Thanks to the release of , which is living up to expectations after a seven-year wait, February is off to a good start. The sequel from Warhorse Studios continues the story of Henry of Skalitz, taking him to new locations in 15th-century Czechia with big cities, powerful new weapons, and dangerous enemies to defeat. is much bigger than the original in every way, and looks much better.
With most big-game sequels, that comes at the cost of needing more graphical processing power to run consistently. However, bucks that trend, running well for most players thanks to impressive optimization.
The early performance reviews for have been very positive, especially with Upscaling which is completely optional. In PC Gamer's tests for the game, they could get running at an average of 61fps on High settings at 1440p with a combination of a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and the RTX 3060 Ti GPU, with even better performance at 1080p, and about 15fps more when running the game on the Medium settings preset.
This is impressive when considering the first game's performance at launch. That was seven years ago, and if someone had a 6GB GTX 1060 graphics card, they wouldn't be getting more than 51fps on Very High settings in 1080p.
I played the first game at launch, and it also suffered from lots of bugs, glitches, and freezes that were hard to avoid until they were officially patched or someone created a mod as a workaround.