Category Archives: PlayStation 5

Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection review – victory tour for feelgood blockbusters

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PlayStation 5, PC (forthcoming); Naughty Dog/Sony
Uncharted 4 and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy get a joint re-release reminding us of the greatness of these bombastic action adventures

It’s been long enough since 2016’s Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End came out that I kind of miss Nathan Drake, the breezy, globetrotting, treasure-hunting star of the Uncharted series. In contrast to developer Naughty Dog’s other PlayStation series The Last of Us, a rather harrowing post-apocalyptic meditation on human darkness, Uncharted is a straightforwardly fun and light-hearted action-movie story. You never have to think too hard about what you’re doing or why, and as long as you can surrender your will to the game – for there is little room for improvisation in these climbing puzzles, shootouts and well-acted story scenes – you’ll have a good time.

Back then I was ready to see the back of Nathan Drake. His quips had started to feel predictable, the Indiana Jones setpieces of his global adventures – collapsing ledges, trap-filled tombs, cursed treasure – even more so. This game is a farewell to him, wringing a surprising amount of pathos from the cast and their relationships to each other (particularly Nathan and his wife, Elena, who share an adorable scene in front of a PlayStation in their front room in the opening hours that still hits just as well now). This series had run out of road, with no further far-flung corners of the world or secret character backstories to explore, and in retrospect it is easier to appreciate this as a victory tour for a developer that really mastered the blockbuster cinematic action game.

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Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One review – a gripping interactive detective drama

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PC, Xbox One/Series X/S, PlayStation 4/5; Frogwares
The detective returns to his childhood island home to solve an elegant series of cases in this lively open-world story

Developer Frogwares has been making games about the world’s most famous detective for a long time now, but Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is the most personal. A 21-year-old Sherlock has returned to the fictional island of Cordona, where he spent his childhood, kicking off a chain of events that leads him to uncover a missing element of his past: how his mother died. Cordona draws inspiration from real-world places that have changed hands many times, and different districts of the island display a melange of cultures. I once heard the athaan, or call to prayer, from a nearby mosque. Shortly after the prologue, the whole island opens up, and you can fast-travel around it in seconds as you dig into Sherlock’s cases.

These setpiece mysteries are varied in both tone and theme, and the solutions are almost always elegant. I won’t easily forget the case of the murderous elephant, or the siren serial killer. Crime scenes are where both the game and the protagonist himself are most at home. Evidence litters the scene; Sherlock surveys every piece, linking them to accounts given by suspects and witnesses, and pieces together what happened. You can manipulate the ghostly outlines of suspects’ positions and actions at particular junctures – a clever way to convey Sherlock’s thinking. Even after solving a case, the grand unveil always revealed some element that I’d overlooked.

Sherlock Holmes: Chapter One is out now; £39.99

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Why I started streaming video games on Twitch at the age of 43

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Over lockdown, comedian, mother of two and former games journalist Ellie Gibson took up livestreaming, loved the community – and learned to love playing again

Like so many things in my life, it began as a daft experiment. I love learning new stuff, and over the course of my 43 years I’ve tried all sorts. Some things have stuck, like comedy, running, and having kids. Some haven’t, like kung fu, olives and holidays in Germany. To be honest, I thought that livestreaming games on Twitch would fall into the latter category.

For those who aren’t familiar (I wasn’t until this year), Twitch involves playing video games live on the internet while providing a running commentary. People watch you, and chat to you via a message window, and sometimes give you money. It’s sort of like exotic dancing, but with fewer breasts.

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Resident Evil Village review – nerve-shredding descent into horror

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PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X; Capcom
The action careers superbly through spooky gothic castles and underground complexes where monsters and a bloodsucking femme fatale lie in wait

It has been four years since Resident Evil 7 rescued the series from its action-heavy nadir and returned to the roots of survival horror: jump scares, and elaborate puzzles involving unattractive oil paintings. Now, Village seeks to bring back some of the gunplay introduced in Resident Evil 4 without losing the tension and dread. The result is a delightfully schlocky survival horror adventure that makes constant references to earlier games – and will bring much joy to fans.

Things start on an eerily domestic note, with Resident Evil 7 protagonist Ethan Winters and his wife Mia attempting to recover from their horrific experiences in isolated rural Louisiana by moving to … isolated rural eastern Europe. After a gruesome opening, in which Mia is shot and their baby kidnapped, Ethan must set out to discover what fresh hell he has landed in this time. You start out exploring the village of the title, a squalid, diseased little place, all cackling crones and mad-eyed yokels with shotguns, like some nightmarish Borat remake directed by Eli Roth. Most of the inhabitants have been slaughtered by four monstrous local lords at the behest of a cruel demigod. To save his daughter, Ethan must track these bizarre aristocratic sociopaths down to their lairs and kill them.

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PlayStation 5 launch gets more coverage ‘than 10 humanitarian crises combined’

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Charity says the media is failing countries by underreporting humanitarian emergencies, with women suffering most

The launch of PlayStation 5 received 26 times more news attention than 10 humanitarian crises combined in 2020, according to a Care International report published today.

The humanitarian crises, which included violence in Guatemala, hunger in Madagascar and natural disasters in Papua New Guinea, were largely swept aside by news of Covid-19, global Black Lives Matter protests and more clickbait-friendly events such as the Eurovision song contest and Kanye West’s bid for the US presidency; the latter two each received 10 times more online news attention than the humanitarian crises in question, the report found.

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Thieves swap Amazon orders of PlayStation 5 for rice and other items

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Online retailer is investigating a spate of pre-delivery thefts of newly released £450 console

Amazon has said it is investigating reports that brand new PlayStation 5 consoles have been stolen in transit, as customers have complained of missing deliveries, with bags of rice even delivered instead of the electronics.

Supply shortages have left the new games console even more desirable than its £450 price tag would suggest. But some shoppers waiting at home for the console to be delivered received an unwelcome surprise on Thursday and Friday, opening their parcels to find something other than the item they ordered.

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Assassin’s Creed Valhalla review: cloudy with a chance of mead halls

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PS4 and PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC; Ubisoft
The weather’s as bad as ever, but this smart, inventive and witty open-world game is a veritable Viking feast of adventure

It’s been a wild ride this year, but you can always rely on Assassin’s Creed to lighten the mood. Let’s see what those zany historians at Ubisoft have cooked up for us in the excitingly named Assassin’s Creed Valhalla … Peterborough, is it? Norwich in the dark ages?

I have nothing against our beautiful cathedral cities, rolling plains and park-and-ride services, but after 12 months of Brexit, Covid-19 and forest fires, plus the cancellation of the Eurovision song contest, I was hoping for something a little less Tough Mudder from this giddy, quasi-historical, action-adventure series, which previously had us gallivanting around Atlantis.

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PlayStation 5 review – Sony’s new console makes a splashy entrance

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This enormous spaceship of a console comes with enough flagship features – from fast SSD and frame rate to 4K resolution – that you might overlook the hefty price tag

With more than 110m PlayStation 4s sold, Sony is coming into the next console generation with nothing to prove. But the company has squandered goodwill before: it followed up the beloved PlayStation 2 with an awkward-looking, difficult-to-develop-for console that cost the equivalent of £600 in today’s money. It took PlayStation 3 almost a decade and several remodels to make up the ground it had lost. The PlayStation 5 certainly looks wild next to the modernist oblong that is PS4, but this is no conceptual experiment in hardware design. It is a console that wants to make you feel good, to celebrate the time, money and passion we expend on video games.

The console itself is a statement object. Standing vertically, its white casing tapers to a V around the shiny black body of the machine. It is enormous and looks like a futuristic spaceship. The new DualSense controller is white with black accents, a slightly different shape from the PS4 pad that feels equally comfortable in the hands. The texturing on the grips comes in the form of tiny circle-square-triangle-cross symbols that you can see only if you zoom in on a high-res photo – a cool hidden design secret indicative of the thought that has gone into the PS5’s appearance.

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Watch Dogs Legion review – fight fascism in a futuristic London

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PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PlayStation 5 (forthcoming), Xbox Series X/S (forthcoming); Ubisoft
This ambitious, imperfect and unashamedly weird game attempts to simulate an entire population

Video games have become extraordinarily adept at simulating geography, from Assassin’s Creed’s detailed, architecturally accurate takes on ancient Egypt or 18th-century Paris to Microsoft Flight Simulator’s virtual simulacrum of the Earth’s surface. But they are still no good at simulating people, and their cities are populated with reactive automatons who forget you tried to run them over two seconds ago. This makes Watch Dogs Legion’s attempt to simulate the entire population of a futuristic, technocratic London one of the most ambitious things a game has tried in years. Walk from Camden to Nine Elms and every person you see has a name, a cluster of attributes (gambler, fashion expert, paramedic, low mobility) and a custom-generated voice and appearance. You can recruit any of them to your hacker resistance movement and step into their shoes.

I played most of Watch Dogs Legion as a construction worker named Hassan. He has no particular special skills; he can summon a cargo drone and ride it up to rooftops, but he hasn’t got any useful weapons or technical expertise. I picked him because he was nearby, and I liked his haircut and accent: not too EastEnders, not too plummy. But then I accidentally took Hassan into the bowels of one of Watch Dogs Legion’s autocratic tech giants, on a mission that I thought would be easy but turned out to involve hiding in a vent from heavily armed private security guards while using a spiderbot to steal encrypted information. Hassan barely escaped with his life. I became rather attached to him after that.

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PlayStation 5 specifications revealed – but design is still a mystery

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Sony confirms custom AMD RDNA 2 graphic processor, solid state drive and innovative 3D audio – without showing the new console

Sony has revealed the full technical specifications of its PlayStation 5 console.

In a blogpost, followed by a lengthy online technical briefing by lead system architect Mark Cerny, the company confirmed that the machine will feature custom versions of AMD’s Zen 2 central processor and RDNA 2 graphics unit, the latter operating at 10.28 Tflops. System memory will be 16GB. The machine will support advanced visual effects such as real-time ray tracing and will have a solid state drive (SSD).

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