Valorant’s PS5 Beta is impressive and unlike anything else on the console

For years, Valorant has been huge on PC, becoming a streaming hit, hosting massive esports tournaments, and inspiring tons of fan art and cosplay. After many job listings revealed that the game could be heading to consoles over the past few years, Riot has finally brought the game to PS5 in beta form, and it’s an impressive take on the shooter in its infancy. It’s full of quality-of-life features that make this shooting style more accessible and familiar to a new audience, without losing any of the skill and craftsmanship needed to dominate matches.

For starters, Valorant is a high-precision, team-based shooter that requires a lot of teamwork and impressive precision from you. The game, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), is a round-based affair with two teams of five facing off in short one-minute, forty-second rounds, either defending a bomb site or were asked to plant and detonate a bomb. First round to 13 wins claim victory.

But we don’t see this style of shooter on consoles very often, and in fact, the last time we can remember something like this on PlayStation was the original CS:GO on PS3 in 2012. That version of the game died quickly because patch releases were slow and the controls just didn’t really suit a controller.

The kills in this shooter genre are extremely fast. Aim well and you can kill someone with a headshot or two in less than a second. If you fail to tame the gun’s wild recoil patterns, your bullets will start to miss their target and hit anywhere but where your point is aimed.

The precision required is simply not easy to master in a controller compared to the high precision a mouse provides. But Riot has made some key changes to the game that help to try and maintain the accuracy you get on PC. The first is “Focus Mode” which allows you to slow down your aiming sensitivity by holding down the left trigger. Doing this allows you to aim in a corner and wait for someone to peak, or tighten the recoil cone of your gun to deliver more accurate shots.

It’s an impressive way to be able to retain the variable sensitivity that a mouse offers while giving you instant access to the focused target when needed, while allowing players to quickly do a 180 if they hear someone coming up behind them. . We still haven’t quite mastered when and when not to use Focus Mode, but it’s not something you should rely on to shoot photos as your movement is very limited.

Getting your settings right is also vital to racking up kills and winning rounds. Thankfully, Riot has kept much of the customization and options available on PC for the console release, allowing you to adjust your sensitivity when in focus mode, when out of it, and when aiming scope shots.

You can customize your dot to a color and style you like, and change the default movement speed to walking instead of running. There are even more in-depth options here, like being able to adjust weapon readiness from holding a rifle or pistol in your right hand to your left hand if you’re right-eye dominant and want to focus on seeing more of the right hand. side of your screen.

In addition to these settings, you can rebind most of the buttons. However, we wish Riot would go a step further and allow you to reconnect ANY button, as some controller presets don’t allow you to change key actions like jumping, shooting, and activating focus mode. For example, we want to set the walk button to L1 or R1 so we can still aim while moving slowly around the map when needed, since footsteps are loud in Valorant. But these buttons can’t be changed for almost all presets, and when they can, it’s because they’re smaller actions and the main actions have been moved to weird buttons like the Cross, Circle, Square, and Triangle buttons.

Despite these minor annoyances, the console port of Valorant in its beta state is excellent. It’s clear from the quality of life features and improvements that Riot wants this game to succeed away from PC; this is not a rushed port and a lot of care and attention has gone into it.

After spending several dozen hours with the game over the past two weeks or so, we’re starting to improve the skills. The bottom line here is that the game is incredibly demanding and requires a calm, cool head along with impressive precision that we just aren’t adapted to on consoles. But after playing with a few heroes and learning their playstyles, we settled on an initiator or controller. These classes or roles focus on either preparing your team for success in pushing or defending a point or providing key information such as enemy locations – with Fade and Viper being our favorite characters.

However, the different kits and abilities of all classes mean there’s an agent for every playstyle, whether it’s Astra’s ability to confuse and distract players with her Ultimate placement and smoke grenades, or the hunter-killer playstyle of Iso- s that prompts him to seek kills and be the main damage dealer for your team.

Unfortunately, in this early stage of beta, matchmaking can be a little rough. Finding games is easy, but not everyone is playing Valorant as it’s meant to be played – or people are still learning how to aim, like us. The latter is not a huge problem and will improve over time and when Ranked is released on consoles.

But we often run into matches where teammates play the game like it’s Call of Duty, jumping and spraying an entire magazine while their bullets keep missing. Or, you have players picking a Sentinel agent and smoking in horrible places that either don’t protect you or don’t allow you to properly defend a point.

However, this is all part of the learning curve. In a few months – fingers crossed – more players will realize that Valorant is a different kind of shooter.

Either way, Valorant on console has become our new addiction. We’ve wasted days on it over the past few weeks, as the “one more game” compulsion and hard-to-master gunplay are enthralling and feel fresh and exciting for the PS5. Pulling off a last second and squeezing in a round are immensely satisfying moments There isn’t another multiplayer shooter like this on PS5 – and especially not one that’s this polished.

Riot has already ironed out a lot of issues over the past four years on PC, which means the game already feels good and doesn’t have any major bugs or issues. While a few more tweaks feel necessary to truly replicate that PC experience on console, we’re excited to see the experience grow and improve over the course of the beta, as new Seasonal Episodes and updates roll out alongside the PC version from here on out. away. .

Have you tried the Valorant beta on PS5? Are you a fan of this precision shooting style? Don’t let your team down in the comments section below.