Valorant has been a huge success on PC for years, becoming a streaming hit, hosting huge esports tournaments, and inspiring tons of fan art and cosplay. After many job postings over the past few years suggested the game could come to consoles, Riot has finally brought the game to PS5 in a beta. It’s an impressive take on the shooter in its infancy. It’s packed with quality of life features that make this style of shooter more accessible and learnable for the new audience, without losing the skills and abilities needed to dominate matches.
First of all, 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 turn-based affair where two teams of five players compete against each other in short rounds of one minute and forty seconds. They must either defend a bomb site or plant and detonate a bomb. The first to win 13 rounds wins.
But we don’t see this kind of shooter very often on consoles, and in fact the last time we can remember something like this on PlayStation was the original CS:GO for PS3 in 2012. That version of the game quickly died out because patch releases were slow and the controls just didn’t really suit a controller.
Kills in this shooter genre are extremely fast. If you aim well, you can kill someone with one or two headshots in less than a second. If you fail to tame the guns’ wild recoil patterns, your bullets will miss their target and hit anywhere but where your crosshairs are pointing.
The accuracy required is simply not easy to achieve with a controller compared to the high precision of a mouse. However, Riot has made some key changes to the game that help maintain PC precision. The first is a “Focus Mode” that allows you to lower your aim sensitivity by holding down the left trigger. This lets you aim at a corner and wait for someone to look past, or narrow your weapon’s recoil cone to make more accurate shots.
This is an impressive way to retain the variable sensitivity of a mouse by giving you instant access to focused aiming when you need it, while still giving players the ability to quickly perform a 180-degree turn if they hear someone coming from behind. We haven’t quite figured out when to use Focus Mode and when not to, but you shouldn’t rely on it to land shots, as your movement is severely limited.
Fine-tuning your settings is also important for getting kills and winning rounds. Thankfully, Riot has kept many of the customization and options available on PC for the console version, allowing you to adjust your sensitivity in focus mode, out of focus mode, and when aiming with a scope.
You can customize your crosshair in a color and style of your choosing and change your default movement speed from running to walking. There are even more advanced options here, such as the ability to customize your weapon handling by holding a rifle or pistol in your right hand or your left if your right eye is dominant and you want to focus on seeing more of the right side of your screen.
In addition to these settings, you can remap most keys, but we wish Riot would go a step further and let you remap the keys. every button because some controller presets don’t allow changing important 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 if needed while slowly moving around the map because footsteps are loud in Valorant. However, these buttons cannot be changed for almost all presets and if they can, it’s because they are less important actions and important 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 beta is excellent. It’s clear from the quality of life features and improvements that Riot wants this game to succeed beyond PC. This isn’t a rushed port, but a lot of care and attention has been put into it.
After spending several dozen hours with the game over the past two weeks, we’re starting to hone our skills. The bottom line is that the game is incredibly demanding and requires a calm, cool head as well as impressive accuracy, which just doesn’t come naturally to us on consoles. But after playing around with a few heroes and getting to know their playstyles, we’ve settled on an Initiator or Controller. These classes or roles focus on either successfully setting up your team to capture or defend a point, or providing important information like enemy locations – with Fade and Viper being our preferred characters.
However, the different kits and abilities of all classes mean that there is an agent for every playstyle, be it Astra’s ability to confuse and distract players with her ultimate and smoke grenade placement, or Iso’s hunter-killer playstyle that drives him to hunt down kills and be the main damage dealer for your team.
Unfortunately, matchmaking can be a little tricky in this early phase of the beta. Finding games is easy, but not everyone plays Valorant the way it’s meant to be played – or people are still learning how to aim, like us. The latter isn’t a huge issue and will improve over time and with the release of Ranked on console.
But we often come across games where teammates play the game like Call of Duty, with jump shots and a full magazine because their bullets constantly miss. Or there are players who pick a Sentinel agent and throw smoke in terrible places that either don’t protect them or don’t allow them to properly defend a point.
This is all part of the learning curve, though. After a few months – fingers crossed – more players will understand that Valorant is a different kind of shooter.
Either way, Valorant has become our new addiction on consoles. We’ve spent days playing it over the past few weeks because the “one more game” compulsion and hard-to-master gunplay keep us hooked and feel fresh and exciting on PS5. Getting a last-second defuse and stopping a bullet are extremely satisfying moments. There’s no other multiplayer shooter like it on PS5 – and especially not one that’s as polished.
Riot has already solved many of the issues over the past four years on PC, meaning the game already feels great and has no bugs or major issues. While a few more changes seem necessary 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 will be released alongside the PC version from now on.
Have you tried the Valorant beta on PS5? Are you a fan of this style of shooter? Don’t let your team down in the comments section below.