In this PlayStation 5 Review You will learn below facts and experience high quality PS5 photos.
- PlayStation 5 Review: Playing Astro’s Playroom
- PlayStation 5 Review: Playing Godfall
- PlayStation 5 Hardware Review
- DualSense Controller Review
- Impressive Cooling System Performance
- Realistic Haptic Feedback
- Loading: Blink of an eye
- Quieter Button Sound
- SSD is Lower than said, why?
On November 12th, 2020, PlayStation 5 will finally go on sale, and Pre-orders for PS5 are already being accepted. Before the launch of the PS5, Sony Interactive Entertainment held an early access PS5 event for the media in Tokyo. Japanese media “4Gamer” joined that event and experienced PlayStation 5 and DualSense Wireless Controller.
4Gamer got the opportunity to get to know Astro’s Playroom, which will be pre-installed on PS5, and the launch title Godfall, so let’s take a look at them with some impressions from 4Gamer. (As it is, translated from Japanese)
PlayStation 5 Review: Playing Astro’s Playroom
Astro’s Playroom is an action game in which Astro and his friends explore four worlds based on PS5 components, making full use of the features of the DualSense gamepad, the stock PS5 controller, and is more of a demo title. It’s also a solid game.
The first thing that struck me was how cleverly the differences in texture between the floor and the ground were expressed by the “haptic feedback” built into DualSense. For example, when you jump from a leaf floating on the surface of the water to the wooden floor, the delicate changes in vibrations and the sound effects coming from DualSense’s built-in speakers combine to give you the sensation that your unsteady footing has suddenly become solid. The sticks become heavier in the strong sandy winds, and the sense of moving firmly against the wind is also expressed.
Also, when using the [R2] button to perform a jump, the more you shrink the spring in your foot, the heavier the adaptive trigger will be. While a light press of the trigger is all that is needed to jump to a lower level, the higher you jump, the more force you have to put into it, which adds to the realism of the experience.
Astro’s Playroom game is a simple stage action game, in which you avoid obstacles and defeat enemies in areas with various textures, such as the beach and ice, to reach the goal. For example, in the jumping stage above, you decide the angle of the stage by tilting the DualSense and the height of the jump by shrinking the spring, but you can get by even if you start rather randomly. However, as the stage goes on, there will be some tricks that you can’t jump over unless you think it through. It’s a great feeling when you finally get it right after repeated trial and error, even though you’ve failed many times.
On the snow stage, you jump from one crumbling icicle to the next, but the enemy placement is so exquisitely nasty that you’ll be dropped underwater several times and have to start over. However, there’s almost no time to wait for the re-do, and I found myself wondering, “Is this loaded? I can’t even wonder if I can do it. No, I can’t just take a break and check for incoming mail while it’s loading.
A picture is worth a thousand words, and we’ve heard a lot about the new DualSense features and the performance of the super-fast SSD in previous presentations, but if you play Astro’s Playroom, you’ll be able to experience them right away. If you’re fortunate enough to get a PS5, we hope you’ll give this title a try first, and feel its power. If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a PS5, we hope you’ll be able to try it out for the first time and experience it for yourself.
PlayStation 5 Review: Playing Godfall
Godfall, on the other hand, is an action RPG that specializes in third-person melee combat. It’s billed as a “router slasher” and has various elements such as co-op play for up to three players, but we only got to play it this time until the mid-boss battle at the beginning of the game, which is probably within the scope of the tutorial, so we’re barely able to get a full picture of the game.
Controls are simple: press the R1 button for a weak attack, R2 for a strong attack, X for an evasion (double tap for sliding), and L1 for a shield. You can also accumulate a strong attack, which is another way to experience the effects of adaptive triggers. You can also throw a shield to deal a heavy blow to an enemy, or chase down a downed enemy with the R3 button.
The effects of haptic feedback and adaptive triggers are felt most strongly when you change weapons. For example, a long sword and a hammer will naturally make the latter seem heavier, and a hammering attack will feel more tactile from the trigger. There are five weapon classes in this title, each with a different weight, so we’d like to try them all out.
The game progresses to achieve the goal indicated. Along the way, several enemy groups are placed in various places, and some of them are fighting each other, perhaps because of the difference in their races. So, you may wonder, “Is one of them a friend or a foe? But when I attacked one of them, I was attacked by both sides. Well, that’s just as well.
Some enemies are divided into two groups, the vanguard using melee weapons and the rear guard using firearms and buffing the vanguard with a guard. It’s not easy to deal with a guarded vanguard, so you can slide up to the vanguard and take them out with a slide like. As mentioned above, this is a “super-attack” game, so it’s not a soul-like game where you lure enemies out one by one, shield up, and wait for them to attack back.
Also, sometimes there are dead ends or roads cut off along the way. In this case, if you carefully look around you, you will see a knot in the space-time, and you can jump to a remote place by pressing and holding the [○] button. If you are lost, look for the space-time knot.
Battles against mid-bosses are a complete change from battles with miscellaneous soldiers along the way, so it’s dangerous to move forward aggressively. That said, since this is the first mid-boss, it’s possible to capture the boss in a hit-and-go fashion by sliding in and out of the way while the opponent is frozen in place with his hammer. Sometimes your opponent will create an area that deals with continuous fire damage, but it’s not a huge threat. However, the bosses in this game are designed for co-op play, so it won’t be as easy as it sounds.
Godfall challenges you with challenging missions to earn items needed to build your character and loot that will help you progress in battle while unlocking 12 “Veiler Plates” to take on even more difficult enemies. We only got our first taste of it this time around, so I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a PS5 and getting down to it when I get one. Let’s Move to hardware review.
PlayStation 5 Hardware Review
At the spot, 4Gamer were able to take photos of the PS5 and the DualSense Wireless Controller (DualSense), a dedicated gamepad, and published a detailed first impression of the PlayStation 5 on their website.
4Gamer wanted to show you the details of the PS5 in close-up, but because it is a development version, close-up shooting is not allowed on PS5, and it is not possible to take pictures of the bottom and the back of the PS5 but 4Gamer shot some really good high-quality photos. As you can see from the photo, the black panel part of the body looks a little dusty.
Let’s start with the PS5 itself. Since we’ve already mentioned the specs, we’ll skip the specs and look at the size of the body, which is officially 390mm x 104mm x 260mm, with a nominal bodyweight of about 4.5kg. The PS5 with Ultra HD Blu-ray (UHD BD) drive was the only one available this time, and there was no disc drive-less digital edition, but it has a nominal body size of 390mm x 92mm x 260mm and a nominal weight of about 3.9kg. The width and weight differ by the drive.
When you see the actual machine, you can see that it is composed of complicated curves, and it looks organic. It is also interesting that it feels slimmer than the actual size from almost any angle. This is true whether it is placed vertically or horizontally. PS5 is supported by the attached stand, but we could not check the stand itself in detail. The color of the unit is two-tone, and there is a logo on the left side when you look from the front. Moreover, the surface treatment of the white side panel is different from the backside.
When PS5 was placed vertically, PS5 was designed to intake air from the upper part of the front side (and probably the bottom part too, structurally speaking) and to exhaust air from the backside. As you can see in the photo below, you can see some metal parts through the gap in the upper air intake. It looks like a fin guard, which is as big as a 200 to 240mm fan.
Besides, from the structure, it seems to have a sirocco fan in it, so the case itself also seems to be a fan case. It is thought that this huge fan secures the quietness and cooling performance. By the way, I couldn’t see any heat sink from the top. How on earth does it look like a heat sink?
What is the temperature of the body with PS5’s cooling mechanism? I started playing “Godfall”, one of the launch titles, and when I checked it out after a while, the wind coming out of the exhaust vent was gentle and did not feel extremely hot. At this time, the temperature in the studio was about 30 degrees Celsius. According to the specs of the SoC, it should be running at about 55-60 degrees Celsius. Then, I was wondering if the noise was too much. You may think that it’s just the opposite. As I mentioned above, the exhaust air was gentle, and we could hardly hear anything like the sound of fan rotation.
Incidentally, because the studio was located in the basement and there were four lights on the ceiling for video recording, the room temperature was as high as 30℃. However, in a typical home, the room temperature would be around 20-25 degrees Celsius. So, if we imagine that PS5 is used at home, based on the studio environment, there is a good chance that PS5 will not have any problem with a sound explosion. If you are planning to replace your PS4 with PS5, you need to make sure that there are 10-15cm clearance on the front, back, and sides of the place where you are currently installing PS5, or you can prepare for it.
DualSense Controller Review
Next, let’s take a look at DualSense. It’s a close-up shooter, so it’s mainly light photos. Although the specific nominal size of the device remains undisclosed, it looks very close to the stock PlayStation 4 DUALSHOCK 4 gamepad. The D-Pad, buttons, and analog sticks are in the same position.
The D-Pad and buttons are made of clear plastic, and the PS button is not circular but has the shape of the PlayStation symbol. Also, the analog sticks have a surface treatment to prevent finger slippage.
The handle is a typical Sony feature. The surface treatment is matte, but when I touched it while I was taking the picture, I felt like it was a standard pear-skin finish, but it was very comfortable to hold. However, when I checked the photo data at the site, I found out that the pear skin surface has a pattern of X, Y, and Z. It may be the result of the balance between design and practicality, but I want to appreciate the goodness of the grip feeling.
There are light bars on both sides of the touchpad, and four LED lights on the lower side. The light bar glows in four colors: blue, green, red, and purple. This is to distinguish between multiple controllers and PS5, and one LED light at the bottom means 1P. Since it’s not so bright, it won’t be distracting …… that it gets in your line of sight while you’re playing.
Speaking of DualSense, the combination of haptic feedback and adaptive triggering is a new feature, and when I used the PS5’s pre-installed Astro’s Playroom to test the effect, I found that by combining both features at the same time, I was able to get a lot more out of it. It expressed touch and weight.
The adaptive trigger can change the weight of the trigger when pressed. This is thought to be a magnetic fluid application. This is an example of the use of “SoftMRF”, which is a magnetic fluid made by Kurimoto Ironworks. Considering the similarity of the texture and the speed of response, I wondered if they used “SoftMRF”, a magnetic fluid made by Kurimoto Ironworks.
Compared to DUALSHOCK 4, the buttons are less noisy when pressed, and the back of the buttons feel like a thick rubber plate. It feels like there are thicker rubber plates behind the buttons. This seems to have been done to make it easier to play while playing with live-action and voice chat. Incidentally, as I mentioned in the above photo, there is a sub-microphone for noise-canceling at the bottom of the device.
I was able to see PS5 in person, and I’m relieved to say that the heat and noise level are not so bad that I’m not worried about it. If anything, I was surprised at how good the DualSense finish is.
From a gamer’s point of view, the lack of a bottom button, which has become popular in recent years, maybe a cause for disagreement. We hope that the optional parts will be added. However, even including this, I am satisfied with the next-generation hardware.
PlayStation 5 Usable Space to be 664GB.
PS5 gamers know that the next-generation console has been greatly improved in many aspects of the gaming experience, and what gamers are more concerned about is the PS5’s super-fast read speed, compared to the previous nearly half-minute long experience, the PS5’s read speed seems to be in the blink of an eye.
With the upcoming launch of the Sony PS5, potential buyers have been getting a lot of new information recently. Recently, wccftech reports that the leaked picture posted on the ResetEra board could have revealed the actual usable storage space of the PS5 to be 664GB.
According to the official specifications sheet, the PS5 SSD is 825GB in size. Due to the way computers work (i.e. binary), 1GB actually equals 1,073,741,824 bytes instead of 1,000,000,000 bytes; that alone converts the 825GB number to 768GB. Plus PlayStation 5 operating system adds 104GB of reserved space, we’re left with 664GB of actual usable storage space.
For comparison’s sake, the Xbox Series X has an exact similar configuration with its claimed 1TB of standard storage. The latest discovery is that the console has 930GB of storage, 128GB of which is used for the Series X’s operating system. So the total amount of storage available is 802GB, which is 138GB more than the PS5’s available storage.
The main reason for this difference is likely due to Sony equipping the PlayStation 5 with a faster, more expensive custom SSD with a 12-channel interface that allows for 5.5GB/s of I/O throughput without compressing data. Microsoft has opted for a slower NVMe SSD that achieves 2.4GB/s of I/O throughput with uncompressed data. This allows them to offer larger SSDs.