Steelrising

Steelrising is a 2022 action RPG developed by Spiders and published by Nacon, released September 8, 2022 for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. It holds Metacritic scores around 70, and the best alternate-history premise in the subgenre: it’s 1789, but Louis XVI has crushed the French Revolution with an army of clockwork automatons — and Paris burns under machines instead of muskets.

You play Aegis, a masterwork automaton built as a dancer for Marie Antoinette, sent into the occupied city to find her creator and, along the way, the Revolution’s real history — Lafayette, Robespierre, and the queen herself among the questgivers.

Technical Specifications

A Dancer’s Souls Combat

Aegis fights like what she is — fans, chain whips, and bladed dances alongside conventional halberds — over a familiar stamina-and-checkpoint chassis with a heat-cooling twist on resource management and grapple-assisted traversal across a sizable interconnected Paris. Notably for its era, Steelrising shipped a full assist mode — adjustable damage, stamina regeneration, even death-penalty removal — making it one of the genre’s most flexible entries on difficulty years before that debate softened elsewhere.

Reception

Reviews credited the premise, Aegis’s design, and the historical-cameo storytelling — Spiders’ signature Eurojank ambition at its most stylish — while landing the usual counts: stiff animation, technical roughness at launch, repetitive enemy variety, and mid-tier polish against the genre’s leaders. The community’s recurring “still worth buying?” threads settle where the critics did: a flawed, atmospheric B-tier pick that’s easy to recommend deep on sale — the same shelf as The Surge and Asterigos, with the best costume department of the three.

Where to Play It Today

Steelrising is on Steam, GOG, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with the Cagliostro’s Secrets DLC and bundle editions perennially discounted into single digits.