Steel Seed Review – Retro Future
Steel Seed would have done pretty well, had it released 20 years ago. A stealth/platformer/action hybrid, it looks like a late stage PS3 game that got bumped to a launch PS4 title before being unceremoniously dumped on to the PS5, a prime example of the ‘eurojank’ genre that I’m often quite fond of – Italian developer Storm in A Teacup are no doubt punching above their weight with some aspects of Steel Seed but the overall package is a touch too long at 12 hours (which says a lot) and suffers greatly from repetition without really delivering on the promise its setting and worldbuilding suggest.
Steel Seed puts players in control of Zoe, a human/cyborg hybrid that’s essentially woken up in an Aldi version of the shitty machine dominated future both The Matrix and The Terminator promised. Zoe’s dad is the bloke responsible for much of the shenanigans she’s seeing in this metallic hellscape, and she needs to find his four scattered memory macguffins to resurrect him and save humanity somehow. Along the way she’s aided by KOBY, a handy drone that can fire mines, traps and interface with a lot of the switches and ports necessary to make progress.
Floor sliding, double-jumping and later gliding through platforming sections are the strongest gameplay aspect of Steel Seed next to its stealth, which equips Zoe with a decent arsenal of tools and abilities to tackle the frequent rooms of robotic foes that impede progress. Navigating a tricky platforming sections and climbing up more illuminated ledges than Nathan Drake managed across five games is all well and good, until you pop over a ledge and see the classic ‘chest high walls’ infesting the next room. The sigh of relief that comes from entering an area and not seeing an assortment of metal guards doing their set laps is palpable because the combat itself is totally naff and only serves to highlight how much better sneaking through each encounter is. The cherry on top of slinking around darkened corners & atop invisibility cloaking vents to lure unsuspecting bots to their doom is the ability to remotely pilot KOBY, a function that is useful for exploring ahead and laying traps for enemies. It’s unfortunate that often, this approach is not quite enough to eliminate all enemies. Like many stealth games, being spotted is incredibly hard to come back from and it’s generally easier to just bung your laser sword out and get slashing, even though combat tends to be rougher than the mosh pit at a Metallica concert, lacking any of the elegance of the systems it seems to be aping.
The world design of Steel Seed is its strongest element, the sheer scope and scale hinting at exploration and discovery that never quite manages to deliver, aside from a few cleverly hidden lore-dumping PC’s or upgrade-unlocking nodes KOBY can access by taking flight in search of a faint purple glow in more expansive areas. Invisible walls abound, and it’s never quite clear why KOBY can travel very extensive distances in some areas and crashes out within a few metres in others. With four main biomes, it’s really only the last area that distinguishes itself, the first three lumped together as dystopian junkyards to varying degrees. I held off getting this review ready for launch due to the numerous graphical hiccups, frame drops, progression bugs, HDR Removal and other issues Steel Seed presented me with during my time with it, many of which have been cleared up with a few patches. Even still, there are sections of Steel Seed where I wondered if I shouldn’t quit and reset due to how much the frame rate had tanked, although it would often right itself after waiting long enough.
Steel Seed is sometimes engaging and exhilarating in a ham-handed fashion, the kind of game you can finish over a weekend or two on autopilot and promptly never think about ever again. There are flashes of brilliance scattered throughout, but the gameplay itself never quite rises above stale rehashes of franchises that have themselves moved on from the elements it’s swiped. It’s perfect fodder for myself as a middle-aged Dad looking for something that won’t tax me too hard for an hour or two at a time, requiring scant investment in developing any particular skills, but I fear the wider audience will balk at Steel Seed’s particular brand of throwback gameplay and middling graphical performance.
Steel Seed was reviewed on PS5 with code kindly supplied by PR.
