Sackboy: A Big Adventure PC review – Another great PlayStation port

❘ Published: 2022-12-01T11:18:58

Sony

Sackboy’s Big Adventure might be a few years old at this point, however, you can now enjoy the game on PC. But, is Sackboy’s latest outing optimized just as well as other Sony PC ports?

Sackboy’s Big Adventure might be an odd choice for a PC port, when Demon’s Souls is laying right there for the taking. However, it’s the latest in what now appears to be a long line of Sony first-party titles coming to PC. We’ve seen God of War, Uncharted, Horizon, Spider-Man, and now Sackboy’s Big Aventure land on the humble old personal computer.

So far, Sony’s porting efforts have been largely stellar. You can expect there to be full support for DLSS. Thanks the Sackboy’s Big Adventure is a relatively small-scale title, you can also expect it to have relatively light system requirements, meaning that if you have a gaming PC built in the last five years or so, you’ll probably be able to run this game pretty well.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure PC: Key details

Price: $59.99 / £49.99
Developer: Sumo Digital
Release date: 27.10.2022 (PC)
Platforms: PS4, PS5, PC

Sackboy: A Big Adventure trailer

Sackboy takes notes from Mario

Sackboy’s Big Adventure is a platformer at heart and one that wears its inspiration on its sleeve. We found that throughout our time with the game, evokes all of the best parts of Super Mario 3D Land, and Super Mario 3D World. As a huge fan of those two titles, Sackboy: A Big Adventure keeps things fun, bright, and interesting throughout its run. It also has oodles of heart, with heaps of style, too.

The platformer uses a stitched look that looks gorgeous, while the different areas you traverse through are equally impressive in their execution. The hugely strong art direction is just the cherry on top of what is already a fantastic game.

Sackboy: A Big Adventure mashes together fun and interesting new mechanics to ensure that you won’t get bored. A huge part of the game is collecting hidden collectibles, and you can jump, traverse and interact with your surroundings to your heart’s content.

Co-op conundrum

Sackboy: A Big Adventure also has support for seamless online and offline co-op, where you can run through the game with up to three more players. Sadly, on PC you are required to log into Epic Games, even if you purchased it on Steam, and there is no cross-play to speak of. Luckily, we found lots of fun with the game’s co-op mode regardless by using Local play.

It’s fun, and family-friendly, with a couple of extra additions for those who have a co-op buddy to access special levels and areas.

Nvidia gets special treatment

There are very few faults with this PC port. Like many other of Sony’s PC-based efforts, you have access to features like custom resolutions, in addition to DLSS. For those not in the know, DLSS allows you to render the game internally at a lower resolution, and have AI do the rest of the work for you. DLSS 2 works splendidly here. So, for those on older hardware, don’t be afraid to crank up the settings a bit to get a prettier-looking game, without sacrificing any performance.

There’s one huge caveat to this, though. Sackboy seemingly does not support AMD’s open-source FSR. This is another supersampling tool like DLSS that works on non-Nvidia graphics cards. This is a strange omission, since Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection also both feature it.

This seems somewhat glaring for the legions of users who might want to play the game on the likes of the Steam Deck, or Ayaneo Air. The rest of the game gets fully-loaded settings, with options that range all the way up to full PS5-like quality.

The game also has features for the Dualsense, so if you wanted to use that with this PC port, you’d be getting the controller’s full functionality.

Scaled for speed

We tested Sackboy: A Big Adventure on our RTX 3080-equipped testbench system. Of course, GPU like that will allow the game to run at a blazing-fast speed. While cutscenes remain capped at 60 FPS, you are able to lift the framerate limiter. We cranked all the settings up, with all manner of ray-traced bells and whistles, to boot and the game ran at a silky smooth 60 FPS, thanks to DLSS set to “Quality” mode at 1440p.

On lower-end devices, you will also be able to simplify the geometry and turn the settings down. On our Ayaneo Air Pro, we managed to achieve around 45 FPS at 720p. This is more than a playable experience.

So, no matter what system you might have, you’ll be able to run this fantastic title quite easily.

The Verdict – 4/5

Sackboy: A Big Adventure has tonnes of heart, and just has joy bursting from every seam, whether you play alone, or in co-op. The scalable Unreal 4 engine impresses here, as we had the game looking, and running well on two spectacularly different devices. We only wished there was FSR support here, as it’s an incredibly odd omission.

Reviewed on PC