Stellar Blade: Complete Edition review for Nintendo Switch 2

Stellar Blade: Complete Edition review for Nintendo Switch 2

Posted on November 2, 2026 by Dawn in Reviews

System: Switch 2
Release date:November 5, 2026
Developer: Shift Up
Publisher: Shift Up

Action adventure games have gone through something of a renaissance over the last few years, with a few notable standouts in the genre serving as a blueprint for those that have come after. Stellar Blade, the first console title from developer Shift Up, makes no effort to hide its inspirations but manages to establish an identity of its own through smart gameplay design, even if the writing leaves a lot to be desired. Despite some minor caveats, it made the jump to Nintendo Switch 2 two years after its original release in excellent form.

Stellar Blade is set in the far-flung future and puts you in control of Eve, who is part of an elite organization dedicated to ridding planet Earth of the Naytibas, mysterious creatures that have ravaged Earth and forced part of humanity into space and the rest into near extinction. Eve’s mission doesn’t go according to plan, as she arrives on Earth a little worse for wear and her companion, Tachy, is quickly dispatched in the battle. Alone, Eve encounters two additional survivors, Adam and Lily, and establishes herself in the nearby city of Xion, where she will need to find some way to continue her mission to reclaim the planet and ultimately discover what caused this chain of events to occur in the first place.

Although it looks to promise an action-packed and high-stakes narrative from its explosive opening, Stellar Blade’s story is not its strongest suit. There is an engaging dynamic between Eve and her companions, and the writing is easily at its best when it is exploring their relationships. However, it struggles to maintain a consistent pace and throws a lot of its major story revelations into its final few hours, which results in them lacking the weight that they are clearly intended to have. The game touches upon some interesting ideas and themes, but does it in such a way that it feels more like a checkbox exercise than something that is of any particular consequence. In a world where societal order has collapsed and humans have evolved in both natural and unnatural ways, you expect dialogue about the nature of morality and what defines humanity to pop up during those idle moments, and it feels oddly disconnected from the story itself.

The bulk of the game’s subsequent worldbuilding, and a lot of its content, comes through doing sidequests, and although it never quite comes together in a way that elevates the central narrative conflict to make it more impactful, it makes those quieter moments between main missions more significant. There are an aggravating number of mundane fetch quests (amusingly, Eve will actually refuse to do some of these), but many provide some interesting crumbs of information. The NPCs that Eve interacts with through these are the main highlight; there’s a surprising amount of personality packed into a few short lines of dialogue and quest flavor text, and although a couple have character arcs that are cliché at best they do a good job of getting you to care about the world you’re supposed to be saving. The main story is complete by itself, but rushing through it and neglecting the side content would make the game feel distinctly flatter as a result: much of Eve’s personality and motivation only comes through in her interaction with the civilians in Xion and resolving their problems.

But as is often the case with action adventure titles, the central focus is the gameplay, and Stellar Blade is very keen on getting you out into its ruined world, exploring desolate landscapes, and fighting Naytibas. Thankfully, it excels at delivering a mechanically deep and satisfyingly robust combat experience. Combat in Stellar Blade is all about dodging, parrying, and exploiting openings in between, and it favors a more methodical and rhythmic combat style at its core. Enemy attacks are very clearly telegraphed to allow you time to react and are color-coded to indicate if they need to be parried or dodged in a particular way. Successfully exploiting their weaknesses will allow you to stun them temporarily, inviting you to unleash a retaliatory strike of your own. Although most encounters are brief and limited to two or three enemies at a time at most, it’s not a game that encourages mindless aggression: even early enemies will outright block your strikes and punish you if you take this approach. Every swing of the sword in Stellar Blade needs to be intentional, and even if you lean all-in on making her as tanky as possible, Eve is always going to be noticeably more fragile than her opponents.

At the heart of combat are skills, which are divided into five separate categories. Despite being fairly extensive, the focus is more on upgrading a small selection of abilities rather than giving you an overwhelming number of new ones to play around with. It’s a refreshing approach that means you’re not required to memorize an exhaustive list of combos that only gets bigger the further you progress, and also means that any one element of Eve’s toolkit isn’t entirely useless if you choose just to unlock it and focus on other things. You’ll gain full access to her toolkit midway through the game, and how effective any one element of it is will depend on how much you decide to invest in it. You can reset your skill points at camps, which results in a surprising amount of depth in how you choose to build Eve as you progress, and your priorities will undoubtedly shift as you encounter stronger bosses that have different weaknesses and attack patterns that would make certain abilities more useful.

It also makes adjusting to the game’s combat significantly easier if you’ve played other action games in the past. As someone with a nervous trigger finger who generally struggles with parrying, I focused more on the perfect dodge section of the Survival Tree, and favored upgrading Beta skills to unleash them as soon as possible and make them count. However, you could choose to ignore skills entirely and focus entirely on basic combos if you choose. SP will accumulate naturally as you gain experience from fighting Naytibas and exploring, although the game doesn’t really encourage or reward actively grinding to expand your options sooner than you would through natural progression.

In between bouts of combat, you’ll be exploring fairly large and mostly linear open areas, taking circuitous routes to your intended destination, and solving very basic environmental obstacles that are more about unlocking doors or creating pathways and shortcuts than they are testing your ability to solve puzzles. There is some light platforming involved, but it never feels overly taxing outside of one or two very specific moments that require more precision than is strictly necessary. You’ll want to invest some SP into double jump at points. Stellar Blade is very good at keeping you constantly on the move, so that no one element of gameplay outstays its welcome, although it can occasionally feel drawn out at times as camps are few and far between, and enemies are aggravatingly persistent and will chase you across half the map if you don’t stop and dispose of them.

In terms of technical performance, Stellar Blade does not leave a very good first impression on Nintendo Switch 2 with its opening sequence, which looks messy and struggles to maintain a consistent frame rate. Fortunately, this is less of a problem later in the game, and it runs quite well in the more enclosed areas that you’ll visit. Its struggles with frame pacing are more noticeable on a TV screen than they are in handheld mode, and environments are quite featureless and drab in places, and textures do not hold up under close scrutiny, which can make for some messy low-resolution visuals at certain angles. But despite the cutbacks, overall the visuals are of a reasonably good quality on the system.

The game requires quite a bit of tinkering for it to be a more comfortably playable experience both from a visual and gameplay perspective, as the default settings are not ideal for either docked or handheld. The game has both motion blur and camera shake set to the maximum value, which is an unpleasant combination with frame generation also enabled. Disabling the latter (which is something that was incorporated into the full game) is practically mandatory if you have any intention of playing on a difficulty above Story Mode, or not making use of Action Assist to help you time your actions. The input delay you’ll experience with it enabled will result in a great deal of frustration otherwise.

Base sharpness is set to 8, which only serves to highlight the lower resolution in handheld mode in particular and results in very unpleasant visuals. Reducing this makes environmental effects such as rain significantly easier on the eyes in handheld mode in particular. Like many games on Nintendo Switch 2, Stellar Blade also struggles with higher resolution hair texture, making Eve’s long ponytail a problem on the default settings: I’d recommend disabling it entirely if you’re not playing docked, as it results in less artifacting around Eve when playing and makes both combat and movement a smoother experience. The game also has HDR, chromatic aberration, and depth of field enabled by default, which results in a slightly sharper image when docked, but has little effect on handheld image quality.

Despite the default settings being less than ideal, Shift Up has put a lot of time and effort into making playing Stellar Blade on Nintendo Switch 2 a flexible and enjoyable experience, and it shows. The game has also been extremely well-optimized from an accessibility standpoint, and has options to fully customize controls for handheld mode, dual controller grip, and the Pro Controller. All of these are fully individualized, which is a thoughtful inclusion. Gyroscopic aiming and mouse controls are also supported for players who find that more intuitive, which is something of a rarity in third-party titles and rarely implemented well when it is.

Stellar Blade is one of the best action adventure titles to release in the current console generation. Comparisons to NieR: Automata and Bayonetta are inevitable (particularly with the DLC costumes to highlight the similarities), but mostly only down to shared aesthetics and some thematic similarities with the former, as the game carves out its own unique identity with its superb combat. The visual cuts are there, and it is absolutely unplayable with frame generation enabled, but with some slight tweaks to the default settings, it delivers a fantastic experience on Nintendo Switch 2 – particularly in handheld mode.

Stellar Blade copy provided by the publisher for the purposes of this review.

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