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 coming to consoles in recent years, Riot has finally brought the game to PS5 in beta, and it’s an impressive shooter in its infancy. It’s full of quality-of-life features that make this style of shooter more accessible and learnable to a new audience without losing any of the skill and mastery needed to dominate matches.
For starters, Valorant is a high-precision team-based shooter that requires a lot of teamwork and impressive accuracy from you. The game, similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), is a round-robin affair with two teams of five facing each other in short one-minute and forty-second rounds, either defending a bomb site or having to plant and detonate a bomb. Winning the first to 13th round claims the victory.
But we don’t see this style of shooter very often on consoles, and honestly, the last time we saw something like this on PlayStation was the original CS:GO on PS3 in 2012. That version of the game died quickly because the patch release was slow and the controls just didn’t really suit the controller.
Killing in this shooter genre is 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 weapons’ wild recoil patterns, your bullets will start to miss their target and hit everywhere but where your reticle is pointing.
The precision that is required is not easy to handle on a controller compared to the high precision offered by a mouse. However, Riot has made a few key changes to the game that help maintain the accuracy you get on PC. The first of these is ‘Focus Mode’ which allows you to slow down your aiming sensitivity by holding down the left trigger. This allows you to aim in a corner and wait for someone to fire, or tighten the gun’s recoil cone for more accurate shots.
It’s an impressive way to retain the variable sensitivity that a mouse offers by giving you instant access to targeted aiming when needed, while allowing players to quickly do a 180 if they hear someone coming up behind them. We still haven’t quite figured out when and when not to use focus mode, but it’s not something you should rely on for ground shots, as your movement is severely limited.
Fine-tuning your settings is also crucial to getting kills and winning rounds. Thankfully, Riot has kept a lot of the customization and options available on PC for the console release, allowing you to adjust the sensitivity in, out of, and scope mode.
You can customize the reticle to the color and style you like, as well as change the default movement speed to walking instead of running. There are even deeper options, such as being able to adjust your weapon dexterity from holding a rifle or pistol in your right hand to your left hand if you are right eye dominant and want to focus on seeing more with your right hand. side of the screen.
In addition to these settings, you can rebind most of the buttons. However, we wish Riot would go a step further and let you rebind each button because some controller presets don’t allow you to change key actions like jumping, shooting, and activating focus mode. For example, we want to put the walk button on L1 or R1 so we can still aim and move slowly around the map when needed, since footsteps are loud in Valorant. However, these buttons can’t be changed for almost all presets, and when they can, it’s because they’re minor 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 features and quality-of-life improvements that Riot wants this game to succeed outside of PC; this is not a rushed port and a lot of care and attention is given to it.
After several tens of hours spent playing the game over the last two weeks, we are starting to improve in terms of skills. The bottom line is that the game is incredibly challenging and requires a calm, cool head along with impressive precision that we’re just not tuned for on consoles. But after playing around with a few heroes and learning their playstyles, we settled on an initiator or controllers. These classes or roles focus on either setting your team up for success to claim or defend a point, or providing key information such as enemy locations – with our favorites being Fade and Viper.
However, the varied sets and abilities of all classes mean that there’s an agent for every playstyle, whether it’s Astra’s ability to confuse and distract players by placing ultimates and smoke grenades, or Isa’s hunter-killer playstyle that forces him to seek kills and be a major seller damage to your team.
Unfortunately, in this early beta, matchmaking can be a bit rough. Finding games is easy, but not everyone plays Valorant the way it’s supposed to be – or people are still learning to aim like we are. The latter isn’t a big deal and will improve over time and after the release of Ranked on console.
But we often run into matches where teammates are playing a game like Call of Duty, jumping shooting and spraying the entire magazine while their bullets keep missing. Or you have players who pick up a Sentinel agent and throw smoke at horrible places that either don’t protect you or don’t allow you to properly defend the point.
However, this is all part of the learning curve. After a few months – fingers crossed – more players will understand that Valorant is a different kind of shooter.
Either way, Valorant on consoles has become our new addiction. We’ve lost days to it over the last few weeks as the “one more game” urge and the hard-to-master gunplay keep us hooked and feeling fresh and excited for the PS5. round are immensely satisfying moments There’s no multiplayer shooter quite like this on PS5 – and especially not this polished.
Riot has already fixed a lot of issues over the past four years on PC, which means the game already looks great and has no bugs or major issues. While it seems like a few more changes need to be made to truly replicate the PC experience on consoles, we’re excited to see the experience grow and improve during the beta as new seasonal episodes and updates are released in parallel with the release from now on for PC. .
Have you tried the Valorant beta on PS5? Are you a fan of this precision shooter style? Don’t let your team down in the comments section below.