The PS4 review embargo lifted a couple days ago, and Ive spent way more time than I should have this week reading through them instead of, you know, working. Polygon, IGN, Ars Technica, all the usual places had their pieces up basically the moment the clock allowed it, and the consensus is pretty much what you'd expect: nice hardware, thin launch lineup, some rough edges that'll probably get patched out eventually.
Sony ships the thing this Friday for $399, which is a hundred bucks cheaper than what Microsoft's asking for the Xbox One later this month, and that price gap is doing a lot of work in the early reaction pieces. Everyone keeps bringing it up like its the whole story. It kind of is, honestly. Four hundred dollars for a new box under the TV is a real purchase, not an impulse buy, and a hundred dollar difference between the two is the kind of thing that actually moves people one way or another at Best Buy.
What strikes me reading through these reviews isnt the games so much, its how many reviewers are mentioning what the thing cant do yet. No DLNA media streaming at launch. No MP3 playback. A bunch of the media apps people got used to on the PS3, Netflix and the like, arent there on day one and are apparently coming "soon" in an update. Ive owned enough consoles at this point to know "soon" is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence. Remember when the PS3 launched without in-game XMB access to some features and it took what felt like a year to get sorted? Not saying this is the same situation, but it rhymes.
As for the games themselves: Killzone Shadow Fall is getting the usual "gorgeous but the shooting feels a bit stiff" treatment that Killzone games always seem to get, Knack is being described as fine-for-kids-forgettable-for-everyone-else, and Resogun is the one everyone actually seems excited about, which is funny because its a $15 twin stick shooter and not a system seller in any traditional sense. That tells you something about the state of exclusive content at launch. If the free-with-PS-Plus arcade shooter is the best thing people have to say about your new console's software lineup, the AAA exclusives arent quite there yet.
None of this is really new for a console launch, to be fair. The PS3 launched thin. The 360 launched thin. Everybody knows the good stuff comes six, twelve, eighteen months in once studios have had actual dev kits for more than a year and figure out what the hardware wants to do. Im not panicking about it. Im just trying to decide if Im a day-one person or a wait-three-months person, and every year I go through this exact same internal argument and I honestly dont think Ive ever picked the same answer twice.
My actual hangup, if Im being honest, has nothing to do with reviews or launch titles at all. Its that I still havent finished GTA V, which came out back in September, and I feel a little ridiculous buying a new box to play new games when I've got a half-finished open world sitting right there mocking me from the shelf. My backlog is genuinely embarrassing at this point. I started keeping a spreadsheet of unfinished games earlier this year as a joke and then it stopped being funny around entry forty.
Battlefield 4 and Assassin's Creed IV are both getting next-gen versions alongside the PS4 launch too, which is the more interesting story to me than the exclusives, honestly, since those are games a lot of people already own on current consoles and now have to decide whether to double dip on. Cross-buy or upgrade pricing for stuff like that would go a long way, and as far as I can tell nobody's offering it.
Anyway. Friday's the day for anyone who preordered. I did not preorder. Ask me again in January and I bet the answer's different, it usually is with these things.