Stellar Blade is now even better after its day-one patch

A new patch has made a second playthrough of Stellar Blade a must

(Credit: Shift Up)

• 👍 Stellar Blade has received a day-one update

• 👏 The update adds a brand-new mode, New Game Plus

• 🙌 It means you can take your skills and unlocks with you into the game’s Hard mode

• 📆 Stellar Blade releases on April 26, exclusively for PS5

Stellar Blade releases tomorrow, April 26, but that hasn’t stopped developer Shift Up from making the game even better before it hits the hands of gamers.

Unlike the vast majority of day-one patches, Stellar Blade’s update doesn’t focus on addressing critical bugs, poor performance, or game-breaking issues. Instead, it adds a New Game Plus mode, allowing you to take all the skills you’ve unlocked into the game’s Hard mode difficulty, which is available once you’ve completed the game on Normal.

Not only that, but Stellar Blade’s New Game Plus mode unlocks additional skill tree slots so you can make your Beta Charge and Burst Skill abilities even more powerful – handy considering the enemies you’ll face will be even tougher than before. The drone can also be upgraded further than before.

Any memory sticks, passwords, and lore you’ve found in your first playthrough will carry over, too, meaning you can unlock those chests that previously evaded you the second time around.

What’s more, developer Shift Up says it’s made improvements to the game’s input latency, which should make performing parries easier, and added an option to toggle film grain and chromatic aberration on or off. New costumes and enemy placements have also been added.

In my Stellar Blade review, I gave the PlayStation 5 exclusive a perfect score. I think it’s one of the best PS5 games of this generation, and the addition of a New Game+ only strengthens that belief.

It’s also surprising just how quickly New Game Plus for Stellar Blade has arrived. We’ve seen developers take months to add the popular mode, with Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 adding New Game Plus five months after its initial October release date.

Considering just how polished and bug-free Stellar Blade is and that it remarkably only takes up 30.4GB of storage space, perhaps it isn’t too surprising after all.

If you’re curious about the game, a free demo of Stellar Blade is available from the PlayStation Store.