Steelrising – the Dark Souls for beginners

I have been quite enjoying Steelrising lately. It’s an action game set in Louis 14th France filled with destruction, dead bodies and robots.

I would call the game souls-like and it most certainly is. The reason why I didn’t use the term in the description is that it usually creates the wrong perception in people’s head.

Either:

1. The game is hard and I need to defeat it, because I am epic Gamer
   or
2. Oh no, that’s like Dark Souls, and that’s too hard for me

Neither of those cases, would quite track to the reality of Steelrising. The game certainly has many Souls-Like elements: There are checkpoints, and if you die you will return to last one and all the enemies will revive. There are also “souls” you collect and upgrade yourself with and… you guessed it right- you lose them when you die.

All those game elements are very souls-like. Nevertheless, it seems to me, people talking about Souls-likes usually refer to specifically difficulty. Which is a bit of pity, because souls-likes have a lot more to offer than just high difficulty.

Usually these games are quite pretty, even original Dark Souls still looks very pretty in my opinion. Steelrising definitely doesn’t lag behind here. The game is beautiful.

Paris is a lovely location, well, if you don’t mind the guillotines and all the dead bodies…

Art direction is definitely where Steelrising shines. It manages to combine a lot of Souls-like dark fantasy with Paris architecture and style.

difficulty

Let’s get back to the combat and difficulty of the game.

Steelrising is not easy. Not by any stretch of imagination. It doesn’t include any difficulty setting and it will take you some time to understand mechanics well enough to leave any fight alive. The combat is a lot more fluid and more forgiving than FromSoftware games, but it’s far from easy.

One huge difference between Dark Souls and Steelrising is the assist mode. Sometimes these modes are called Easy mode, but here it’s an assist mode and I am very happy it is included.

I find myself more than capable of beating the game without it, but that’s not quite the experience I want to have. I want to play the game and enjoy it with just the right amount of challenge.

Assist mode lets you adjust how fast your stamina regenerates, damage multipliers and much more. There is quite a few options to modify your experience and I think that’s just the best way to look at it. You have a chance to tweak how you want your playthrough to feel like.

Having this mode lets me as a player decide how I want to enjoy the game. I personally don’t care much for endless grinding and repeating same boss fight over and over. But I still like the challenge and don’t want to sleep-walk through the fights. I also don’t like repeating encounters. It’s just not what I enjoy.

Easy mode for Dark Souls?

Should Dark Souls have an easy mode? Is it too difficult?

I think that’s a surprisingly complicated question. It seems like there is a lot of people who enjoy Dark Souls specifically because it’s so difficult and adding easy mode would ruin it.

Since there isn’t an easy mode, finishing Dark Souls is sort of a badge of honor for being an epic Gamer. I don’t mean to make too much fun out of it, if grinding and high difficulty is how some people want to enjoy their games, then all the power to them. In the end we play games for the experience we want to have.

I do think there is an argument for adding easy mode, exactly because it would let more people enjoy the game. I don’t think it would ruin the pride of someone finishing it without an easy mode.

Steelrising did it quite nicely. When you are enabling assist mode, it notifies you, that you won’t be able to get some achievements. It doesn’t make fun of you, just lets you know that’s the case. I find that very fair.

In the end I won’t sweat it too much if Dark Souls never gets an easy mode. I think, it’s nice that we have this diversity. There are Souls-Likes with easy mode like Steelrising and Souls-Likes without it. That also seems fair to me.

Games like Steelrising can also serve as a good intro into Souls-Likes. I am very much enjoying it with the assist mode and have the game tuned just to my liking.

You can get Steelrising here