Shift Up’s PlayStation 5 exclusive has some graffiti that could be construed as a bit racist, but Sony already swears that it will disappear from the game after the Day 1 patch is installed…
Digital Foundry did a technical analysis of Stelalr Blade, which runs on Unreal Engine 4. So the engine is a bit outdated (5.4 is already available to developers), but Shift Up goes all out, including volumetric lighting, to make the game look nice. There are also none of the annoying shader compilation stutters that have been a major annoyance with Unreal Engine 4 titles over the past few years. There are surprisingly few bugs in the game, which is a rarity in AAA titles these days.
The performance graphics mode ranges from dynamic 1080p to 1440p resolution, maintaining 60 FPS almost all the time (rarely dropping to 59). Resolution mode is a dynamic 4K resolution and delivers 30 frames per second with proper frame timing. Balanced mode uses a dynamic 1440p resolution with temporal reconstruction (more often than the other two modes) to deliver a sharper-looking, upscaled 4K at 60 fps, but the unstable frame rate is more noticeable here, although it doesn’t drop below 50 fps here either. It’s a good choice if you have a VRR-capable display (one that supports variable refresh rates).
IGN has pointed out that one of the in-game shops, the R Shop, has some rather racist graffiti on the wall. It reads “Hard. The two together could be considered racist (as there is no difference between L and R in Chinese, Korean and Japanese, making it difficult to pronounce), and PlayStation responded with a statement. They don’t think the two things were put together on purpose, so Shift Up did it on purpose, but they will fix it with the day one patch.
Stellar Blade will be released on April 26th for PlayStation 5.
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