Controls on the keyboard are fully re-mappable. It feels as good as a controller, but the support for non-Playstation controllers required moving controls from the touch pad to a combination of d-pad and stick movement. Unless you grow a second thumb this is impossible to use while moving. The right d-pad + right stick up is mapped to blowing the wind to show the path to your objective. I think that mapping combination was a very poor choice.
Performance wise, the game holds up well at 60fps on the highest settings with no issue, but I had inconsistent results trying to go anything above that. Loading times are very quick, to the point where trying to read some of the messages in-between is a wasted effort. I haven’t had any crashes or game-breaking bugs either, so it seems very stable.
Graphics look stunning as always for these Playstation ports, although there weren’t a lot of graphical settings to tweak besides the ones you would expect. Some of the cutscenes were also very low quality and I expect they were unable to improve the cutscenes that are just video files, and not rendered in-game.
Apart from a fairly major bug early on where the ever cool "standoff" mechanic failed to work with high frame rates, the PC port has had fairly minimal issues, a lot of which are revolving around the multiplayer "Legends" mode. I also had some issues with lag during the beginning of cutscenes and some minor desync in audio to video in cutscenes, but both issues seemed to fix themselves after a few hours of playing.
Ghost of Tsushima is a good PC port of a great game. If you never got around to playing it, I don’t see why you can’t buy this, but if you have the choice of PS or PC, there’s nothing about the PC port that makes it more worth your money.
• If you are not familiar with the game, it is set in 1274, on Tsushima Island, where the last samurai, Jin Sakai, must master a new fighting style, the way of the Ghost, to defeat the Mongol forces and fight for the freedom and independence of Japan.
By Michael Robertson
