The Good And The Bad Of Sony's PlayStation 4

By Matthew Nemeth

So I have had my PlayStation 4 for just over a year now and I wanted to discuss what is good and bad about the console so far from exclusive games, how the console runs, whether the UI is any good and so on.

The Bad, Let’s Start With The UI

Let’s get the bad out of the way 1st, The UI for the PS4 is pretty bad. it’s fairly slow at times there is no easy way to switch between apps apart from pressing the PS button but sometimes that doesn’t work properly either. The idea of having all your games and apps with the TV apps being tucked away just doesn’t look good and sometimes it can be annoying to try and get right to the other end and I can’t find any sort of ‘pin’ system apart from folders which is only a recent addition to the system, The UI is simply too clunky. Also when you go back to your game from a “Suspended State” it can make the console that bit louder (it’s already a little too loud) and takes a little too long to load up again.

The TV App

I briefly touched on the TV app. I really don’t like it, it has to individually load and then actually load the app that you want to actually open. If you are playing a game and want to watch a walkthrough on YouTube you can double press the PS button and switch between the game and YouTube itself, Sometimes, however, this doesn’t work and all it does it take you from your game to the TV app so you still have to actually load the app again.

The PlayStation Network

The PlayStation Network is slow, sometimes failing to load simple things such as messages, The store and basically everything else that needs the internet to load and you still cannot change your name, Not much else to say with this, It’s just mostly slow.

The Good, Let’s Start With Exclusives

So far this year we have seen Horizon Zero Dawn, Persona 5, Nioh, Neir, Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted The Lost Legacy and PSVR titles. That’s quite a lot of content just in 2017. Let alone the games due to come out in the future such as Spider-Man, Death Stranding from the awesome Hideo Kojima, Days Gone, The Last Of Us 2, God Of War, A New Gran Turismo And More. Sony is doing incredibly well with exclusives right now.

PlayStation VR

I personally don’t have a PSVR system yet but I’ve heard mostly good things. From a growing library of games from Batman VR, Until Dawn Rush Of Blood and the upcoming Spider-Man game (a different title from what I mentioned earlier). PSVR is cheap compared to others such as The Vive and Oculus Rift, Plus the fact you would also need a good enough gaming PC to even be able to run those, which therefore would cost a lot more than a PS4 so as a result, PSVR is the cheaper and more accessible, I mean at least 60 million people own a PS4 in the 1st place.