The roughly 15-hour campaign tells a pretty predictable “down with the king” story that has you turning increasingly dangerous metal machinations into scrap, but the peculiar setting and characters help make that journey mostly enjoyable. Everything about the setting is incredibly weird in the best possible way: all the robo-folk take design cues from old school clockwork machines of the time period, you spend a lot of time hanging out with actual French revolutionaries like Lafayette and Robespierre, and Marie Antoinette herself serves as your boss and chief quest-giver, which never stops feeling super strange (but I’m into it). Set in a bizarre alternate history version of the French Revolution where Louis XVI has crushed his would-be usurpers using monstrous robots, you play as Aegis, a stoic dancing robot turned lone warrior who has to face the king’s mechanical army. That means in the long list of recent serviceable soulslikes with lots of rough edges, Steelrising is… well, another one of those. The unfathomably weird setting is a delight, but simplistic combat and underwhelming boss fights end up making disappointing use of it.

You know that one soulslike game that is a decent enough take on the genre, but also has a bit of wonkiness that otherwise holds it back? Sorry, did you think I was talking about Lords of the Fallen, or maybe Mortal Shell? Or perhaps you thought I meant The Surge, Ashen, Vampyr, or Remnant: From The Ashes – or even Thymesia from earlier this month? No, in this case I was referring to Steelrising, a French Revolution-themed action-RPG that’s chock full of creepy robots, emotionally unstable aristocrats in powdered wigs, and death screens that tell you you’re dead.