Carving through foes at a breakneck pace while perfecting your parries and mastering your combos, Stellar Blade is an action game through and through. However, while you’ll often bring the pain to smaller enemies to flex Eve’s strength, developer Shift Up has revealed that the PS5 exclusive will have around 20 bosses to really put your skills to the test.
Revealed in an interview with French content creator Julien Chièze, Shift Up explains that these Stellar Blade bosses will range from humble human-sized opponents to towering beasts. Given the Stellar Blade length clocks in at around 30-50 hours according to the developer, it seems like battling bosses will be a regular event.
While Stellar Blade isn’t a Souls-like game in the traditional sense, it does take inspiration from this tried and true genre, such as the focus on parries. It adds this to the pot of hack ‘n’ slash Bayonetta-style action for unique and undeniably flashy combat. Nevertheless, be prepared to die a handful of times before learning each boss’s unique rhythm and how best to weave in your combos. This PS5 exclusive could become one of the best RPG games if it all pays off.
Shift Up also confirms there are multiple difficulty levels that can be changed on the fly, meaning you can turn the challenge down if a boss is giving you too much trouble.
Taking a look at the gameplay trailers released so far, we’ve already got a glimpse of what to expect from Stellar Blade’s bosses. From horrifying monsters covered in tentacles and rampaging robots to rogue swordsmen, there’s evidently a great deal of variety to be found. Succeed in taking them down and you’ll be rewarded with a slick and gruesome finishing move to make your triumph that much more satisfying.
With a solid lineup of bosses waiting for you, learning new combos, unlocking skills, and adventuring with companions you meet on your journey will no doubt be necessary to make it through in one piece. And remember, there’s also a fishing minigame so you can always kick back and relax when the going gets tough.
Pair this promising news with the 30 outfits “all acquirable through gameplay”, and Stellar Blade is on course to be a rewarding new PS5 game – as long as it has the depth to back it up. Nevertheless, with its ambitious narrative-driven open-world and gorgeous graphics, it’s remarkable just how small the Stellar Blade file size is expected to be on PS5 – especially with around 20 unique bosses joining the fray.