As part of the latest Sony State of Play, an announcement that Stellar Blade is coming to PC was made. The game already has a Steam page and looks to be all glitz and glam, with the addition of a new photo mode, and some upcoming DLC that will integrate with the developer, Shift Up's other intellectual properties.

So what is the premise of the game?

The future of humanity is balanced on the edge of a blade. Ravaged by strange, powerful creatures, Earth has been abandoned, and what is left of the decimated human race has fled to a Colony in outer space.

After travelling from the Colony, EVE arrives on the desolate remains of our planet with a clear-cut mission: to save humankind by reclaiming Earth from the Naytiba – the malevolent force that has devastated it.

But as EVE tackles the Naytiba one-by-one, piecing together the mysteries of the past in the ruins of human civilization, she realizes that her mission is far from straightforward. In fact, almost nothing is as it seems…

Previously, I wrote a review for the PlayStation 5 version of the game, and there's a lot to think about from a PC gaming point of view. first, Stellar Blade uses the Unreal engine to render its stunning visuals, and that hasn't exactly been known for ... err, pardon the pun, stellar performance on PC. There's the odds of rampant stuttering or lengthy shader compile times.

On the other side of the coin, the Unreal engine has been around for quite some time, and the long rumored PC version of this game is probably going to excite those modders who are keen to submit to rather NSFW desires, given the anatomy of the game's protoganist, Eve.

Yes, that Anatomy. Underneath its veneer of objectification (and away from the uncanny valley) Eve's character attempts to grasp with notions of free will, and of course, saving a human species from the impending alien threat, no matter what.

It even gets pretty biblical in terms of its simile, right down to the obvious nature of the character names. There's Eve, Adam, Lily (Lillith?) - and other references to the divine stacked within the game's environments.

Still, as a potential PC port, the world feels a little bit empty compared to a lot of modern titles, with its hub-style design and vast environments. Perhaps there'll be a larger population in these hubs on PC, but ... perhaps it is barren because human life is scarce, rare, and cherished, accompanied by the many other robotic machinations that are found in Stellar Blade's world. Hard to say.

Do you like fast paced action games and love the crushing difficulty of Dark Souls or Elden Ring?

If you do, then there will be plenty to like about Stellar Blade.

The combat is tight (even if the dodge button seems to have some sort of frustrating lag built into it...) perhaps lower input lag on PC will fix that?

Then there's the potential of mobile play on a platform like the Steam Deck, as many PS5 titles that have ported over to PC seem to find a good, happy home on that platform. However, that will probably come with a caveat, because this game's scope is pretty massive, meaning there is likely to be a large install size.

Its a glorious visual spectacle to behold, sure; but at what cost? The PC specs for the game are still TBD, but I would expect that you would want a fairly high end rig to run this game well. We can look to recent ports from the PS5 to the PC to get a brief idea, take for example, FF7: Rebirth and its system specs:

Stellar Blade is likely to be pretty heavy if you want to play at 4K at a decent resolution, ad its not yet known if the game / engine will be locked to a certain framerate like many ports in the style of this game. I would hope, and suspect, that the frame rate won't be capped due to the use of the Unreal Engine, but we've seen crazier, lazier things on the PC port front of late.

On the bright side, given the use of Unreal engine, it should run on Linux, which is great.

So what did I say in my PS5 review?

In summary:

When I first read about the obnoxious outfits and physics in Stellar Blade, I thought it was a gimmick. Then I read a little more and the comparisons to Elden Ring, and soulslike games, along with the science fiction, futuristic, and apocalyptic setting; I thought I'd give the demo a go.

I did. I then played the demo again, after frustratingly trying to get good.

Then, it clicked. Fluid combat, an incredible soundtrack, character models that are motivated by carnal hedonism, where the developers played the classic card of "know your audience". This leads to the surface level looking like the cover of tasteless magazine, but there's a diamond underneath the veneer. There's a game with complicated combat mechanics and challenging gameplay.

Do you wish Elden Ring was a science fiction setting? Do you wish that it wasn't a quiet, lonely wasteland? Do you wish it had some cities with meaningful side-quests? Okay, all of this is a stretch and its safe to say that these are very different games, but what is not different is the level of satisfaction you get while slaughtering enemies that are overwhelmingly more threatening to you than you are to them.

So, should you get it on PC?

If you like Elden Ring and want that experience in a sci-fi world, go for it. If you're enamoured by the modding potential, go for it. If you want a deeply philosophical treatise on human life facing extinction at the hands of a horrifying alien speices... then expect less.

For me, I'll throw it on my wishlist and wait for it to go on sale. I do prefer PC over all over platforms, after all.