flashes, their timing is all over the place, making perfect parries and dodges difficult to pull off if the player hasn’t perfectly memorized the enemies’ movesets. Even then, given how enemies rarely get staggered by Farron’s attacks, defending properly all the time is difficult. It definitely feels like the developers wanted to go for a system where players go from offense to defense on the fly, but for something like this, consistent timing between the attack indicators and the attacks themselves actually connecting with the player is even more of a requirement. Due to these issues, the decent enemy variety is actually a problem, as it just makes these gameplay mechanics feel more incosistent.

Alongside these issues, there are a few more that make combat in Stray Blade more frustrating than it should have been. Stamina consumption for pretty much every combat action is way too high, resulting in getting it depleted way too often, even after upgrading the total amount. The clunkiness of Farron’s movement and attacks, the general lack of weight, and the enemy’s tendency to gang up on the player make matters even worse. All these issues somewhat render null some of the game’s most unique aspects, such as the mechanics that make the world adapt to Farron’s success in combat.

It is a shame that combat in Stray Blade is so unpolished, as the game does come with some interesting features that could have made it more dynamic and exciting. Farron’s companion Boji isn’t good at just talking but also learns some combat abilities that are extremely useful, such as a blast that depletes enemy Poise, which can be unleashed once a special gauge is filled up by fighting enemies. The game’s weapon system is also tied to the character progression system in an interesting way, as nodes on the fairly straightforward skill tree are unlocked only once perfect mastery has been reached with any given weapon. While some players may see this as an annoyance more than a decent feature, as it essentially forces Farron to use all weapons to reach his full potential, I think this is a good way to make players experiment with different weapons and reward them in some way. Bosi also comes with his own skill tree, which requires players to obtain lore points from exploration, unlike Farron’s, whose skill points are obtained by simply leveling up.

Exploration is another sore point for Stray Blade, possibly even more than the clunky combat, due to the bad level design. While they honestly don’t look too bad, thanks to their colorful aesthetics which are reminiscent of games from the early 2000s, locations are designed in a terribly confusing way. It’s almost as if the developers wanted to get as many alternate paths, crevices, caves, and enemy camps as possible, which only makes them hard to navigate without constantly using the compass and the map. And sometimes, even they complicate things, as maps must first be fully revealed by exploring the map and finding specific items, and the compass only indicates the general direction of the main quest objective. All these alternate paths aren’t even justified by decent rewards, as what players will find, most of the time, are items used to craft armor and weapons.

Even crafting in Stray Blade feels terribly clunky, which is very surprising, considering how getting new weapons is so important to expand Farron’s combat capabilities. Creating new gear can only be done by smithies once blueprints and all the needed materials have been obtained, but having to take out all enemies in their vicinities is not what makes the process clunky. What is the fact that after crafting any item and watching a small cutscene, players are not sent back straight to the crafting menu but back on the field. It is a small thing, to be sure, but it’s still a weird oversight. The game has a few more of these weird design decisions, such as respawning, which forces players to watch a short, unskippable cutscene of Boji bringing back Farren to the bonfire-styled checkpoints of the game.

All in all, the clunkiness of the experience suggests how Stray Blade needed more time in the oven, and the clear optimization issues are just another sign that the game needed more work. While the cartoonish visuals don’t look too bad, giving the game, as already mentioned, an early 2000s feel, character models, locations, and lighting systems are far from looking demanding. This makes how the game ran on my system (i7-10700 CPU, RTX 3070 GPU, 16GB RAM) really baffling, as I was unable to get stable 60 FPS performance at 4K resolution even with AMD FSR on and some tweaking of the settings. Things did fare better at 1440p resolution with a smoother 100 FPS average at max settings, but still, a game like Stray Blade shouldn’t have trouble running at 4K resolution on a system like mine, even without DLSS or FSR. The high system requirements hinted at something weird going on with the optimization, and unfortunately, that is indeed the case.

With the current flood of action role-playing games inspired by the Souls series, Stray Blade wasn’t setting out to light the world on fire, but the game did have the potential to be much better than it turned out to be. While the experience isn’t entirely unplayable when everything clicks together, the clunky execution of most of its gameplay mechanics makes it difficult to recommend the game to anyone but those who live and breathe ARPGs and need to play each and every one of them.

PC version tested. Review code provided by the publisher.

Stray Blade

With its colorful fantasy setting, and decent lore, characters, and story, Stray Blade could have been an enjoyable action role-playing game, but having plenty of heart is not enough to make a game one that is universally worthy of playing. The clunkiness of combat, the bad level design, and the general lack of polish make the journey to the Valley of Acrea a frustrating one that only die-hard action role-playing game fans will have the stomach to complete.