Introduction
And we’re back with another blog of First Impressions and Gameplay Review, the show where we give you straight-up gameplay and our first impressions of the latest games releasing. As usual, it’s me, Jake, and today we’re just taking a quick look at Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut. It’s the PC version of the famous PS4 game, and I think PC fans have been waiting for this one for a while now. This is like the definitive samurai game for a lot of people, and now it’s finally on PC. It’s full price, 60 bucks on Steam. We jumped in at launch and fired it up for a few hours, so we got some first impressions. Now, we usually jump in and give these a glance because Sony PC ports of their first-party titles have a history of rocky launches.”
Performance and Graphics
“Thankfully, Ghost of Tsushima has been alright for me so far. It’s got some problems, but most of them are minor. So, gameplay-wise, it ran well, and it also looked really good with minimal settings tweaking or fussing around. It boasts really comprehensive upscaling and frame generation, man. FSR, DSS, Nvidia’s Reflex stuff, there’s a lot here to really maximize the fidelity and the amount of frames per second. It seems like you can get this bad boy really screaming if that’s what you really want, and it does look great.”
Visuals and Atmosphere
“Just seeing the characters and the world rendered in higher quality and pretty flawlessly really makes Sucker Punch’s original work stand out even more. I mean, beautiful, detailed landscapes, realistic-looking character faces, all just kind of amped up to 11 now. It was always a gorgeous game even back on PS4, and being a huge fan of the original and then replaying it on PS5, it’s not like a completely different looking game or anything, but it just looks much better. I said it then, and I’ll say it now: this game’s color palette really kicks ass. And the game has some of the best sunsets next to The Witcher 3, in my opinion.”
Widescreen Support and Performance on Different Platforms
“Also, full widescreen support is great, as you can see here. This is really the perfect type of game for widescreen. The environments and the framing in camera just really beg for it. A lot of cutscenes fit well, but unfortunately, a few don’t. And I guess this part is really if you’re widescreen or not. Some of these are just not running in real-time, they’re some kind of like pre-rendered cutscene, and it just doesn’t look very good sometimes.”
Technical Issues and Glitches
“My bigger issues lie in problems with cutscenes and transitions, part of what I mentioned earlier with the pre-rendered stuff. If there’s any big issue with this port, this is the type of stuff that I hope is fixed soon. There’s like this weird occasional flickering during darker scenes, like a cutscene would then transition into gameplay. I’d get a bunch of weird flickering across the screen. Like, case in point, the big opening ride across the field with the title card after the intro, that kind of flickered for me and just took me out of it. It’s a bit distracting.”
Recommendation and Conclusion
Otherwise, Ghost of Tsushima is still a game I recommend everyone play, wherever you are. It starts off a bit slow, doesn’t make the best first impression, in my opinion. It kind of feels like just another open-world game. But the deeper you go, the more you explore the world and master the combat, and like the later you get into the story, this game is compelling top to bottom. That’s a hard way to live. It’s not supposed to be easy. It’s not the most challenging or the most super in-depth with RPG stuff, but it’s both slow and contemplative and like a chill-out type of game while also being cinematic and entertaining and, most importantly for me, memorable.
