A highly polished, bug-free experience.
That’s exactly where Stellar Blade sits.
In a sense, it feels like a game from 2002 built using modern technology and design elements.
It’s not another sequel or remaster - it’s a highly enjoyable game.
Part of this stems from its impressive level of polish.
When you finally press that new game button, the scene seamlessly springs to life.
There are no loading screens or fades to black - it simply begins - just like that.
I’m always a sucker for seamless menu to game transitions and Stellar Blade delivers.
Motion blur is, at least, fully adjustable, as is camera shake.
Once you’ve settled into the game and begin playing, take a moment to look around.
This is a game that leans heavily on its art design.
This is a good lesson in leveraging design without pushing technical boundaries to reach a target level of performance.
Instead, the team focuses on performance.
Stellar Blade manages to avoid stutters and hiccups almost completely.
My experience has also been remarkably free of bugs or unexpected behaviour.
To me, this demonstrates an impressive level of restraint in pursuit of the best player experience.
This gels with the animation work that ensures characters look and feel great while fighting through the hordes.
I’m also a fan of enemy designs and animation - especially the bosses.
You’ll face off against some truly outrageous designs that offer up a steep challenge.
It’s often difficult to parse what you’re looking at which only amps up that sense of intrigue.
The animations are superb and enhanced by per-object motion blur.
It’s not just limited to vistas of ruined cities either.
Then there’s image quality.
Performance mode, however, delivers a 1440p presentation that also manages to stick relatively close to the target.
Both seem to use a basic spatial upscaling method.
As a result, image quality can sometimes exceed the native 4K option.
Beyond image quality, however, no other visual differences are evident.
Even when things heat up, the frame-rate very rarely hiccups.
The only time I detected slowdown was during very specific cutscenes and even then, it’s very brief.
Quality mode, simply targets 30fps and, in my opinion, is the least interesting mode.
It is at least properly frame paced and very stable, so that’s something.
The dips in performance are mostly undetectable with VRR engaged.
Rather, balanced is simply a bonus option for VRR users that produces slightly better image quality.
It’s still pretty good without VRR, but less so - it varies per area.
The desert, for instance, is mostly a locked 60 in balanced mode.
This is a perfect example of how to do performance modes in a console game.
Shift Up nailed this, exceeding most Unreal Engine games I’ve played this gen. Well done.
There’s more to this game, though.
This whole sequence plays unlike anything else you’d experienced up to this point and I loved it.
I was genuinely surprised by how well put together and paced this game really is.
All of this is enhanced greatly by a superb audio presentation - mostly.
The actual production work is awesome.
The soundscape, sound effects and voice acting are all top notch.
More importantly, the soundtrack is simply superb and adds a lot to the experience.
However, there is one audio critique I wanted to mention - surround sound.
So, in that sense, I feel the surround experience could use some additional work.
I recommend trying to get used to the demo and see if it suits you.
