Stellar Blade shattered expectations when it arrived as a PlayStation 5 exclusive last year. Despite being the debut console title from Korean gacha game developer Shift-up, the game was knocking it out of the park with striking gameplay, incredible music, and gorgeous high-definition visuals that stood confidently alongside Sony’s first-party heavy hitters like God of War and Spider-man. The fervor around an eventual PC port of this game has been bustling since it released. As someone who only ever played a demo of the original PlayStation 5 release, this PC port combined with it’s bundled assortment of crossover DLC served as my wake-up call to finally dive in. And across my desktop PC and my Steam Deck OLED, Stellar Blade has impressed me on every level.
The graphics and display options on offer here are comparable to other Sony PC ports in how exhaustive and detailed the list of settings to tweak are. Resolution scaling will be set to either NVIDIA DLSS 4, and AMD’s FSR 4 or FSR 3, depending on the GPU you use. FSR 3 is the universal option, comparable to the upscaling used on PS5, while FSR 4 is closer to DLSS in how it works and exclusive to the new Radeon RX 9000 GPUs.
With upscaling enabled, the game raced to an average 90-100 FPS when played at 1440P with max graphics settings on my GeForce RTX 3080. A couple cutscenes full of lots of monsters would cause minor dips, but they were rare and I never felt like the resolution scaling was a distraction. This can even be combined with DLSS frame generation, the game easily hit smooth framerates without major graphical downgrades.
What blew me away, though, was that even with resolution scaling turned completely off, the game was able to maintain a locked 60FPS at 1440P nearly the entire time. As is typicaly, the RTX 3080 easily outperforms every base PlayStation 5 graphics mode, which relied on scaling solutions to hit those targets. Playing any new games at 4K and a steady FPS feels like a pipe dream unless you’ve got a beefy rig or generate half your frames, but Stellar Blade shows a level of optimisation that so few AAA games nowadays do.
Even better, this all means the game is great on Steam Deck. So many recent Sony PC ports require a lot of visual compromise to just barely run on the Valve’s handheld PC, but Stellar Blade feels like it was made for this form factor. The game stays at a steady framerate and maintains a shocking amount of it’s original visual detail and quality.
Packed in alongside the base game content is a duology of crossover DLC with other games that carry a similar thematic through-line of “if android, why hot?” – Square Enix’s Nier Automata an Shift-up’s own title Nikke: Goddess of Victory. Both DLC are more a collection of easter eggs and bonus activities than they are a massive expansion or story continuation. If you’re a fan of either property though, the amount of references and call-backs and familiar costumes tossed in from each game are a delight. The Nikke: Goddess of Victory DLC in particular, which launched alongside this port, includes a new fishing mini-game, a cover-shooter mission series replicating the gameplay from the fanservice-filled gacha game, and an entire new boss fight against a major character from that title. My only complaint? No love for my favorite Nikke character, Elegg. BOOM is life.
Stellar Blade is incredible on PC, and doesn’t compromise at all on any of the quality from the original PlayStation 5 release. For existing fans, the upgrades in resolution and framerate potential are a revelation and the new Nikke dlc is a blast. For those who haven’t played the game yet, this is easily the most accessible and versatile way to check it out.
