Steelrising - Bastille Edition

Steelrising drops you into an alternate 1789 Paris where Louis XVI has unleashed an army of mechanical soldiers to crush the Revolution, and you are Aegis, an automaton bodyguard sent by Marie Antoinette to stop the carnage. That premise alone is doing a lot of heavy lifting, and for a good stretch of the opening hours, it delivers. The city is gorgeous in a macabre clockwork way, the lore tablets scattered across crumbling boulevards reward patient readers, and the class system, which lets you build Aegis as a Soldier, Dancer, Alchemist or Bodyguard, gives you genuine reason to experiment with different weapon types and elemental affinities across playthroughs. The combat is firmly in Souls-adjacent territory: stamina management, dodge timing, posture breaks, and a freeze mechanic that rewards landing elemental buildup for critical-hit windows. It is smoother and more forgiving than FromSoftware's work, which is either a relief or a disappointment depending on your tolerance for punishment. Boss fights are the highlight. Several of them are genuinely inventive mechanical creatures with multi-phase patterns that demand you actually understand your build. The Bastille Edition bundles the Cagliostro's Secrets DLC, which adds a new area, supporting characters, and a fresh boss, giving completionists a meaningful chunk of extra content beyond the main campaign. Here is where I have to be honest with you, though. The writing does not match the ambition of the setting. Historical figures like Robespierre and Lafayette show up, but their characterizations stay surface-level, and Aegis herself is a largely silent vessel when she could have been a fascinating unreliable narrator. The worldbuilding earns genuine points; the narrative payoff for caring about that worldbuilding is thinner than it should be. Side quests trend toward fetch-and-clear rather than anything that reveals character or complicates the politics. For an RPG wearing a tricorn hat and claiming to care about the French Revolution, that is a missed opportunity that stings. Performance on PC is acceptable but not exceptional. Loading times are long enough to break immersion after deaths, and the mid-tier production values are obvious next to genre giants. Build variety is solid through the first two-thirds of the game, then begins to narrow as you approach the endgame and optimal strategies become clear. If you are someone who replays action-RPGs for min-maxing and alternative story branches, you will likely hit a ceiling around hour 30 that a FromSoftware game would not impose until hour 60 or beyond. For fans of Spiders' previous work (The Technomancer, Greedfall) this is their most polished game yet, and that counts for something. The gap between concept and execution is narrowing. If you find Souls games too brutal and want an action-RPG with genuine stylistic identity and a setting you have never played through before, Steelrising with the Cagliostro DLC included is a reasonable package. Just do not expect the narrative depth the setting promises, and bring patience for loading screens. Monika, Scout Team