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Reviews for Sony’s PlayStation 5 dropped today, a few days after Microsoft’s Xbox Series X, and while I’ve only personally tested the latter, I also wanted to sum up what people are saying about Sony’s console.
Typically when new consoles are released you get a lot of comparison and contrast between the two new solutions. The Xbox One launched with a major feature (Kinect compatibility) that the PS4 lacked, while the PS4 had the edge in games. During the previous-gen launch, the Xbox 360 avoided features like Blu-ray and backward compatibility with hardware, while the PS3 had both.
The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X releases feel much more similar to each other, and that’s not just because consoles are becoming more and more PC-like and therefore similar to each other. It reflects the fact that neither platform launches with a roster of next-gen titles. One of the most common things you hear about the PlayStation 5 is that it feels like an improved, refined, and polished PlayStation 4 with a few extra features on top. Reviewers have also been saying similar things about Microsoft’s new console.
Verge really likes the Sony PS5 DualSense controller.
I think this is useful to keep in mind when reading coverage from either platform. These are soft launches compared to the ones we’re used to, and the biggest advantage of the PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X today is the skill with which they handle the games their predecessors drowned out with and the quiet way they play it. make. But because we’re primarily looking at comparisons of how the PS5 and XSX stack up to next-gen titles, there’s not much hard data on how they’ll stack up in the games people actually intend to play between 2020 and 2027.
Activity cards and haptics are current PS5 features
Every PlayStation 5 review highlights two things: how big it is, and the new Activities option built into the game’s menus. The size of the PlayStation 5 has been discussed quite a bit, so I won’t dwell on the topic again – the rig is large compared to other pieces of home electronics, and it also looks quite distinctive compared to them. It can be placed vertically or horizontally, so you will have a few options when it comes to that.
Activity cards are Sony’s answer to Microsoft’s quick resume. Microsoft’s big catch is the idea of seamlessly moving from game to game, in a single digit number of seconds. Sony has no such feature. Instead, Sony offers you “Activity Cards”, which give you the option to jump into a game at a specific time. According to Polygon: “They allow players to load directly into the game at different objectives or levels, or jump directly to additional content such as art galleries. I found the most useful are anything that quickly helps you take a different path and avoid a lot of menus. “
The haptic feedback on the Sony DualSense controller is widely praised in every post that you experimented with it. While noise has been used to simulate impact and / or take damage since the feature was introduced, Sony’s implementation takes things much further, allowing for remarkably subtle changes in how you feel and therefore a much closer integration between on-screen gameplay. and your own sensory experience. Kotaku refers to this feature as granting “subtle benefits and added texture to game mechanics” in titles like Spider Man: Miles Morales. Polygon similarly praises it.
The conclusion of activity cards compared to Quick Resume seems to be a wash, if only because Quick Resume currently supports all XSX games and doesn’t always work perfectly, whereas activity cards require developers to explicitly support them. and they will not be available. (or necessarily just as useful) in every game. This also applies to the excellent haptic support on the PlayStation 5, with various reviews raising questions as to whether or not the developers will support them. Polygon notes that the Switch also includes advanced haptic capabilities, but these are rarely used.
The PS5’s backward compatibility level is lower than Microsoft’s, but reviewers found that the list of supported games works quite well.
The overall tenor of the review coverage can be summarized as “Optimistic”. People like what they’ve seen and experienced, and caveats like less total system storage space and less backward compatibility compare to its lower price. A key feature of the current XSX and PS5 reviews is that they feel somewhat unfinished. There are more next-gen game titles available to try before the XSX and PS5 go on sale, but since we can’t currently talk about them, it’s hard to show these consoles with the same fanfare.
Right now, the PlayStation 5 is landing somewhere between “An excellent and refined PS4 Pro experience” and “A nice update, but don’t worry if you can’t find one on store shelves.” That’s pretty much the same place where the Xbox Series X lands, but there is a variation on that point from revision to revision: Ars likes the XSX a bit more than the PS5, while I’d say the Verge drops very strong on the PS5, based on its reviewers’ experience with the controller. That’s something I’d highlight at this point, without many objective comparisons between next-gen releases on both platforms, the platform that favors a post comes down to features like DualSense’s haptic implementation. It’s always harder to judge how widely a new technology will or won’t be supported on any platform, and that’s definitely the case with the PS5 / XSX comparison.
Our sister site, PCMag, is the most optimistic about the PS5 of all the posts we’ve seen, writing: “The PlayStation 5 is a must-have for PlayStation devotees and worthy of sharing our Editors’ Choice award alongside the Xbox Series X. “
It will be interesting to see how the market responds to these launches. The XSX and PS5 aren’t exactly debuting with a parade of media attention ticker tapes and a massive PR tour. The launch volume is downright quiet compared to what we would normally expect. Given the scale of some of the challenges the United States faces, this is not unexpected, but it does raise some questions about the performance of these new platforms. Personally, I think both of them are likely to sell all the consoles they can make over the holiday season.
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