REVIEW / Steel Seed (PS5)

The stealth action-adventure genre has been a staple of gaming for quite some time now ever since Hideo Kojima pretty much invented it in the early 1990s with the Metal Gear Solid series. Having the ability to jump into the role of the protagonist and use your wits and stealth abilities to find your way through the levels has a way of capturing the imagination of gamers in a way that most games fail to accomplish. If you are longing for a good sneak behind enemy lines then Steel Seed from developers Storm in a Teacup and publisher ESDigital Games is the adventure that you may be looking for. Battling bloodthirsty robots and navigating some pretty imaginative and beautiful looking environments will immerse you into an experience that feels like old times.

I should admit right off the bat that this game is no MGS. Just so we are clear. However, this is the closest experience to that title that we have seen in gaming for a while outside of Konami’s flagship series releases. Jumping into the role of the protagonist, Zoe, you must navigate an Earth that has been ravaged by a catastrophic event. The machines that once assisted mankind in every endeavor have turned against them in an effort to reclaim the planet and heal the damage. Together with your trusty drone sidekick KOBY, you must investigate the depths of an extremely hostile underground facility in search of answers and the key to the survival of mankind.

Gameplay in Steel Seed is of the stealth-action variety and it reminded me a lot of the MGS: VR Missions from back in the day. Levels are made up of a series of large open areas in the underground facility that you need to cross to make it to the exit and advance the story. To progress in the game, you simply are tasked with sneaking your way past and increasingly larger number of enemy combatants that patrol the areas and will stand in your way in an attempt to put and end to you. You can sneak past them entirely or you can sneak up behind them and take them out with a single attack. Going up against them face-to-face isn’t a good idea as they are extremely difficult to dispatch of with the weapon that you have in your possession.

There is a skill tree system in this game that allows you to upgrade your abilities, combat attacks and your weapons. To supplement your repertoire of combat abilities, Koby is able to attack enemies with laser blasts from a distance. This laser can also be used to manipulate objects in the environment like opening doorways or activating machinery. The upgrades are usually very visually stunning but they don’t seem to really give you an upper hand when fighting the enemy robots as they only have to hit you once or twice to defeat you. The game seems to want force you to use the “sneak up from behind and stab the enemy” mechanic to be the main method of attack. In light of this discovery, what’s the point of having the upgrades if they don’t really affect anything anyway?

While there is a good foundation in this game, it feels like there were some good opportunities to really “flesh out” this game that the developers, in my honest opinion, managed to miss. The few enemies that you go up against aren’t varied enough to make the game feel like you are traveling down into a labyrinth that was designed by a super A.I. As you make your way through the different areas, the enemies should advance in size, ability and threat level, and sadly, this is not the case. As it stands, you only face about three different enemy types who, for whatever reason, have no idea that you are there if you simply walk up behind them while they are standing still. They are extremely deadly if they spot you, however, so if you can just avoid them altogether, there’s no real impetus to try to take them out.

One of the other things that I realized at about the 12 hour mark while playing in preparation for this review, was that I hadn’t encountered any mini-bosses, or any bosses for that matter, this far into the game. So I started thinking to myself if I had just missed them or confused them for just the normal enemies. If that’s the case, then they need to redesign the bosses so that they stand out more. That whole time, up to that point, was spent traversing several open areas that were swarming with increasing numbers of enemies that I had to figure out the best path to steal up behind them and stab them as I make my way to the exit point. Rinse and repeat. Not the best game-loop if you ask me but some may find the puzzle aspect of that game mechanic satisfying enough and not need a more robust selection of ways to interact with the game.

Somewhat of a loot system lives in this game that allows you to collect currency that then allows you to turn around and spend that on upgrades to your attacks, combat abilities and weapons. There’s not a lot of loot pickups in the environments so you have to make sure that you are scouring everywhere to ensure that you don’t miss anything. That’s bout it. You don’t find anything else. There are consoles that you will find that contain bits of data that helps to flesh out the in-game narration by giving you information on the world itself as well as the different machines and contraptions that you will find on your journey.

Initially, I was really having a good time with this game, however, as my time drew on during my play-through, I started to get the feeling that something was missing. I immediately thought back to why I pretty quickly fell off of the MGS: VR Missions: it just wasn’t fun to sneak around in a game where there were no real consequences. That’s what it felt like to play Steel Seed. The story is fairly decent, the environments and the design of Zoe and Koby are fantastic but there is a lot to be desired in the gameplay and the visual design of the enemy robots and how they interact with you and the environments. There is currently a free demo on Steam so you can give it a try and decide for yourself if it warrants adding it to your library, but if you decide to pull the trigger and make the purchase, it might be a good idea to wait for a sale.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.