Stellar Blade PC- (Byte Sized Review)

More than a year after its console release, Korean development studio Shift Up’s Stellar Blade has finally come to PC and man, is it good! And it plays wonderfully on Valve’s Steam Deck handheld PC, too.

Now, this isn’t a review of Stellar Blade as a game. We’ve already done that, with Guy describing as a “a fantastic sci-fi adventure, with deep, satisfying combat, amazing graphics and awesome world building. concluding”. You can read it here

I’ve enjoyed Stellar Blade PC much more than I expected to. The combat is satisfying without being too overwhelming (although some of the boss battles did challenge me a tad) and it features a rather lovely amount of graphical tweaks, that will let you lock in a solid frame rate.

Action on the go!

It has a dedicated Steam Deck preset, which is marvellous! With some tweaking (rendering scale set to 70%, AMD FSR 3 sharpness to 3, frame generation off, environmental object detail to medium, character object detail to high, and everything set to low), you’ll happily skip along at a solid 45 frames per second. Meaning the combat flows nice and the game just looks superb.

My main gaming PC was getting repaired at the time I started playing Stellar Blade – hence unleashing my mighty Steam Deck on this action odyssey. But when my PC came back from the shop, I installed it and fired it up. It plays just lovely on my rather ancient AMD Radeon RX580, a GPU that continues to amaze me (at 1080p resolution, of course). Solid frames, looks great, just a pretty game all round.

Honestly, with how good the PC version plays, I’m convinced the team at Shift Up are magicians.