Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut review

PC Gamer's got your back Our experienced team dedicates many hours to every review, to really get to the heart of what matters most to you. Find out more about how we evaluate games and hardware. Need to Know What is it? The PCenhanced edition of Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, which includes the main game and the Iki Island DLC. Release date May 18, 2024 Expect to pay $59.99/49.99 Developer Sucker Punch Productions Publisher PlayStation PC LLC Reviewed on Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti, 32GB RAM (DDR4), AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, ASRock B450M Pro4 Steam Deck No Link Steam 23.94 View at Amazon 47.49 View at Amazon 2 Amazon customer reviews Good Unsurprisingly, Ghost of Tsushima remains an excellent thirdperson actionadventure game four years after its initial release. It's not suddenly become crap. Huzzah! Doing an Assassin's Creedstyle game set in Japan years before Ubisoft decided to make Assassin's Creed Shadows , Sucker Punch delivers a gripping, beautiful, and often memorable samurai epicone loaded with tense sword fights, brutal assassinations, and plenty of storytelling class. So, yes, I rate the game and recommend you buy and play it if you haven't already, which it seems like plenty of PC gamers have already done . The Director's Cut also includes the Iki Island expansion, so you're getting the full Ghost of Tsushima experience. It does take a bit of time to find its feet, though, and, the early moments are quite slow and regimented. And it's still a four year old game, so despite its PCspecific graphical enhancements, the game's core engine is starting to look a bit dated by modern standards. (Image credit Future) Bringing a katana to a knife fight It might not be on the bleeding edge, but Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut still delivers a number of improvements over the console edition, including unlocked framerates, support for Nvidia DLSS3, AMD FSR3, and Intel XeSS, as well as compatibility with Nvidia Reflex and image qualityenhancing Nvidia DLAA. On top of that, this the game also supports ultrawide (219), super Ultrawide (329), and even 489 Triple Monitor support, meaning the sweeping landscapes of Tsushima really can stretch out to your vision's periphery. There are also a few nice little extras thrown in, too, such as the ability for cinematics to be rendered in realtime, a fact that unlocks Japanese voice language lip sync. This sounds like a small thing, but this is absolutely a game you should play with Japanese audio, be that in Samurai Cinema mode (Japanese language, English subs, fullcolour graphics) or Kurosawa (Japanese language, English subs, black and white, film grain heavy visuals) mode. As such, Japanese lip sync in cinematics adds to the immersion massively. (Image credit Future) Finally, there's adaptive haptic feedback, too, if you have a compatible controller. This means that you can get physical feedback when fighting with your blade, or shooting with your bow. A welcome addition. As for things that are not included with this PC edition, which I really would like to have seen, the most obvious is real time ray tracing, both in terms of global illumination and in terms of reflections. I'll come back to this later. For more info on the game's hardware demands, be sure to check out our performance analysis feature. (Image credit Future) My experience with the PC the Director's Cut Playing the game on my primary rig, which is powered by an Nvidia RTX 3090 Ti, 32GB RAM (DDR4), and an AMD Ryzen 7 5700X, Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut ran consistently at over 100 fps at FHD resolution. The RTX 3090Ti is only DLSS2 compatible, too, so I'm confident that if you had a 40series card from Nvidia you'd likely achieve framerates of over 140fps. This game runs like butter, then, and even if you were using more dated hardware, I'm still very confident you'd get a locked framerate of 60fps or more. That high, stable framerate meant I found much of the combat easier and more natural compared to the console version. It's not quite as brutal and unforgiving as a soulslike, but timing sword counters and parries is key in this game, so the smoothness is a real benefit. It also helped when lining up swift bow shots, especially firing from on horseback, which require a good degree of precision. Swapping out the primary monitor for a 329 variant, the sweeping landscapes of Tsushima island do indeed look stunning. Wind rustling through the grasses and trees, shimmering lakes nestling up against wartorn rustic villages, majestic forts and pagodas breaking distant treelinesall seem slightly more real with the wider, perspectivebroadening aspect ratio. That said, Ghost of Tsushima remains really rather pretty at any aspect ratio. (Image credit Sucker Punch, Sony) While I think it's still stunning thanks to its fantastic art directionsomething that is absolutely enhanced by the PC version's bells and whistles there's also no escaping that, four years after its original release, Ghost of Tsushima is not a visual tourdeforce anymore, and its engine allows limited environmental interactivity and, well, realistic clutter. Don't get me wrong, not every game needs Starfieldlevels of interactable objects and environmental details, but aside from people, resources and collectibles, this is a pretty static world. (Image credit Future) It's also a world where, thanks to the lack of ray tracing, there are moments when the lightning looks pretty old hat and flat compared newer openworld third person actionadventure games like Star Wars Jedi Survivor . While the character models, textures, and lightning aren't quite at 2024 standards, this doesn't hamper the story or the action, with it technically pretty darn faultless. I didn't experience a single crash, either, and the only visual glitch I saw was a distant pagoda not rendering properly once, with its angled rafters appearing to float in the air. (Image credit Sucker Punch, Sony) A great PC port Sony should replicate Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut on PC is a great allround port of a very good game, and is now the definitive way to play it.