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Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales Demon’s Soul Godfall Bugsnax Sackboy: A Big Adventure
The majority of my review time with the PS5 has been spent playing Miles Morales, with those other games under separate embargoes. If you’ve seen the trailers, you know how gorgeous Miles Morales is. What you won’t see in the trailers is how quickly it all loads. It takes no more than a few seconds to get from the PlayStation 5 home screen into the game’s menu, and then when you click to start or continue, you load into the game almost instantly. Miles Morales is a particularly great testament to the power of solid-state storage, most notably in how boosted asset streaming means you can hit faster speeds. While the PS4 iteration of Marvel’s Spider-Man certainly made you feel like Spidey, Miles Morales takes it to a new level thanks to how fast you can zip above streets and between buildings. It’s honestly something that never gets old, and while you can use a basically instantaneous fast-travel system, you really shouldn’t. There is a catch, though. By default, Miles Morales is set to Fidelity Mode, which caps the frame rate at 30 frames per second (fps) in order to boost the eye candy and inject next-gen features like admittedly beautiful ray tracing. Alternatively, you can lose some of that next-gen sheen and opt for 60fps (with dynamic 4K) in Performance Mode. Outside of my visual comparison tests, which forces the game to reload when switching between Fidelity and Performance, I always favoured Performance Mode because that 60fps feels so much smoother and more responsive. For me, it’s ultimately a better pairing for the pace at which Miles Morales plays out, not just in terms of web-swinging but also frantic fights where fast reactions are better complemented by the higher frame rate. In an effort to preserve precious internal storage (more on this below), I opted to use an external hard drive. The PlayStation 4 understandably won’t let you transfer games to the external drive until they’re fully up to date, but even though they were patched before transfer, more patching was required when I connected the hard drive to the PlayStation 5. The PS5 seemed happy enough to patch last-gen games on the external drive in the background while I played Miles Morales, which it has done with other game updates, but then my PlayStation 5 hard crashed and desynchronised with the DualSense. Powering the console off and on with the physical buttons resulted in sound with no image, and it wasn’t until I reconnected the DualSense via USB cable that I was able to get it working properly again. Similar to the PS4 rebuilding its library after a crash (or powering off when it’s in a low-power state), the PlayStation 5 then had a “repairing console storage” message. Everything was fine once that repair finished, but it’s hard to tell whether that crash was because of the game, the external hard drive updates, or a combination of both. Once the games were updated, a few weren’t playable: I’d try to open them and it would come up with a “Can’t start the game or app” error and the game wouldn’t start. Transferring those games to the internal storage didn’t make them playable, but redownloading from my digital library did. I say “next-gen storage” because while you can play PS4 games from a compatible hard drive, next-gen games must be played from internal storage: either what comes with the console or what you pay to add on via the tucked-away expansion port. External hard drives can be used to archive games that you don’t want to redownload, but they need to be transferred to internal storage to play. On top of this, it’s a one-way cut-and-paste affair, so it looks like you won’t be able to share game installations to save on download time if you have multiple PS5s in your home. This would be less frustrating if transferring games from an external drive to internal storage didn’t force you to wait. You can’t play a game while it happens or even back away from the transfer screen. If you do, it cancels the process. On top of this, by default, PS4 games download by default to an attached external drive, so head to the settings menu if you want to install them to your internal storage. With a console that (theoretically) plays thousands of PlayStation 4 titles out of the box, and a handful of exclusive console launch titles to justify the price of admission, the next-gen appeal of the PlayStation 5 is very real. Games load incredibly quickly from internal storage, they look great, and the DualSense overhaul absolutely sticks the landing. Speaking of internal storage, it’s likely to be a problem for avid gamers who want lots of fast-loading next-gen options to play, but being forced to pick between quality games to play is one of the better problems to have.
