About half a week into my time with the Playstation 5 and I think I can give a review that I can stand behind. I have managed to get a platinum trophy on Astro’s Playroom and am nearing the end of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, so that’s the context for my review, that said, I will have individual reviews for both those games coming later this week, so check in here regularly for those, or follow our twitter for updates. The Astro’s Playroom review will be coming in around 24 hours. This will be a shorter review, I want to go over it from the user experience, and not getting super technical on the specs.
Ease of Use
First I want to address the ease of switching from the Playstation 4 to 5, because it is extremely easy. You just need to log into your account on the PS5, then if you have both consoles on the network it will walk you through transferring all your data and it just takes half an hour or so depending on the transfer size. There are also a lot of really great settings, you can preset if you want games to default to subtitles on, you can turn on automatic colorblind features, and many other settings that are good for users who gain a lot from those features. I will say this however, colorblind settings I thought, as a colorblind person, mostly just made everything just feel dulled and dark, in menus and in games, so I did turn it back off.
The Menus
The menus are very similar to the PS4’s menus, but honestly, substantially improved. The old menus felt disjointed to navigate, especially going from the top layer to the bottom, but this one just feels much more smoothly integrated. Load times are more or less instantaneous as well when navigating, which is also a pleasant thing to note if you hated the hiccups that the PS4 felt like it had whenever a new submenu was opened. The activities tab it great as well, but the trophy screen does take a hit for me due to being much less space efficient, scrolling through the trophy list as cards left to right is much worse than the vertical snapshot scroll of the past, it feels like an attempt to differentiate from Xbox’s achievement lists, but it’s a miss.
The Controller
The controller is nothing so different that it will feel unnatural but I do have some spacing issues with the controller. The physical controller is bigger than ever, but the buttons and sticks feel more compact, my resting right thumb reaches further across the buttons than it did before, which makes pushing X and O a little less comfortable, and either needs my thumb fully bent, or I need to press it with my inner knuckle area. The vibration features and the slider are improved and the haptic feedback is honestly very natural, I know some people just automatically turn off vibrations, but I would recommend giving it a shot with this controller because it feels like a great game feature. One last downside is that the Playstation button now feels really weird and is not as pleasant to press, and given that it’s a decently used button, that is a disappointment. Ultimately, the controller’s bonus features are great, but the base features feel like a step back from the last one, and to end on a positive, and another bonus, the light on the top of the controller is no longer blinding you if you are light sensitive like me, so that’s nice.
New vs Old
Others have said the new consoles are not currently worth the money without a 4k TV, and I do mostly agree, the graphics are fantastic, but the TV needs to support them. I do think this console, outside of the controller which I don’t particularly like, feels like a clear upgrade over the last one in almost every way, Sony learned some good lessons. Over time more and more of the quality games will be next gen only, and that I think would be a good time to switch regardless of TV.
Alright, let me know what you think of the new consoles and stay tuned for my incoming game reviews for Astro’s Playroom and Spider-Man: Miles Morales.