Latest Steam Beta branch lets you show hadware specs in reviews, and I hope it becomes mandatory

The latest version of the Steam Beta has introduced an option that lets players attach their hardware specifications to Steam reviews, showing everyone what they were trying to run the game on. This is a tremendous addition and quality-of-life improvement, one that I feel should become mandatory when it gets into the official branch.

Steam reviews tend to lean into the negative side, skewing overall grades of otherwise well-received games. It happens constantly. You’d see a game get nines and eights and maybe even 10s, only to have like a 30 percent positive score on Steam itself. This usually happens due to performance woes and complaints, with players writing negative reviews while citing bugs, crashes, lag, low FPS, and more.

With the introduction of (currently optional) hardware specification attachments in reviews, this problem could become much less widespread. Making it mandatory would show us exactly what a user was trying to play the game on, potentially preventing them from leaving that negative review because they were trying to run the game beneath minimal requirements.

It’d also let us read the review and cross-reference it with the user’s hardware, holistically analyzing their experience and gaining a much broader and more accurate depiction of the game’s performance than otherwise. At the moment, anyone can claim to be running the game at any specs, potentially providing false information and dragging an overall review score down based on falsities.

Steam scans user hardware from time to time in various surveys, which would let the platform accurately portray your hardware in any given review. It’s a significant step toward more transparency and review validity, one of many improvements in this respect that Valve has introduced over the past few years.

Review-bombing is a major problem for the platform, and I hope this takes us one step closer to annihilating it.

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High on Life 2 is now out on PC and consoles, and the general performance on the former platform is below par at best.

There have been instances of several players encountering occasional lags and stutters early on their adventures. The main culprit, once again, appears to be Unreal Engine 5. Thankfully, there are a few tweaks you can make on your own to smooth the performance.

Best High on Life 2 graphics settings

Before I deep dive into my current settings, here are the specifications of my PC.

AMD Ryzen 5600G
16 GB of DDR5 RAM
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12 GB

Here’s the set of settings I have been using to get the best possible gameplay.

Window Mode: Windowed Fullscreen (depends completely on your personal preferences)
Resolution: 1920×1080 (depends on your setup)
Framerate Limit: 60
V Sync: Disabled
Graphics Quality: Medium
Upscaling: NVIDIA DLSS (FSR for AMD devices)
Upscaling Method: Balanced
Frame Generation Technologies: Off
Latency Reduction Technologies: Off
Motion Blur: Disabled
Chromatic Aberration: Disabled
FOV: 90
View Distance Quality: Medium
Global Illumination Quality: Medium
Anti-Aliasing Quality: Medium
Shadow Quality: Low
Post Process Quality: Medium
Texture Quality: Medium
Effects Quality: Medium
Foliage Quality: Reduce it to Low if you’re struggling with performance

Here are some key pointers to remember. I have tried with unlimited FPS and 120 FPS. Both seem to cause trouble in the form of stutter. It could be my system, but I believe 60 FPS is a good limit if you have a weak hardware setup. While High on Life 2 is a shooter, it’s not a competitive one. 60 FPS will be more than enough if you manage to keep the stutters away.

V Sync comes disabled by default, and it’s best to keep it that way. The extra feature doesn’t offer much, but consumes a lot more resources.

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