Artistically the game looks lovely on the PS5, having just played the demo, but technically it's a bit disappointing for an Unreal Engine 4 game with lots of very noticeable pop in of grass, which has a very short draw distance. I found it quite distracting even though I wasn't intentionally looking for it. Once I saw it then it was hard not to look for it.
This was on Framerate mode but switching to Resolution mode doesn't do much to improve it, if at all, and the framerate drops from 60 fps to 30 fps which feels jarring (edit: the latter is actually unlocked and runs at a stuttery 45 fps on average, which is even worse since the PS5 lacks support for VRR). Also, aren't we past loading small overworld areas and combat arenas by now? I know this is a cross-gen game but, come on, it surely wouldn't be that difficult to add larger play areas and seamless combat on the more powerful systems with more memory?
If I buy this then it'll be for PC as UE4 is extremely easy to tweak on that platform, improving LOD, shadow, tree and foliage draw distances with little to no performance impact. I expected more from the PS5 version personally; it basically looks and runs how I would have expected it to on my old PS4 Pro.
Combat is pretty awesome though and it does look lovely in HDR when all the pyrotechnics are happening on screen. By the way, the opening post mentions the game has no HDR but I have my PS5 set to Auto HDR so that non-HDR PS4 games run in SDR but on loading Arise I see the HDR logo pop up in the top right corner on my LG B9 OLED TV.