Sholva Stellar Blade Review

A great PC Port and quite enjoyable experience. In the year 2025, Unreal Engine on PC and stuttering tend to go quite together, except in those rare occasions where they don’t, and Stellar Blade is one of such cases. It is a well optimized PC version for the UE 4 title coming from PS5 and, on my system, this was one of 2025’s best performing games. On my Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB, this game was very easy to run at locked 120 FPS, at 1440p output resolution and Max Settings, especially with the help of Frame Generation. With pretty decent PC Latency numbers on my system, not even FG could make me feel any significant lag and…yeah, this game has some intense boss encounters, particularly close to the end, and I had no trouble at all beating all of them. Moving on to Gameplay, what can I say: I had fun playing this game; the gameplay is quite fluid for the most part, it does not feel like a struggle at all, running around the more open areas in the game, since Eve can auto-sprint pretty quickly, she’s fast, and the game offers a decent amount of teleport locations as well for those bigger levels. Combat wise, the game is well animated, hits feel like they have some impact to them and you do need to pay attention to enemy tells and react accordingly. My small pet peeve with the combat is the fact that some attack animations cannot be fully cancelled but I guess it is part of the design / need to commit to certain actions. It is something I could see improved by the developers in the sequel, for sure, because other than that, the combat felt quite satisfying. The Soundtrack in this game is fantastic, great ambient pieces and intense action ones too, some others full with emotion, for those particular moments in the game and, in general, great job with the soundtrack, definitely stuck with me quite after finishing the game. The Characters and Story are, for the most part, well written but you can’t expect some amazing revelations in this game that aren’t easy to anticipate, if you have played other similar games, where Stellar Blade draws inspiration from, and you know which games I’m talking about, well it’s quite easy to predict most of the twists in the game. This does not mean I didn’t enjoy them, I did actually like where the story went, and how the characters were handled but it won’t be the deepest story ever for most people. Secondary NPCs, quite a few of them had very cool quest lines, that I also enjoyed so, overall, I never felt bored by the Story or its Characters. And, finally, on a Visual level, I think this game looks gorgeous, for not having any advanced Ray Tracing effects or anything like that, the art style was excellent, the Asset Detail was pretty high on many things (made me spend a lot of time in Photo Mode appreciating desks, computers, stores and NPCs around the city etc.) up on close inspection, and so on. Overall, a very decent action game and, as mentioned, one of the best ports for me in 2025, for sure.