Developer Spiders has been making games with obvious inspirations for a while. From Greedfall’s aping of Bioware RPGs to Bound By Flame’s Witcher-esque dark fantasy, the results have been decidedly wanting but nonetheless always hinted at some imagination that could lead to better things. It pleases us to say that this time the studio’s landed on something compelling. Steelrising’s lacking in some areas, though nothing not overcome by its novel premise.
‘The French Revolution but with robots’ sounds like nonsense (and to a certain degree it is), yet Spiders commits so thoroughly to the premise it’s hard not to fall in love. Heaps of historical research pays off with well-informed depictions of historical figures to complement a world of jittering, clockwork machines that stomp through a well-recreated Paris like they were always meant to be there.
