I was fortunate enough to get my PS5 fairly early on after release. After spending hours searching the internet and following countless social media pages letting me know when the next drop was, all of my hard work paid off.
Now I have never been one to “grind” games, I love playing for shorts spurts and then get back into it little by little. I’ve done that for years, I thought that was just who I was and that’s just how I played. But the PS5 changed that.
At first I assumed it was just the fact that I had something new, so of course I wouldn’t want to put it down, but that feeling never faded. I would start a game and find myself more engaged than I had ever been before.
It didn’t take me long to realize that it wasn’t just the feeling of owning something new that was driving me to play, but that it was the fact that I had a system that didn’t make me feel limited.
I am writing this about 6 months after getting my PS5 and I can honestly say the feeling hasn’t faded at all. No matter what game I am playing, the console is able to maximize it to its full potential. The feeling of “I wish this was better somehow” doesn’t exist for me.
The load screen has been the woe of many a gamer, games like GTA and Red Dead redemption have plagued Xbox and playstation gamers alike, the sheer amount of time spent just waiting to play the game drains what joy you have before you even start to play.
The PS5 isn’t afflicted with this unfortunate condition, thanks to its lightning fast SSD(solid state drive) even the largest of games are loaded in a matter of seconds. I’ve spent a majority of my time on 2k21, a game I have played for years and for the first time it actually felt different. The next-gen system has finally perfected it for me, the time spent between the main menu of the system to actually being on the court is almost nonexistent.
This is what I have been waiting for, being a fair-weathered gamer it never took much for me to lose interest and just move on, but so far I haven’t come close to that.
Of course no system is perfect and the PS5 isn’t the exception, the main issue I have with it is one I had with the PS4. The home screen interface just isn’t user friendly, sure you can learn it and get used to it, but even now I find myself taking a second to remember how to find netflix, or how to navigate the settings to see if my internet connection is working.
To me it just feels clunky and overcomplicated to complete the simplest tasks. This doesn’t take away from the enjoyment for me, but it feels like something I will most likely never fully come to know.
Another issue I’ve been running into is the battery life of the controller, it feels surprisingly short, lasting me about one or two nights of playing before letting me know the battery is low, and the charge time seems to have the opposite problem, taking between 3-4 hours to reach a full charge.
That might seem a little nitpicky, but for some people problems like that aren’t worth the headache, it’s not a big enough issue for me to stop playing but is an annoyance that probably won’t go away anytime soon.
Overall the PS5 is the perfect system for anyone looking to fully immerse themselves into games again, and with the great PS exclusives already out and the many interesting ones on their way there’s no shortage of games to dive into.
