Steel Defier Review

Steel Defier reminds us of the best scene from that Milla Jovovich Resident Evil movie. It’s when the S.T.A.R.S. crawl into the servers of Umbrella’s AI, and the AI retaliates with a row upon row of lasers. The soldiers leapfrog the lasers but eventually turn into diced chorizo when the lasers become a lattice. Now, imagine that scene – minus the impossible last sequence – and you have Steel Defier. 

You play a prisoner on the lam in a science-fiction prison. Someone has blown a hole in your cell, which gives you the opportunity to run free. The problem is that freedom is twenty or so rooms away, and those intermediary rooms are absolutely stacked with death traps, lasers included. Can you hop, skip and jump over them so that you reach the escape pod at the end? Probably, but you’ll lose some lives on the way.

The plot doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, of course. It doesn’t matter, but it’s fun to pick it apart regardless. There are no other cells in the prison, for one. You are clearly a badass crim who needs an entire prison to keep them locked up. And each room’s traps are triggered by you stepping on a whopping great pressure pad in the middle. It’s not exactly the precarious trap-filled dungeon of an Indiana Jones movie. 

When your little criminal emerges from his cell, he’s got a Legend of Zelda-style map in the top-right of the screen. It’s the path to the exit, and you can take whichever route you fancy. We’d heartily recommend completing every square on the map for a couple of glaring reasons (more on them later).

Hop into a room, step on the pressure plate, and a contained game of Total Wipeout starts playing. Every one of these rooms has, as baseline, a shoulder-high wall moving from side to side through the room. Imagine the revolving pugil sticks you get in a game of Fall Guys that everyone has to jump over, and you’re pretty much there. 

While this wall rolls back and forth, you need to dodge it and pick up security cards. These appear randomly, and you’ll need fifteen of them per level to stop the hazards and move onwards. That would be simple with just the wall, but as levels progress, more and more hazards get shuffled into the deck. 

A red block moves around the circumference of the room, walloping players who think they can just sit out the chaos. Yellow blocks slide about before exploding into a cluster of smaller blocks. Traffic cone dudes materialise out of nowhere. Our least favourite, the sodding blue block, appears and slowly stalks you like the monsters out of It Follows. They’re creep buggers. You will be memorising the effects of all these bricks and blocks, so that you can navigate the arenas at speed. 

It would be unearthly difficult if it wasn’t for some upgrades. It’s hard to predict where these permanent unlocks will appear – thus why you should play every room, so you can see them all – but most of them are utterly game-changing. Honestly, we’d say that a couple are broken.

On the broken list is a time-slowing device. Activate it once-per-room, and you can have an extended period with all the hazards at about one-third speed. If you’re good (and, oh yes, we (thought) we were good), you can pick up about six or seven security cards in this period, so we tended to press Y halfway through the room and cruise to the finish line. The other broken unlock is an extra life. Get hit once and you don’t have to restart. We’d suggest that these two together are enough to make the whole game easy as pish. 

There are other, slightly less overpowered unlocks. You can double-jump, speed-dash, magnetise cards and more. Generally, each upgrade comes with an achievement ‘bloop’ and a massive improvement to your evasion, so it feels great to collect them.

We were on a roll with Steel Defier. It is about as simple as video gaming can get – there’s really not much complexity beyond what we’ve described – but the simplicity is elegant rather than limiting. We could have played world after world of Steel Defier, and were fully prepared to do so. Which is where its glaring fault kicks in, sadly. 

Steel Defier isn’t short: it’s tiny. The one map you see in the top-right of the game is the only map you’ll get. Reach the end and the game is done. It’s another reason for playing every single square of its Legend of Zelda map: you will be finished in thirty minutes max if you don’t. We’d recommend taking your time with things, because it’ll be exhausted in moments if you don’t. Plus it’s worth your time. 

We reached the end of Steel Defier and a sad little sigh burbled out of our throat. We weren’t done; we wanted more. In a way, it does offer more. On completion, you get a survival mode, where the rounds escalate over time, and your task is to collect as many security cards as you can before you die. But there’s no new unlocks or obstacles, and the progression of both were the joys of the main campaign. We ratcheted a couple of high scores, got the single achievement related to it, and never played it again. 

It’s not hard to see how Steel Defier could have expanded to fill more space. Co-op play of some kind would have been brilliant, as would have some global highscores. Although it makes no narrative sense, more ‘dungeons’ with more hazards would have been lovely. We’d have even accepted spreading the upgrades out more, delivering them as XP unlocks perhaps. It’a compromise we would make to get more Steel Defier. 

Is thirty minutes of a good thing enough? We’d say so. This adrenaline booster to the heart had us gripped. But just as we were getting good, nimbly leapfrogging any and all obstacles, Steel Defier was over. It needed to be about triple the length for us to nod sagely and say ‘that’s about right’. 

Know that Steel Defier is more of a demo than a game, and you’ll be prepped. Because, as a demo, this little dodge ’em up defies all expectations.