Steel Seed review - Assassin's Creed meets Halo on a budget

Metro

22-04-2025

Steel Seed – it's amazing how good indie games can look now (ESDigital Games)
A new double-A indie game tries to blend elements from two of gaming's most successful franchises, in a unique new sci-fi adventure of its own.
These days triple-A game development budgets regularly stray into the hundreds of millions, which means anything less than a massive hit can be enough to send studios into bankruptcy. For publishers, there's an increasing sense that the future of games may not be a headlong rush towards blockbuster hits at any cost. A less stressful approach may be to make games that don't have to sell like Call Of Duty just to break even.
It turns out you can make perfectly entertaining games that don't take 150 hours to play, work perfectly fine without hiring Idris Elba as a voice actor, and for which you don't have to spend multiple man-years in a motion capture studio. It's not that everything needs to be a pixel art cosy farming sim, but with a more modest vision you can still create great entertainment without having to bet your future on every release.
Steel Seed is part of this new wave of mid-budget games. While it may not spend the kind of money CD Projekt does on making a new Witcher title, it's certainly not short of ambition, its twin inspirations being Halo and Assassin's Creed. Set in a post-eco disaster future, where every human's consciousness has been uploaded into an industrial grade AI, you're Zoe, a cyborg woman tasked with rebooting our species.
Zoe's dad was the scientist that came up with the idea and, along with repopulating humans, you're also trying to bring him back, as he uploaded himself along with everyone else. To do that you need to make your way through a succession of huge, robotic landscapes that look like a cross between Halo and the high-tech Cauldrons from Horizon Zero Dawn.
The sense of scale is fantastic, with vast, ancient machinery stretching above you, and in every direction as far as the eye can see, dwarfing your cyborg warrior in every way. Your job, in these gigantic metal landscapes, is to work your way through rooms full of alert robot guards, in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who's spent time with Assassin's Creed.
This means using stealth and cover to pick your way towards patrolling bots, before silently creeping up behind them and stabbing them with your miniature lightsaber. If you mess that process up and get spotted you'll raise the alarm, which rapidly sees you swarmed by robo guards. As in Assassin's Creed, you can sometimes fight your way out of those situations, but sticking to the shadows is always your best bet.
To aid in your stealth there are ground level 'glitch fields', which stand in for tall grass, completely hiding Zoe if she's crouching. You also have a hovering drone companion called Koby, who you can use to scout the way ahead, looking for concealed paths, and tagging enemies and their patrol routes so you don't cause any accidental alerts.
As well as observation, you can also unlock Koby's offensive powers. They start with a simple blast, that you can trigger during open combat to give you a chance of stunning opponents, but more useful are the lethal mines you unlock as you start to open up the game's skill trees. They start off causing alerts each time they go off, although you can eventually access silent ones as you gain experience.
Koby's other useful addition to your offensive capabilities is hacking. When you creep up behind a robot or gun turret, rather than simply knifing them, you can instead hack them to fight briefly on your side. In the case of turrets that's quite a powerful option, letting you clear substantial portions of the game's often very large rooms with minimal effort.
You'll also spend plenty of time in traversal, figuring out how to get around the game's oversized topography, your marked destination often in completely the opposite direction from the way you need to head in order to get there. While this can sometimes feel like being horribly lost in Halo's bewildering Library levels, you do always manage to muddle your way through.
If you ever wondered what a sci-fi Assassin's Creed would be like (ESDigital Games)
Your quest is to find and unite the four shards that hold your long dead dad's personality, taking you into the game's four distinctive biomes to achieve your goal. To enable plot exposition along the way, Zoe chats to Koby, whose R2-D2 style beeps and boops are the only reply to her musings. The voice acting is serviceable, even if the cockney father doesn't sound like most people's idea of a theoretical physicist, but the story is fairly nonsensical.
It's riddled with ludicrous acronyms for the various programs and AI entities you encounter and much of the documentation you find as you explore is poorly translated into English, rendering it a little bizarre (developer Storm in a Teacup are Italian). Unfortunately, some of the action is similar stilted by budgetary constraints.
While its great fun picking your way through some of the game's gargantuan chambers, full of patrolling enemies, there are quite a few points where that fun breaks down. Sometimes a crash will force you to repeat a room, which can be frustrating if everything had previously gone perfectly. Other times, the slightly unpredictable timing of the button prompt for a stealth kill can trip you up, alerting foes and sometimes getting you killed for something that doesn't feel totally like your fault.
Worse are the wobbly set pieces. Often taking place amongst collapsing, exploding pieces of giant machinery, you'll need to jump, wall run, and glide your way through them, in lengthy chains of interactions that are not always well signposted. The result is you have to repeat those sections over and over again until you finally stumble across the route the game intended. Far from feeling edge-of-the-seat, these sections tend to be equal parts dull and infuriating.
There are also balancing issues. One of the techniques you unlock is a sweeping sword strike triggered by pressing both attack buttons together, which uses up four of Zoe's energy bars in a single special move. Its underwhelming effect is compounded by the fact that it's easy to set off accidentally, using up energy you'd otherwise spend on healing, sometimes ruining your chances of completing a level or boss fight.
Some checkpoints are weirdly far apart, leaving you to repeat time consuming sections for no obvious reason, and there's no confirmation pop-up when you save. It's entirely fair to say that none of these issues are catastrophic, but many are irksome. And along with the wonky script, occasional glitches, and misfiring set pieces, undermine Steel Seed's ambitions.
With its majestic scenery; rooms full robot guards to be worked through, like huge moving puzzles; and seemingly impassable traversal challenges, Steel Seed's mix of stealth, combat, and platforming is a winning combination. So it's a pity not all of it works as intended, its dozen or so hours runtime peppered with moments of mild irritation, that slowly chip away at your enjoyment.
Steel Seed review summary
In Short: An ambitious and visually arresting double-A adventure, that blends Assassin's Creed's stealth with Halo's epic scenery, but which is compromised by a litany of minor technical issues.
Pros: Big ideas, spectacular views, and interesting combinations of landscapes and enemies to pick your way through. A decent sized adventure with a large skill tree to unlock.
Cons: Kinetic set pieces don't work as intended. The story gets bogged down in its own complexity and you may wish you'd never unlocked some of its abilities.
Score: 6/10
Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: TBA
Publisher: ESDigital Games
Developer: Storm in a Teacup
Release Date: 22nd April 2025
Age Rating: 12
Traversal isn't as fun as it should be (ESDigital Games)
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