Prior to release, all indications were that Stellar Blade would be an unusually technically polished current-gen launch, with the game’s demo leaving many impressed. But, of course, demos aren’t always indicative of the final game, with devs sometimes taking a thin slice of gameplay and give it more polish than the rest of the game. Well, the review embargo for Stellar Blade has arrived, and it seems it’s not only a good time in terms of action (check out Wccftech’s positive review here) but according to the tech heads at Digital Foundry, the full game is every bit as technically sound as the demo. You can check out Digital Foundry’s full video analysis below, provided you have around 20 minutes to spare, or you can scroll down for our rundown of the salient points.
Stellar Blade is built on Unreal Engine 4, but per Digital Foundry, Shift Up is making use of the full toolbox of the somewhat dated engine, including impressive volumetric lighting. The game also avoids those annoying shader compilation stutters that have plagued a lot of UE4 titles over the past couple of years and is surprisingly bug-free for a modern AAA release.
In terms of visual modes and performance, it’s a similar story to what we got with the demo. Performance mode runs at a dynamic 1080p to 1440p and sticks its 60fps target 99 percent of the time, dropping at most a frame here and there. Resolution mode is a dynamic 4K and delivers a rock-solid 30fps with proper frame pacing. Finally, Balanced mode is a dynamic 1440p that uses more advanced temporal reconstruction than the game’s other modes to achieve a sharper-looking upresed 4K with a 60fps target. Balanced is the only mode with some framerate jitters, although it doesn’t seem to drop any lower than 50fps, and thus is a very viable option if you have a VRR-capable screen. As for visual quality, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the modes beyond basic resolution.
Overall, seems like Shift Up has delivered quite nicely on a technical front. Stellar Blade acts as a nice counter to those who say current-gen consoles are already tapped out. They aren’t if you really focus on polish and optimization.
Stellar Blade arrives on PS5 on April 26.
