Robot is not a wolf: Buka has released steath action Steel Seed
The very first Steel Seed credits made us talk about the revival of the fashion for the steath action genre. This is when you need to hide from enemies for most of the game and attack them only as a last resort. The release itself is a dark dystopia where humanity has long been extinct and the world is ruled by cruel robots. The Russian-Cypriot company ESDigital Games, also known as Buka, took part in the international project, so the game is of particular importance to domestic gamers. Steel Seed was released on April 22, Izvestia played it and were perplexed.
What is Steel Seed like?
Sometimes the heavens laugh so hard that you don't even know how to relate to Fate and Fate after that. The stealth action game Steel Seed was supposed to be released at the end of 2024, then the release shifted, then it shifted even more — and on April 22 we got a game in which the girl Zoey wakes up in the body of a killer cyborg after a thousand years of suspended animation. There are no humans left in the nightmarish man-made future, and robots are everywhere, mostly aggressive. Zoya needs to run, slip, fly through hundreds of kilometers of tunnels, giant workshops and mines to collect the fragments of her brilliant scientist father's consciousness and use it to revive humanity. Zoey is traveling with a small flying drone named Kobi, and he will perform a significant part of the tasks. Theoretically, Zoey won't even have to fight the enemies, a smart robot will do everything.
A shot from the game "Steel Seed"
All this is completely discouraging, because just a month ago the super hit Split Fiction was released (we wrote about it in detail), where you need to play in pairs, and one of the main characters is named Zoey. The heroines there are writers, one writes fantasy, the other — oh, a miracle! — dark cyberpunk dystopias that even look something like the levels in Steel Seed. This writer has a sore subject — her father, who appears in her works and whom she drags around hospitals in her life, trying to cure. In Split Fiction, the heroines take turns finding themselves in each other's fantasies and doing exactly the same thing there as Zoey in Steel Seed. There's also a double jump, you can run on walls, sometimes you need to plan in the air, but the main thing is that you can't play alone, just the two of you at the same time, completing tasks together.
How is it possible that Steel Seed, whose Italian developers, of course, could not have known exactly what their colleagues were doing in Split Fiction, does not seem to be an independent game, but an addition, several secret levels for those who managed to quickly complete Split Fiction and want more? In the early hours, it seems unnatural that the screen does not split in half and that Kobi's robot has to be controlled independently: it feels like a second player should do it, as it should in Split Fiction.
A shot from the game "Steel Seed"
All this would not have happened if Steel Seed had been released on time, at the end of 2024, when not much was known about Split Fiction. Perhaps, since the coincidence happened, it was not worth rushing now, especially since even after a number of patches, the PS5 version that we played is full of wonderful glitches. Zoey freezes motionlessly in the air, the walls disappear, you need to reset the level to try to go further. It would probably be worthwhile to refine the game, slightly rewrite the plot and rename the heroine so that the coincidence does not look so wild.
However, perhaps the developers and publishers decided, if not to peddle the similarity, then still quietly turn it to their advantage. Because due to parallels, entering the game is quite easy. The differences will start later. First of all, this is a combat process where you sometimes have to hide from evil robots for a long time, plus a somewhat cumbersome leveling system for the heroine and her robot, and some monotony of levels that are not so different from each other, and gradual innovations like surfing through toxic reservoirs do not bring much pleasure. Every time you think that what happened every half hour in Split Fiction happens here after four hours of crawling through dark warehouses and killing robots in the same way.
What are the disadvantages and advantages of Steel Seed
Robots are very boring. They don't have many varieties, and as the game progresses, they become so strong that they can't even be killed from glitch fields (such as electric grass) in one go, and dealing with them quickly tires. Rare funny moments like Zoey's conversation with a giant philosophical excavator do not greatly diversify the process. Over time, you find yourself wanting to quickly run from one teleport save to another and collect the damn pieces, because the main problem with this mechanized cold space is that it is meaningless, uninteresting, simply put. Maybe people, if they are revived, will add at least some charm to it, although the Earth has become so unsightly that you definitely won't envy the first generations.
A shot from the game "Steel Seed"
One of the strengths is the elaboration of Zoya's image. Her remarks are sometimes ironic, sometimes gloomy, but the main thing about them is that they are practically devoid of truisms and vulgarity. This is probably how the daughter of a real inventor would react to the post-apocalypse. There's a decent pace of storytelling for stealth action here: you don't have to crawl on your belly for too long and save ammo, because there aren't any ammo left. It's rare to find yourself in a situation where you don't understand where to go, which probably happened a little more often in Split Fiction.
But it seems that the main advantage of the game is precisely in the paradoxical (maybe it's still industrial espionage?) similar to Split Fiction. Suddenly, someone was annoyed by fantasy levels with dragons and castles, but they wanted more sci-fi. Now it is possible to get it in full and, by the way, much cheaper: the price difference between the two releases is about four times. Just acceptable for the extra levels of a big hit, how can you resist?
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
