With poorly lit metal halls, flickering neon lights, a larger than life mechanical sprawl, and a cyborg ninja protagonist, Steel Seed has a lot on the surface that piqued my interest, as I can be easily lured into B-tier sci-fi stories if things look weird enough. Unfortunately, this one is weird in all the wrong ways. Its stealth action and energetic platforming are its best traits, but they are uneven across the roughly 12-hour campaign. Some really cool moments and creatures end up lost amongst miles of dreary and uninspired spaces, overshadowed by frustrating combat and a flimsy story that sap whatever shuddering signs of life this machine had in it.
The problems with Steel Seed start with its hero’s generic presentation. Zoe, awkwardly plucky and earnest daughter of the creator of the dystopia she woke up into, feels completely out of sync with the post-apocalyptic sci-fi world she is in. She’s well-voiced, but not well-written, relying heavily on some vapid self-reflection about a past she can’t fully remember and superhero movie-style banter with her robot pa. Ma’am, you’re the last living human on a planet overrun by killer robots and the only chance to bring humanity back from extinction. I need you to stop quipping and lock in.
Steel Seed is dense with lore about how some major corporation was humanity’s last hope until the CEO (who is also Zoe’s father) got double crossed by whoever and whatever, but its plot is light on interesting happenings or compelling reasons to continue to the next objective outside of “because it’s telling me to.” There’s a part that technically satisfies the literary definition of a plot twist, but you see it coming so far in advance that it might as well be a naked man covered in gold.
You’ll spend a great deal of your time navigating this post-human settlement by hopping on platforms and scurrying up walls. It’s all very reminiscent of the Uncharted games, where shimmying across a ledge could be filled with enough mishaps and jump scares to make the process a tense one. Steel Seed even goes a step further, making its high stakes sequences of sliding through collapsing structures or outrunning gunfire feel way more precarious as it’s pretty easy to fail some of the more intense sections.
Light puzzle mechanics can add some small speed bumps to your progress, often in the form of commanding your R2D2-coded companion, KOBY, to shoot unreachable buttons while your hands and feet are busy keeping you firmly attached to a wall. These were just dynamic enough to stay engaging, which is all I can ask for for a game that has platforming but isn’t entirely focused on that kind of gameplay, a la Astrobot. Things do get more clever in certain chase encounters, where your perspective changes from 3D to 2D in order to outrun enemy fire from the background – but these moments are scarce, and Steel Seed does nothing that clever anywhere else.
The vast environments you’ll be doing all this poking around in are very hit and miss, visually speaking. There are quite a few stretches of pretty generic techno-hallways or oft-troped rust-chic junk yards that don’t really inspire awe if you’ve seen any science fiction ever. But occasionally those halls will be filled with weird little robot bugs, or a X-story tall mech that rivals the scale of some of God of War’s largest creatures will rise to greet you, and you can’t help but think, “they cooked with this one, at least.” Generally, though, there’s very little about the world Zoe is tasked with saving even worth remembering, something me and the amnesiac protagonist have in common.
There are a lot of enemies in all of these spaces looking to stop you from saving the day, and you can take care of them with stealthy wit or brute force. The stages where you find most enemies are rife with nooks and crannies to hide in and precariously placed obstacles to use as distractions, or to cause killing blows themselves. At first stealth is pretty simple thanks to the very slim variety of different bad guys that patrol around, as well your limited starting skills. I was happy to see that blossom into something more robust as time went on, though. Even though you don’t really see more than five different enemy types in any given encounter throughout Steel Seed, each one is so different and they are mixed together well enough to create checkpoints that can be a real challenge to navigate safely.
Sections get larger and more dense with lookouts that have overlapping patrols and vision vectors, and while some of the mid-game scenarios hit the “just right” mix of enemies and area size, the late-game stealth sections drag on way too long. The fairly strict checkpoints also mean you need to start from the beginning of the section if you fail during it, sometimes throwing 15-20 minutes of patient stabbing and enemy hacking directly into the recycling bin when you slip up. You also run out of new ways to take down foes pretty early on, and I found myself setting a lot of the same traps throughout. So while the hunt started tense, it became stale sooner than I’d hoped.
Zoe and KOBY gain more tricks as they progress, but you sort of have to earn the ability to buy them with the points you find by breaking containers or enemy robots, completing what can often feel like busy work first. Kill five enemies without being seen and you’ll earn the privilege of buying the extremely useful glitch mine skill, which goes a long way towards killing bots without being seen. A lot of the skills have requirements that can come naturally through play, like scanning a number of enemies individually in order to unlock a version of the scan that hits everything of interest in a small zone – ,but others were more tedious tasks, such as searching the mostly bland locations for hidden pick-ups or completing more challenging skill tests like killing a certain amount of enemies a specific way in a small window of time, which were things I happily avoided.
I less than happily avoided outright combat like a computer virus, though. From the buggy lock-on that lets you focus on an enemy but will still pull you towards other nearby foes, to the mashy attack strings with mushy responsiveness, to the dry attack animations from both Zoe and all of her victims, confronting your foes directly is generally a mess. None of the skills you unlock make combat feel any better, despite giving you some admittedly strong options for late-game encounters that can spin out of control with the number of potential participants in any given melee, attacking from off screen with reckless abandon. By the end of the campaign, if I got caught during a stealth section, I’d more often just reload at the last checkpoint than clean up the foes that caught me because it was simply less boring that way. Zones where you have no choice but to fight in open combat were consistently my least favorite parts of the Steel Seed, but mercifully, they are few and far between.
