Sony PS5 review: Why console v PC debate is now over

The next-generation gaming consoles are promising some huge improvements, but is it enough to take the gaming throne?

Sony’s new PlayStation 5 has managed to achieve an astonishingly rare feat: Making annoying losers like me change their personal opinion about something.

Before I sunk a few hours into the new console this week I was one of those boring nerds who thought PC gaming was the only way for truly l33t gamers to play because of its “superior graphics” and “better performance”.

The PlayStation 5 releases on November 12.

RELATED: Thousands of refunds after PS5 fight

RELATED: Rare Pokemon card sets $305k record

I even had big plans to not even review the next-generation consoles at all, since valued readers such as yourselves won’t actually be able to get your hands on one for a while unless you already secured one of the few pre-orders that were available.

Instead what you were going to read was a wrap-up of some of the best gaming PCs and laptops you could buy.

When I actually went to play some games on those systems, though, it ended up devolving into hours of troubleshooting and online research as games crashed because a driver was out of date or the developer hadn’t optimised their product for whichever specific set-up I was on – and this is for gaming computers that cost several thousand dollars.

Sony has embraced a white design on the launch console for the first time.

It took all of 10 minutes for the $749 PlayStation 5 to change my mind and usurp the throne – because that’s how long it took to set up.

There was no cherry picking parts and wasting afternoons getting them to work together – you just open the box and find a place to put the thing (it’s massive), plug it in and turn it on.

Setting up your account and connecting to your local network is a breeze (and takes even less time if you don’t read the terms of use agreement at the start, which I did not do and can pretty much guarantee you won’t either).

The PS5 box you might eventually see in a shop.

Sony has also gotten on-board with the environmental consciousness being trumpeted by other brands.

The box you’re hopefully going to recycle is more organic and doesn’t have nearly as much plastic as you might expect.

Even the little ties that hold the power cable and (included!) HDMI cable are made of paper, not plastic.

The console includes an HDMI cable in the box.

PUTTING THE PLAY IN PLAYSTATION

PC gaming advocates will be quick to tell you why their preferred platform is so much better.

They’ll bore you with talk about the customisation options, how you can build whatever kind of computer you like and use state-of-the-art graphics architecture and faster solid state storage for better gaming experiences.

Why bother listening to any of that when you can spend some time actually playing video games?

If you do it on one of the next-generation consoles you’ll see those state-of-the-art graphics, customisation, and solid state storage have now trickled down to the consumer level anyway.

It’s not clear yet whether all games will offer them: Some on the PS5 do let you change settings, making it possible to trade graphical fidelity for increased performance and vice versa.

Faster storage means it now takes less than a minute to go from a turned-off console to playing your favourite game, and you won’t be interrupted while you’re doing it either – I’ve been playing Spider-Man: Miles Morales this week and can’t recall seeing a single loading screen so far. With the console turned all the way off (and not just in rest mode), it takes less than 30 seconds to start up and get you into the game.

Spider-Man: Miles Morales is one of several day-one launch titles for Sony’s PlayStation 5 games console.

RELATED: Who will win the ‘console war’
Some might still try to tell you the graphics are better on PC but since I’ve recently spent so much time trying to get games to work on PC than actually playing them I can’t verify this for certain.

The graphics argument is kind of a moot point by now anyway: Based on what I’ve seen from the PS5 any improvement in graphics would just throw us into the uncanny valley where they become creepy instead. How good do you really need the graphics to be?

The exciting thing about the graphics update on the next-gen consoles is that we’re only at the start of the console cycle, and developers are going to get better at optimising their games for visuals and performance on the system hardware (have a look at a launch title from the PS4 versus a game released six years later for an example of what this looks like).

If you’re on the PC train you also don’t get the PS5’s futuristic new controller, which is the best thing I’ve ever used to control a video game in all my years wasting my time playing video games.

We’ll have more to tell you about the PS5 and its rival Xbox Series X and Series S consoles over the coming weeks, but for now here’s my early review: The PS5 is sick. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.