I am a console gamer by nature. My preference is to play in my living room with a controller, mainly so that I can wander through to my kitchen with it when I need a drink.
There are exceptions when I’ll play on PC, including empire builders like Age of Empires or the Civilization series and certain shooters like Counter-Strike and Riot Games’ Valorant. And lately Valorant has been the game of choice between the two.
I was caught completely off guard when Riot Games announced that Valorant was coming to consoles during Summer Games Fest. It’s a surprise move from a company that has mostly eschewed consoles, save for some delightful Riot Forge games, like Song of Nuru and Ruined King.
After a little over 20 hours with the public beta on my PlayStation 5, I can safely say that I’m pleasantly surprised at how well Riot has translated the Valorant experience onto consoles. Here are some initial thoughts on Valorant for console after some time with the public beta.
What is Valorant?
Valorant is a popular tactical first-person shooter on PC developed by the previously mentioned Riot Games, who is mostly known for League of Legends. Similar to Overwatch, the game pits two teams of 5 players against each other with one team defending bomb sites while the attacking team attempts to plant the spike (bomb). Also, like Overwatch or Sony’s upcoming Concord, Valorant is a hero shooter with multiple unique characters featuring a variety of abilities and weapons. Unlike Overwatch, though, Valorant’s gunplay is more in the vein of Counter-Strike with its precise shooting and tactical gameplay.
The public beta released on July 19 after a month of closed beta.
Focus your mind: Controls and ADS
With precision being the name of the game, Riot had to overhaul the controls and UI to make the game work on consoles. Everything is pretty clearly labeled, though I did have to hunt to find out that you need to hold LT and R3 to truly aim down the sights (ADS) of certain weapons like the Vandal.
For the most part the gunplay feels like a great translation of the PC version of the game. Each gun feels different but it's pretty intuitive to figure out how they work.
Where Riot changed things up is with Focus mode, which is similar to traditional ADS in games like Call of Duty. Using Focus significantly lowers your sensitivity to allow for precise aiming. Releasing Focus allows you to regain movement speed and spraying ability.
Riot has decided against cross-play between consoles and PCs, and I think it's because ADS like you’d see in other console shooters isn’t here. You have to be precise with your aim. There is no aim assist.
You’ll really notice this in the lack of strafing. Firing while strafing is severely punished with poor accuracy. Valorant feels like it should play fast but it is a game where you want to slow down. Doing so will give you an edge in 1-on-1s and even group battles.
Coming from PC, Focus mode took time for me to get a handle on. The slow down continually surprised me and I lost more gunfights than I won because I kept forgetting that it drops the sensitivity. Once you get a handle on it, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you become a monster on the field.
Compared to other shooters, Valorant does bring a ton of customization to the controls and crosshair look. It’s not as deep as the PC version of course, but you can get pretty granular.
Git gud? Or a true issue?
It is early yet and I’ve only put about 20 hours into the beta, but there were some struggles. Because Valorant puts an emphasis on tactics, a big part of moving around on maps is being stealthy by walking. On PC you can hold CTRL and your character will walk. On PS5, you can customize a specific button to be a walk button but the default is to push the movement stick slightly forward.
I toggled between both and the slight pressure on the stick method feels miles better to do but I have yet to get comfortable with it. I did the same with crouching which is an on-off option. I tried switching it to holding a button so when I released it I would get out of crouching, but that just doesn’t work comfortably on controllers.
Additionally, Valorant on console feels slower than the PC version. In the moment when trying to move from one bombsite to the other this is frustrating, yet on the whole I enjoyed that it makes you slow down. Which isn’t to say that it feels like your character is a tank lumbering around the map. It’s not a flaw per se, but it feels noticeable.
There are two places in the game where being a PC title first and foremost really rears its head. One is in team communication. Valorant has a ping system that can enable you to communicate with teammates who aren’t on a microphone. I have children and tend to game at night, so I don’t use a mic most of the time. But I can ping the map to alert teammates to danger, like where a dropped bomb might be or where an enemy player is lurking. It’s a helpful, ingenious system.
Valorant on console has this feature but moving your cursor on the map feels so slow that it’s almost unusable. I imagine many gamers in Valorant will find themselves in plenty of games with mic-less players, which means that some kind of improvement to this system needs to be made. That said, the pings I was able to get off were routinely ignored by teammates, so maybe it’s just me that needs to change.
Relatedly, the slow moving cursor affects how certain heroes play. Plenty of heroes like Gekko or Viper have abilities that can be quickly accessed and used with a press of a button. Others like Brimstone with his cloud smokes or Astra (with her multitude of abilities that necessitate her becoming a floating zombie) require looking at the map and dropping your ability where you want it.
Using Brimstone as an example, his smokes can feel like a tactical in the moment response to enemy strategies as you quickly toggle in and out of the map on PC. On a console, it’s so much slower that it really changes how much you can do with his smokes. Mostly, I ended up dropping smokes at the beginning of a round to alter lines of sight or in the middle during a quiet moment to block visual access to bombsites while defending or retaking.
Final Thoughts
Riot Games has brought an exciting, unique shooter to consoles.Will it be able to compete with the likes of Apex Legends or Call of Duty? No, but those games operate in a different space. Those games offer fast, fluid, almost arcade-y gunplay that allows for swifter, more immediate reactions.
Despite its cartoony artstyle, Valorant fits more in the Rainbow 6: Siege mold of tactics, planning and precision, with the addition of abilities like an adorable monster that plants bombs and a woman who can raise ice walls.
Riot has done an admirable job of translating that precision to console and making it feel like it belongs on your console. The game runs at a solid 60 FPS, and I’ve encountered few bugs or issues, though I’ve read others who’ve struggled with bugs.
There is refinement that can be done to the controls, especially anything that requires a cursor to work, but for now, I am solidly happy with Valorant’s translation to PS5. It’s quickly going to become one of the best PS5 games, in my opinion.
While we were putting this together Riot surprised released Valorant in full for consoles. If you want to give it a try, you can download the game on your console of choice (Xbox Series X|S or PS5) now. You will need to get a Riot account to login into the game.
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