PlayStation 5 Review: Is it Still Worth Buying in 2024

After a generation of figuratively towering above its rivals with the monstrously successful playstation 4, one thing is certain, sony's new Generation contender will also loom large over its piers. Literally, this thing is massive, however, what the playstation Five lacks in the subtlety it more than makes up for in potential, thanks in part to its amazingly fast SSD, but mostly to its truly remarkable new controller, the dualsense.

While a good deal of what folks are going to be able to squeeze out of 2020. S. Saliva of shiny new hardware may be bottleneck to some degree by the screen that they own, the psfive's unique Dualsense Democrat as a next-gen gaming experience for all, delivering an amazing new level of haptic feedback that really needs to be felt to be believed.

Make no mistake. The austere and unceremoniously nature of the box and packaging is in stark contrast to the playstation Five itself, which is far and away the most flamboyant looking console I've ever owned.

Rather than a single shell, the PS Five appears to be made up of four separate pieces, a glossy black case sandwich between a pair of warped matte white plastic plates with a detachable stand.

I'll happily conceive the Pierce Five does look a bit better in the flesh than it did in the initial product shots. The matte off-wrightite finish to the plates is actually a lot nicer than I feared it would be, and the sloping vents flanking the strip of glossy black plastic that wraps around the edge of the unit are eye-catching. The problem to my eye is that the gradually widening black strip on the front and the floppy, overhanging plastic corners makes the Piers Five look a little bit like a piece of luggage that's stuffed too full to zip up properly, and the irregular curves remind me more of a cassette that spent a hot summer's day on a car dashboard than a playstation. It's obviously not the first white games console, but in concert with its sheer size and shape, it's surprisingly ostentatious for something designed to sit beneath or beside black televisions, black sound bars, black subwoofers and a generation of black AV equipment and gaming hardware.

It's a bit showy and in a world of generally sleek and simple tech, it looks a bit out of place like 2 thousand and six S vision of 2046. On the front, you'll find access to the Ultra HD blu-ray optical drive, a highspeed USB Type A port and a superspeedway USB Type C port, as well as the power button and eject button. These buttons are adjacent to each other, but the eject button is noticeably smaller, so if you're anything like me, there's now hope of not spending an entire generation trying to remember which button is which.

On the back there's the figure eight power connection and HDMI out two superpeed USB Type A ports and an Ethernet port. Unlike the Pice Four, the pice Five does not feature an optical audio out.

The stand is necessary because the misshapen nature of the plates means the Pierce Five can't sit flat on its side properly without it. It has a pair of small hooks which loosely clutch the back of the PS Five and a rotating base.

Sitting flat, the console is simply perched on the stand without any additional fixtures. The base can flap around and slip left, right, or even off entirely, but that's something unlikely to frustrate unless you're regularly moving your console from place to place.

Positioned vertically. A single screw is required to affix the stand to the console to prevent it from falling out of it. The slotter screw comes stored in the stand itself and is easy to install. If you don't have a flat screwdriver, a knife, or even your thumbnail will suffice. Appearances aside, there is one element of the PS Five that can't be as easily ignored, and that's the sheer size of it. Positioned vertically and perched to top its stand. The PS Five is about 40 cimeters tall or 16 inches.

With the stand switched, that figure is a fraction less when positioned horizontally, coming in at around 39 centimeters. But even in this orientation, the Pers five is still just over 11 centimeters high, or four and a half inches at the point where its top plate kills Skyward. That's bigger than the grill-sized Pis Three or the vcrlike original Xbox One. It's even bigger than two original Piers Four stacked on top of each other. There are only two bigger white appliances in my house, one washes my clothes and the other keeps my butter cold. The Pis Five fits in my furniture, albeit with the subtlety of a Humvee squeezing through or drive-through, but may not fit in everyone's setup.

It's quaint that this year's biggest console comes from the land of capsule hotels and K cars, and it's the American console that's more compact by a comparison.

Initial setup is extremely simple for PS Four users. The slim PS Five manual describes the ability to connect your PSF Four console and PS Five to the same network to transfer save data, downloaded content and user information.

Though it doesn't outline the process for me, the much quicker alternative was plugging in the USB hard drive I've been using as extended storage for my PES Four for several years. It's a cinch and the PS Five can access your existing digital perce Four games from it instantly. For long time playstation uses, the Pierce Five makes it very easy to browse you whole digital library and sort between Pierce Five and PCE Four games.

Oddly enough, there's a search field for Pierce Three games too, though it comes up empty. The PICE Five UI doesn't feel wildly removed from its roots on the PIS Four, particularly as you get deeper into the menus, but it's definitely different and significantly more elegant in a number of ways. Now, a single tap of the playstation button in the center of the controller will bring up what Sony is called the Control Center, which is a little like a taskfire on a Windows PC.

Checking things like current downloads and what friends of yours are online. On PIS Four requires a bunch of shuffling back and forth, up and down and left and right through menu icons.

The PS five's control center places all that info at our fingertips after one button press. The other key point of difference are dubbed cards which are also presented on screen when you hit the playstation button. Some of these are just fluff like links to newly published articles about games you're following on playstation and recent screenshots, though the activity cards seem to have the potential to be a little more useful.

There's slightly frivolous information about how much longer it's estimated you'll need to complete a certain level or task, but there's also the promise of the ability to immediately view pre-made game hints without having to reach for your phone.

For example, it was revealed earlier this week the PS Five remake of Demon Souls will feature over 100 and 80 help videos that players can opt to watch if they get stuck. The ultimate value of the PS five's activity cards is hard to gauge at the genesis of the PS Five, though hopefully developers will embrace them as useful ways to communicate with players while in game and not turn them into lists of additional chores.

There's other interesting stuff sprinkled throughout the PS Five UI two though from a global setting to invert the y-axis by default like the Xbox 300 and 60 used to do to the ability to watch a friend play a game pitcher in pitcher while chatting to them as you play something else entirely. I'm not a particularly proficient multitasker, so I can't say I'm very interested in the latter, but the former warms my oldcho upside heart.

One of this generation's most important upgrades is the switch from traditional hard drives to solidstate storage drives, dramatically improving loading times across the board and potentially enabling games to load in new objects effectively. On the fly appears five s. Ssd can read 5.5 ggabtes in just a second, which is on paper twice as fast as the Series X. In practical terms, it means I could go from powering up from a complete shutdown to perched on top of whatever Manhattan building i last left Miles Moral on in a mere 45 seconds that still leaves time to tap your toe. But once I was Inga the time it takes to go from selecting a safer load to actually swinging through Spider-man Mild Morales' open world is basically OB Bliquek after generations of watching progress bars inching across the screen. It's pretty stunning stuff.

I thought that was going be the game-changing feature with the psfive, but to my surprise, it's really the dualsense controller that boasts the biggest potential. It may feel fairly similar to the dualshock Four at first touch, but it didn't take me long to realize it's really an incredibly impressive new beast, entirely largely the same shade of white as the console itself.

The dualenss is just a fraction larger than the dualshock Four and has a more premium look, particularly in the translucent buttons, which have an almost glass-like appearance. The options and create buttons are also more raised than they are on the dualshock Four, so they're far easier to find without blindly rubbing your thumb beside the touchpad until you find it or glancing down. The dualsense also has a built-in mic making headsets unnecessary, but it still has a 3.5 mm jack that those you prefer to use them. The charging port is USB-C, however, it's what's on the inside that makes all the difference, and the range of haptic feedback the dualsense can provide is quite astonishing.

Nuanced Rumble travels from palm to palm and with a white spectrum of effects from almost imperceptible pulsations to massive vibrations. The triggers not only buzz with force feedback like the Xbox One controller, but also fight back and introduce a brand new layer of immersion.

It's seriously remarkable. The pre-installed platformer astro's Playroom is a pretty wonderful tech demo for the dualsens and well worth experimenting with. It's a rich and fabulous demonstration of the new level of feedback that dualsense can output and an adorable tour through playstation's long hardware history to boot.

For a hardware generation jump that's currently muddied with a lot of cross-gen content and an overall feeling of something more incremental than the often seismic shifts we've experienced previously, the Dualensors emerged to me as a bit of a revelation. I've had to plug it into charge every second day since getting the PS Five, but it's worth it.

In the Power Stakes there's been a role reversal this generation, with microsoft's new Xbox Series X arriving with reportedly 20 percent more grunt than the PIS Five. That said, it's a bit of a meaningless figure until we can properly examine how the Series X and PICE Five cope with the same third-party games head to head, regardless of the apparent power disparity. However, doubling the frame rate to 100 and 20 Hertz will also be on the cards with certain games should your four K TV support it, but personally I suspect I'm going to get a lot more mileage out of the better resolution and lighting effects that players who opt for increased frames may be forced to sacrifice.

Spider-man Miles Morales, for instance, has the option to switch between a 30 frames per second fidelity mode with the maximum amount of visual flourishes and a 60 frames per second performance mode. Without things like ray tracing and other advanced lighting effects and temporal techniques providing a four K picture from a lower resolution base, fidelity mode was easily my preference, as without the slick lighting and real-time reflections, it was a bit of an anti-climax.

Despite all that horsepower under the hood, the PCE Five is impressively silent and ign's testing is pegged at at a virtually inaudible 44 decibels at 58 degrees Celsius in the midst of Spider-man mild morales. It's a refreshing change from my current Pierce Four pro booting up marvel's Spider-man on that makes it sound like it's ready to be catapulted off an aircraft carrier.

Unfortunately one of the piersfive's key strengths, its Lightning SSD is also one of its weaknesses. It may say 800 and 25 gigabytes on the box, but that translates to just 600 and 67 gigabytes of usable space, which is significantly smaller than the Xbox Series X is 800 and two ggabtes of usable space.

There's room for maybe a dozen games and even fewer if there're anything like current generation behemoths like The Last of Us Part Two or GTA Five. As I mentioned, you can carry on using any external hard drive you may have already been using in your Pierce Four and continue to play PICE Four games off of it, but Piers Five games can only be played when installed on the SSD, and while you can open up the top lid of the console to install an additional SSD for more internal space, there are currently no Sony approved drives on the market. Ps Five games can be stored on an external HDD but need to be copied back to the SSD to play, though the near instantaneous loading times for Pierce Five games may make this palatable. However, it's worth noting that losing time later to the task of living stuff around when my SSD invariably fills up may feel a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

With a launch lineup dominated by games that are also available on Pierce Four and on the back of a generation already punctuated with incrementally more powerful hardware revisions like the Pierersce Four Pro, the Pierce V doesn't quite land as a knockout punch yet, but it's definitely got the power and speed to be a real contender, although the jury's out on the stamina of that tiny 600 and 67 gigabyte SSD.

However, while the Pierce five's well-consider UI and blistering, quick loading times for Pisce Five games make it a pleasure to use, it's the dual-sens controller that's proven to be the surprise Haymaker I never saw coming. It truly leaves other controllers feeling primitive in comparison.