Valorant has been huge on PC for years, becoming a streaming hit, hosting huge esports tournaments, and inspiring tons of fan art and cosplay. After many job postings suggested the game could be coming to consoles in recent years, Riot has finally brought the game to PS5 in beta form, and it’s an impressive take on the shooter that’s still in its infancy. It’s packed with quality of life features that make this shooting style more accessible and learnable for the new audience, without losing the skills and control needed to dominate matches.
For starters, Valorant is a highly accurate, team-based shooter that requires a lot of teamwork and impressive accuracy from you. The game, like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), is a rounds-based affair that pits two teams of five against each other in short rounds of one minute and forty-two seconds, either defending a bomb site or plant a bomb and detonate it. The first through 13 round wins claim victory.
But we don’t see this style of shooter all that often on consoles, 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.
Kills in this genre of shooter are extremely fast. Aim well, and you can kill someone in less than a second with a headshot or two. If you fail to tame the wild recoil patterns of weapons, your bullets will miss their target and end up everywhere except where your crosshair is aimed.
The required accuracy is not easy to master on a controller compared to the high precision offered by a mouse. But Riot has made some significant changes to the game that will help maintain the precision you get on PC. The first is a ‘Focus Mode’ that allows you to slow down your aiming sensitivity by holding down the left trigger. Doing this allows you to aim at a corner and wait for someone to peak, or tighten your weapon’s recoil cone to make more accurate shots.
It’s an impressive way to maintain the variable sensitivity of a mouse, giving you instant access to targeting when needed, while still allowing players to quickly make a 180 turn 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 for land shots as your freedom of movement is severely limited.
Fine-tuning your settings is also essential for racking up kills and winning rounds. Fortunately, Riot has retained many of the customizations and options available on PC for the console release, letting you adjust your sensitivity when you’re in focus mode, when you’re out of it, and when you’re aiming down with a scope.
You can customize your crosshair to a color and style you like, and change your default movement speed to walking instead of running. There are even deeper options here, like being able to adjust the dexterity of your weapon, from holding a rifle or pistol in your right hand to your left hand if you’re right eye dominant, and you want to focus on seeing more of the right hand. side of your screen.
In addition to these settings, you can re-link most buttons. However, we wish Riot would go a step further and re-engage you each button, because some controller presets don’t let you change key actions like jumping, shooting, and activating focus mode. For example, we want to set the walk button to L1 or R1 so that we can still aim while moving slowly around the map when necessary, since footsteps are loud in Valorant. But these buttons can’t be changed for almost all presets, and if they can, it’s because they’re smaller actions and the main actions have been moved to extraneous buttons like the X, Circle, Square, and Triangle buttons.
Despite these minor annoyances, the console port of Valorant in beta status is excellent. It’s clear from the quality of life features and improvements that Riot wants this game to succeed beyond PC; this is not a rushed port and a lot of care and attention has been given to it.
After spending several dozen hours with the game over the past two weeks, we are starting to improve our skills. The bottom line is that the game is incredibly demanding and requires a calm, cool head along with impressive accuracy, which we’re just not tuned into on consoles. But after playing with a few heroes and learning their playstyles, we settled on an initiator or controller. These classes or roles are focused on making your team successful by pushing or defending a point, or providing important information such as enemy locations – with Fade and Viper being our favorite characters.
However, the varied kits and abilities of all classes ensure that there’s an agent for every playstyle, whether it’s Astra’s ability to confuse and distract players with her Ultimate and smoke grenade placements, or Iso’s hunter-killer playstyle that pushes him to seek kills and be the main damage dealer for your team.
Unfortunately, matchmaking can be a bit rough at this early stage of the beta. Finding games is easy, but not everyone plays Valorant the way it was meant to be played – or people are still learning how to aim, like us. The latter is not a major problem and will improve over time, and when Rated arrives on console.
But we often come across matches where teammates play the game like it’s Call of Duty, jumpshotting and spraying an entire magazine while their bullets continually miss. Or you have players who pick a Sentinel agent and throw smoke at horrible places that don’t protect you or allow you to properly defend a 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.
Anyway, Valorant on consoles has become our new addiction. We’ve lost whole days to it in recent weeks, as the urge to play another game and the hard-to-master gunplay captivate and feel fresh and exciting for PS5. round are immensely satisfying moments. There’s no other multiplayer shooter like this on PS5 – especially not one this polished.
Riot has already fixed many of the issues on PC over the past four years, meaning the game already feels great and has no bugs or major issues. While there still seem to be a few changes needed to truly replicate that PC experience on consoles, we’re excited to see the experience grow and improve during the beta as new seasonal episodes and updates will release in parallel with the PC version from now on. .
Have you tried the Valorant beta on PS5? Are you a fan of this precise style of shooting? Don’t let your team down in the comments below.