Steel Seed starts strong with an atmospheric cut scene with cinematic camera angles and a tease of something special. A woman is trapped in a lab, seemingly undergoing a medical procedure, with a scientist in the background who seems to be battling to save her life. While the rest of the game doesn’t reach these dramatic heights, it’s a solid, if generic, stealth action game which I really enjoyed playing.
Skip forward a few millennia and our heroine, Zoe, wakes up in an underground facility and discovers she is now a cyborg. She seems to take this fact, along with the news that humankind is dead and she is the only one who can bring them back, rather matter-of-factly. I would have spent a good ten minutes freaking out if that happened to me, but nope, off she skips along with her new robot drone pal Koby to meet S4VI (or as it’s pronounced, Savi), a super buff AI who struts around a vast library with little more than a loin cloth covering his AI Ooh-I-Says.
More exposition reveals that Zoe’s dad has digitally stored humankind while the planet fixes itself, and to return to the good old days Zoe needs to go find her dead father who has inconveniently split himself into four digital shards. Each shard is located within a nest of mechs controlled the evil robot overlord Hogo, and you can tell he is the bad guy because he has red eyes and a very big gun.
Each of the four areas has a distinct visual style, but they all roughly follow the same format with sections of platforming followed by large open areas that require stealth. The platforming includes lots of clambering around ledges in an Uncharted style, but that’s joined by wall running, bounce pads, zip wires and timed puzzles. It’s usually obvious where you have to go next, and checkpoints are spaced quite generously, so while there’s nothing new or surprising, it’s well put together and usually lots of fun.
Like most action adventure games, as long as you are quite close to where the next platform or ledge is, you get a tiny boost to make sure you grab it even though gravity would suggest you would not. The exception here seems to be zip wires, some of which are located at the end of wall running sequences, which are annoyingly difficult to grab onto.
After a lengthy section of being athletic you will encounter a larger area patrolled by different types of robots, signalling that it’s time for stealth. Again, there’s little surprising or new here, with disruption fields substituted for long grass to hide in, sending out a pulse being the sci-fi equivalent of throwing a stone to attract an enemy – all things any stealth fan should be familiar with but with a technological twist.
It’s here where Koby, your sci-fi Assassin’s Creed Eagle, comes in to play as you can take control of him and use his vision to check out enemy locations and patrols. He can also flip switches, drop mines, glitch fields and attack enemies, but if he is spotted then he will get a good battering and become inactive for a minute or so. Zoe always utters an anguished cry of “Oh no! Koby!” when het gets knocked out, which seems a bit silly after then twentieth time, as by then she should know he’s always going to come back to life moments later.
When hidden, Zoe can stealth kill most enemies, but if she’s spotted, you may need to fight your way out. She has the usual light and heavy attacks and a dodge, and you can add in ground slams, perfect dodge attacks and more by buying upgrades. The enemies do have weak points, the game tells you, but as they are tiny and – going against convention – the same colour as the rest of the enemy. It was only through trial and error I worked what they were. Zoe herself can’t attack these points, but she can control Koby and use him as a rather rubbish gun that runs out of steam after a couple of shots. It’s a nice idea but badly explained, and only really useful near the end of the game when you have upgraded both Zoe and Koby. One nice feature is the ability to hack the enemy robots and turn them to your side, which is very satisfying when used on machine gun turrets that can can wipe out most of a level in seconds.
While there are only seven enemy types, they are placed strategically on the maps to give you a challenge, and if one is alerted many from the surrounding area will head into battle. Fighting, while fun, is really the last resort as the robots are vicious and will soon kill you. They are also quite clever, if they are chasing you and you hide in an air duct or on top of a platform they won’t just mill around, complain for 20 seconds and then go back on patrol, they will throw grenades to flush you out.
Sprinkled throughput the game are chase sections with Zoe rushing through platforming levels that are collapsing around her, side on scrolling sections, flying, and even a surfboard, all of which keep things from becoming too repetitive.
As the game comes to its conclusion, the plot twists shouldn’t really surprise anyone, but I did find it annoying that after making you stealth through pretty much the entire game the final boss battle is a hack and slash affair which is rather more difficult if you have been spending most of your upgrade points on stealth and utility mechanics.
I applaud the fact that Zoe’s father is not voiced but some posh English man as genius scientists usually are, instead he has a strong modern London accent which means “Nothing” is pronounced “Nuffink”. Unfortunately, the actor seems to have been hurried along as the lines are missing emotional depth. He sounds more robotic than the robots!
I finished the game in around 15 hours but only scratched the surface when it comes to secrets and collectables, so there’s a reason to replay if that’s you thing. I really enjoyed Steel Seed. It’s got rough edges but its packed full of ambition and with more time and a bigger budget the developers, Storm in a Tea Cup, are certainly ones to watch out for.