PlayStation 5 review – big, beautiful, and powerful
Do you like ’em big and beautiful? No, not your dating choices – your gaming hardware. Because PlayStation 5 is very big, and very beautiful. Pictures don’t do justice to just how large the PS5 is in reality, but Sony’s latest console is positively gargantuan – bigger than the original model PS3, even.
The PS5 carries its weight well though. Dressed in black and white and with curves in all the right places, Sony’s design maestros have delivered a form factor that is sleek and alluring. It looks premium, which is just as well considering pricing starts at £359/$399 for the all-digital edition, and £449/$499 for the fully-featured disc drive version.
You get some impressive tech for your money though. PS5 boasts a 3.5GHz 8-core custom AMD Zen 2 CPU, a powerful AMD RDNA 2 GPU, 16 GB GDDR6 SDRAM. Between that and a custom solid state drive, it’s shockingly fast – you can be playing a game in less than a minute of hitting the power button. It’s quiet, too – although not as preternaturally so as the Xbox Series X|S is.
Like the Xbox Series S, the biggest failing of the PS5 is storage capacity. At only 825GB raw space, and a mere 667GB usable after system files are accounted for, it has less storage than users might like. This is especially true for any who opt for the all-digital edition, but even those with the disc drive model will still need to closely monitor space. Games don’t actually run from the disc, merely install from them and then run from the internal solid state drive. To make matters worse, you can’t store and run PS5 games from an external drive.
In future, the PS5’s internal storage will be expandable though. The console already has an accessible NVMe M.2 slot, although Sony has not enabled support for this in system firmware yet, nor has it confirmed what specification of drive will be needed. Given the cost of NVMe drives though, upgrading your PS5 will likely be an expensive option for a while.
It’s also a mixed bag looking to the past. Although the new console offers near 100% backwards compatibility with PS4 games – currently, only ten titles are known not to run on PS5 – that’s where the retro train stops. Games from the PS3 or earlier are not supported at all. The only exception is a selection of PS3 titles that are included in Sony’s streaming PS Now service, but no PS3, PS2, or PS1 games you already own – physically or digitally – can be played on PS5. On the plus side, PS4 games can be played from an external hard drive, allowing you to save that scant PS5 SSD space for true next gen games.
In the here and now though, the PS5 delivers a real sense of excitement – helped in no small part by the presence of some exclusive games at launch. Even the system user interface feels thrilling and futuristic, overhauling the PS4 experience for one that’s smoother, cleaner, and bolder, with a swirling energy motif running in the background that evokes the power of the device. Rather than screen after screen of categories, everything is tidily grouped into either ‘Games’ or ‘Media’ sections. Each game installed gets its own bigger, clearer tab than it would on PS4, and a selection of ‘cards’ with related news, updates, and progress reports unfold below the tab as you select it.
Sony has also integrated better ways to interact with your library. For instance, those cards might show how close you are to achieving a trophy, and allow you to leap straight to the point in the game where you can complete the objective. The Notifications system has also been upgraded – as well as being less intrusive when alerting you to completed downloads or unlocked trophies, you might get alerts when a friend has beaten your time on a race or overtaken you on a score board. From there, you’ll again be able to leap directly back into the relevant game, ready to reclaim your throne.
On the media front, the biggest improvement is – on the disc based PS5 – the ability to play 4K UHD discs. The PS4 Pro, oddly, skipped this upgrade even as the Xbox One X and One S added it, but the format finally makes its appearance on a Sony console. Despite the delay, playback proves phenomenal, with PS5 offering some of the best 4K video performance we’ve seen. The drive is also fully backwards compatible with Blu-ray and DVD, so in conjunction with support for streaming apps such as Netflix and Disney+, the disc enabled PS5 is a contender for your main media box.
The biggest sense of a generational leap isn’t in the console itself though. Rather, it’s what’s in your hands – the new DualSense controller. It’s a real marvel, simultaneously feeling reassuringly familiar to anyone migrating from PS4, but packing in a host of new features that pull players more deeply into their games.
The biggest improvement are the haptics – or commonly, rumble features. Much like the JoyCon controllers for Nintendo Switch, the DualSense can target precisely where in your grip you’ll feel vibrations, but packs in far more power. Judiciously applied, it means feeling every delicate footstep of the eponymous robot hero in Astro’s Playroom, through to the thudding impact of walking into enemy attacks in Spider-Man: Miles Morales. The triggers now offer adaptive resistance too, and while so far it’s only Astro’s Playroom that shows what this might entail – a gachapon machine where pulling the lever actually feels like there’s some effort – it has wide ranging applications, especially for shooter games.
It’s not just the physical sensations though – the speaker in the controller is much improved over the PS4 predecessor, with subtle audio working in concert with the haptics to create a sense of presence in games. Swinging around New York in Spider-Man generates the trademark “thwips” of Miles’ webshooters, while dashing around the colourful worlds of Sackboy: A Big Adventure results in sounds concordant to the environments, or exaggerated shrieks when you fall off a ledge or lose a life. Other changes include moving the lightbar of the PS4 pad from the top of the pad, facing away from the player, to the front, underneath the touchpad. So far, this seems a largely cosmetic shift, but some games have use for it – Resident Evil 3, backwards compatible from PS4, indicates Jill’s health in-game by shifting from green, to yellow, to dire red.
The trade off to all these features is that the DualSense is the biggest PlayStation controller yet. Aesthetically, the same black and white panelling of the console itself makes it appear smaller, but there’s no hiding the heft of it. Able-bodied players are unlikely to get wrist strain from it, but it’s notably heavier than past Sony controllers. Battery life is surprisingly solid though, giving roughly two to three days of moderately intensive play time between charges.
Aside from the DualSense and the very noticeable boost in speed and performance though, a lot of the PS5’s best attributes are going to be locked behind a 4K gate. If you don’t have a 4K HDR TV, then you’re going to miss out on the majority of the console’s improvements over PS4 – the staggeringly detailed worlds it’s capable of rendering, the fidelity of 4K HDR games running at 120fps, the sheer beauty and picture quality of 4K UHD movies. That does make PS5 something of a luxury purchase right now – but then, any games console at launch is a luxury. For those who have a screen to best appreciate the PS5’s performance on though, it’s a fantastic machine – and possibly Sony’s strongest new generation launch yet.
About The Author
