izigame.me

I'm an hour and a half in but so far I'm loving this game, more than I expected to. I expected to have fun combat with a cringe story or main characters, but actually so far it's been very enjoyable. It's incredibly refreshing to play a brand new IP with such a strong presentation and new ideas, so for that I have to commend the devs here. The graphics are also mind blowingly good. I have a few points I'll make for now and I'll update my review when I've played more.
Performance wise, I am getting over 100fps consistently after getting out of the prologue using DLSS Quality. For whatever reason, the prologue doesn't perform as well as the main chapters of the game, and also doesn't look as good in my opinion. It's also worth noting that as of midnight on launch day, Nvidia has not yet released drivers for this game, so performance may get improved once those are out as well.
For reference, my setup:
-RTX 4090 GPU
-i9-13900k CPU
-64GB RAM
-Alienware 3423DW OLED (Ultrawide 21:9 3440x1440p Resolution)
PROS:
-Amazing graphics and effects
-Satisfying combat (not just the visuals, but a good thump on kill shots plus good physics throwing enemies back makes magic feel powerful)
-Exciting spells
-Strong presentation of story and character motivations so far
-A few genuinely funny story moments
-Settings menus give good information around how your performance will be affected with various settings
CONS:
-DLSS 3 implementation has some of the worst ghosting I've seen. Not just in the environment but even the reticle and HUD. It looks really bad. Once I turned it off everything looked much better (minus my frames).
-Extremely disappointed in the lack of HDR! This game is SERIOUSLY begging for it.
-Very surprised by the lack of a brightness calibration tool. All the game has is a "Gamma" bar with zero indication of what the artists intended you to see. Not a great experience going back and forth between settings and the game to figure out what is "correct."
-Although the settings menus do give information on how performance will be affected, it does not allow you to see the difference either in stills or by making the menu transparent while in game. It also doesn't tell you what any of the settings actually mean, so aside from seeing roughly how your performance might be affected, you really have very little idea of what you're actually sacrificing or gaining by adjusting a setting.
-I think the CPU budget section of the settings menu is bugged, as I have a 13900k, and maxing out the settings says I'm "100" over budget, yet my performance is very good.
-I continue to dislike DLSS being used as a crutch for game performance instead of optimizing an engine. That said, so far, it looks very good regardless.
-It doesn't look like there's any way to disable or adjust anti-aliasing which is a shame because even turning off DLSS, if you stop moving, things can look kind of blurry. Speaking of which, you also can't disable motion blur aside from cinematics. I usually like motion blur, but I know a lot of people hate it, so that's worth noting here.
Most of my cons so far are fairly minor, but please keep in mind I have an unusually strong system so the fact that I'm not experiencing the performance issues others are is probably an anomaly. If you have a similar system to me, and the game looks interesting to you, it may be worth a shot. I'm loving it so far and will update this review as I play more. If you are worried about performance, maybe wait for Nvidia drivers and some patches from the dev team before jumping in.