EVE stole my heart when I met her on the Sony PlayStation 5 in 2024. I was overjoyed when I reunited with the badass Naytiba-slaying babe on PC in Stellar Blade: Complete Edition. Locked and loaded with extra content galore. Korean devs SHIFT UP’s action RPG is back in full force. 

EVE’s journey is upgraded with PC boosts like Nvidia DLSS 4 and AMD FSR 3 upscaling, ultrawide display support, up-rezzed textures, new voice localisations in Chinese and Japanese and, most exciting for me, carrying over the glorious PS5 controller functionality with haptic feedback for both the Standard Edition and the Complete Edition.

The Complete Edition includes all DLC, including the cross-over expansions: Stellar Blade x GODDESS OF VICTORY: NIKKE and the Stellar Blade x NieR:Automata expansion and bonus outfit packs. As another sweet bonus, there’s a limited-time outfit CD-Key to redeem in SHIFT UP’s free-to-play mobile game, GODDESS OF VICTORY: NIKKE, that can be picked up when arriving in the last bastion of humanity, Xion. 

Stellar Blade follows EVE, a member of the 7th Airborne Squad, a squad deployed from an off-world colony of Androids (otherwise known as Angels) to save what’s left of humanity. Her mission is to eliminate the Naytiba, horrific, mutated creatures taking over whatever little is left for the small portion of humans remaining. Her task is big, fraught with dangerous foes and obstacles, and the worst thing I can think of is that she must traverse through deserts with lots of sand.

The game walks the line between sci-fi, action and, in some moments, almost horror. From the dark, abandoned city of Eidos 7 to various wastelands and wreckages, Stellar Blade is gorgeous. Its stunning visuals have only improved thanks to the graphical capabilities on PC and the boosted environmental textures. EVE, her allies and enemies are all incredibly detailed down to the fabric’s sheen and every gruesome piece of rotting flesh hanging off Naytibas. The animations are gorgeous, and EVE’s movement, especially during combat, is like the most fast-paced, graceful dance I’ve ever seen.

New players have a learning curve to get to this state of flux. With a hack-and-slash gameplay style, Stellar Blade focuses on landing as many hits and combos as possible. It puts enough need to master dodging and parrying to make timing crucial. There’s limited room for error in the best way possible. Landing a perfect dodge or parry has glorious feedback, with a slash from a sword or a sweep away from an enemy just feeling right.

Combat is still great on mouse and keyboard, with decent default keybindings and the option to re-map keys. However, I still found Stellar Blade’s combat shines considerably from the tactile feeling of the DualSense controller. I preferred to play that way. I did find platforming and some movement to feel a bit more finicky to get the correct angles for prompts and to make jumps on the mouse and keyboard.  It felt more precise on a controller, but enjoyable whichever way you play.

There are 25 more outfits and 9 new accessories to deck EVE out in to look stylish during missions, which can be unlocked throughout the game. The Boss Challenge mode has added an additional boss who awards EVE with another outfit on defeat. There are three new songs to play in camps, and I enjoyed taking a breather, chilling to mellow new tunes. Which, on top of the already killer K-Pop-esque songs, orchestral numbers, drum and bass, and EDM tracks, was a nice little bonus.

The audio design is next level, with every sound of ambience and all manners of combat and creature sounds fitting perfectly. The voice acting is top-tier, too. I’ve played alongside EVE in English and Korean; both voice casts did an incredible job, and I’m sure all the voice talents in other languages are great, too.

Thanks to the uncapped frame rates on the highest graphical settings, I mostly stayed between 190- 230fps in cutscenes and between 190 and 207 in-game. AI upscaling support and frame generation offer an even bigger boost to performance. There was a delay with loading between cutscenes and when moving between areas, where I saw tooltips for between 10 and 30 seconds on a few occasions. It’s a small price to pay for the incredible all-around performance in every other area of the game.

The most bizarre peeve of mine is that despite the prompt to log in with my Sony account, there currently isn’t a way to carry over a PlayStation 5 save file. As someone running a new game+ playthrough on PS5, it would’ve been excellent to carry over all my content, especially all my stunning outfits. It was a bizarre omission.

Stellar Blade: Complete Edition is, as it says, the complete package. For those seeking the Stellar Blade experience in the standard edition, there’s still a tremendous amount of gameplay in the base game alone, and there may be enough allure to buy the add-on content later. The PC versions can’t be beat for players looking to experience Stellar Blade again with the performance and graphical upgrades on PC or for brand-new fans looking for a great action-adventure title to add to their arsenal.

Written by: Yasmin Noble