Steel Seed Review

Steel Seed is a stealth-focused 3D action-adventure game in which you play as a woman named Zoe in a sci-fi world that’s on the brink of extinction. As a usual fan of this genre, I was immediately intrigued by the interesting scenario (and the cute robot) I saw in the game’s trailer.

The game starts with the protagonist lying in a medical facility, asking the doctor, who is also her father, what is going on, to which he replies that everything will be alright. When something suddenly goes wrong, the screen fades to black, and we now view everything from the perspective of an adorable little robot called Koby. Through its eyes, we get to see how the place we started the cutscene in was completely changed without explanation. After a few seconds, we end up right where we started, with our robot friend waking up Zoe and joining her on her quest. Once you take control of Zoe, you don’t really know what happened, except that your goal is to find her father and ask him what happened and why, and it can be really interesting if you get into it. After progressing through the game for a bit, a lot of things can change, and it gets really engaging, but I don’t want to spoil anything past the premise.

The gameplay is very much the standard for the genre, almost being one-to-one with that of STAR WARS Jedi: Fallen Order. Whilst I wouldn’t say it’s a bad thing, if you’re looking for new innovations in the gaming experience, Steel Seed might not be the best for you. I was never positively or negatively surprised by a particular mechanic: everything was fun and normal. One thing to note is that the game does focus on stealth, so if you decide to abandon it and try to fight plainly, you’ll find that the opponents have a lot of health — the most basic enemy takes upwards of ten hits to kill! And this is a problem with basically every game of this genre, but it still bothered me: chase scenes in which the opponents just can’t hit me when I’m running in a straight line should not exist; it really breaks the immersion when I notice the enemies hit everywhere around me even when I move at the speed of a snail.

Whilst playing, I kept constantly staring at the genuinely amazing backgrounds. Almost every model and texture is perfect, and the lighting is amazing. My performance was great, but whilst my computer isn’t particularly high-end, it’s better than the average according to the Steam hardware survey, and unfortunately, I no longer have my old setup around to test it. In the game’s Steam page, though, the recommended requirements list an RTX 2070, so most people should be fine. Nevertheless, even on the lowest settings, the game looks great, and it does offer built-in upscaling in case you have an old GPU that doesn’t support it and need the FPS lift.

Steel Seed has full voice acting for characters and sound effects for basically every possible action in the game. Other than a few weird line reads and some of the dialogue writing sounding a bit cheesy, most conversations are engaging and fun to listen to. Unfortunately, a lot of scenes lack music, even when it really feels like there should be some kind of track playing in the background. There are some scenes in which the silence works, though — it’s just overused and present in areas where there should really be something playing instead.

Overall, Steel Seed is not a bad game by any means, but it is lacking in some important aspects. The gameplay, while fine, is not different from the usual experience found in other videogames in this genre. The story can be really engaging, but if you don’t start off with a focus on wanting to understand the story, a lot of the experience’s value will be lost. As a usual fan of both action-adventures and stealth games, I am definitely going to try and 100% this, so if you’re already interested in this title and typically like games from this genre, you should definitely try Steel Seed out. But if you’re not a usual fan of this sort of experience, there are probably better options to spend your money on.