How good is the PlayStation 4? Ask me in five years. Ask me later Naughty Dog's next distich of games, after I figure out whether War god is headed in the right direction, after I learn whether it has get along unfathomable to play a console halting without livestreaming it.

You have it away what? Ask me in a week, because I've alone been using the unaccustomed system online since 9pm Tuesday night and let history display that this review first ran online along 9am Wednesday morning.

That's wherefore, for directly, I'm calling this a Review (In March on). These days, many game reviews aren't really through when they early run. They can excuse parts of the game accurately at establish, but online communities cast these games. That's true, too, for the astonishingly online-centric PlayStation 4. We update game reviews to cistron in how a game's multiplayer stands heavenward. And I'll comprise updating this one, importantly, as we test much of the organisation's offline and online features. Still, there is a luck I tin percentage now.

Today I arse tell you a trifle about what the PS4 is, how it's on the job in its pre-launch phase, and what, as a device, its maker Sony has situated it to embody.

The console is a glossy, well portable (!), wonderfully quiet slab

The PS4 is a surprisingly small corner. It is so sleek that it might as well follow the 2015 PS4 Slight tossed back to us 2013ers via a time automobile. It is lighter, thinner and quieter than the original 2006 PlayStation 3. Extraordinary game machines, such as the archetypal fat PS3 or the original Nintendo Darmstadtium, arrive with an imperfect design that predicts their own looming displacement. Not this uncomparable. The PS4 shapes up as a corner in take of no space-redemptive or cosmetic improvement. Information technology doesn't use a power brick and even uses the same power line as the PS3.

The new angles of the unit look nice. My colleague Tina calls the console italicized. But this is still equally artless a package as most game machines.erhaps Nintendo's GameCube was the only console table e'er planned to be seen rather than to atomic number 4 hidden in an entertainment mall. Sony's newest is premeditated to vanish.

The PS4's trim shape and low visibility is all the same a boon to gamers. On solar day one, the PS4 turns out to represent easily movable. This is surprising and pleasingly disharmonious with the fact that, Eastern Samoa the operation of PlayStation 4 games proves, this soothe is a powerhouse. Mighty as information technology may be, for several days, I've been healthy to easily slip the console into a rucksack. I grab two cables and a controller and travel with the machine with little more inconvenience than if I was hauling around a thickheaded laptop computer reckoner.

The controller has better sticks, better triggers, healthier weight, and an awesome jack

There is much to care around the console's new, developed controller.

The DualShock 4 retains the twin-stick, some-buttoned layout that hardcore gamers love and that probably horrifies most of the people who went bowling connected the Wii. This control will break no barriers the way the Wii's Remote did Beaver State the commercials for Microsoft's Kinect say it testament. It should withal delight dedicated console gamers. A circular groove around the tops of the controller's thumbsticks enable more confident analog movement. The berm buttons have to a greater extent punch. The triggers ultimately curve outward to provenance your thumb as the Xbox 360 restrainer's did. And the unhurt matter is a tad heavier than the disconcertingly light DualShock 3.

One of the signature additions to this PlayStation accountant is a multi-touch touchpad, though it plays no great role in any of the console table's launch games that I've set up. Information technology's been used for simple swipe-based commands of in-game minions in Killzone and can zoom in connected a mapping in Assassin's Creed. Nothing amazing yet. It is offenseless, at pessimum.

Better, though less ballyhooed, is a headphone labourer in the restrainer that, in conjunction with a change in the console's settings, prat output all of a game's audio to accountant-associated headphones, a thaumaturgy last seen on the Wii U. Cry that setting the Domestic Seventh heaven option. Your most beloved housemates will prize it if they walk in and you trade the game audio from blaring through your speakers to purring through your headphones. And IT works, I behind confirm, with regular old iPhone headphones.

The DualShock 4 apes one of Nintendo's sillier concepts and puts a verbaliser in the controller. It wasn't really necessary. But let's yield a cheer for Sony adding a more sensible feature and allowing controllers to beryllium negatively charged when they are plugged into a PS4 that is in standby fashion.

Overall, moot DualShock 4 a flushed acclivity.

The revamped PlayStation Meshwork is fundamentally a Facebook that puts games—good games—best

Straight off we get to the parts of the PS4 that are harder to review. Namely, everything else. Back in the days of the Super Nintendo or even the original PlayStation, a game soothe did pretty very much just one thing. Maybe two. It played games. You either had fun with information technology OR not. And so Sony successful the PS2 a DVD musician and Microsoft late turned the Xbox 360 into a Netflix-streaming, fitness-trailing, ESPN-playing corner that also runs games. Even the gaming purists at Nintendo filled their new Wii U last year with video streaming services and a made-up-in mixer network.

Keep the PS4 offline and the arrangement rattling isn't much to a higher degree what I've already described: IT's a thin negro slab with a groovy controller, and it runs brilliant-sounding games. (Approve, it can also play Blu-Ray movies.) Yours for $400!

Plug the PS4 into the Cyberspace and you can expect a very antithetical experience. It's ironic that the PS4 was the system that was never announced to expect an online association. That was exactly departure to be the Xbox guys until they changed course. But it sure feels like the PS4 would do good from a persistent indefinite. Maybe you put on't have to be ever online with this unit, but it's designed to hit you want to be. Pick up, Sony's turn PlayStation gaming into an improbably social experience. Work the machine on and the main fare CRT screen will embody full of a cascade of updates from some PS4-related stuff your friends have been doing: playing games, uploading clips, broadcasting livestreams. I'm not talking about some small feed of info tucked unofficially. Below the system's row of main navigation icons tumbles a waterfall of updates. It is the element designed to catch your eye.

It's a tautology, but everything about the PS4's online systems feels designed to make any and all gaming experiences cost ethnical. In some respects, the system is catching busy its Xbox rival in causative cross-courageous company chat. In others, it's stepping on the far side, allowing users to press a "divvy up" button on the DualShock 4 and, with a couple more button taps, broadcast the game they'Re performin to anyone on Ustream, Twitch or a PS4 World Health Organization bequeath watch. To PC gamers, this will seem like another case of cute 'lil consoles trying to maintain. But if consoles are all about simplifying things, and so here is the PS4 with a guarantee that the next time you get a Naughty Dog game, a God of War or Killzone, then it'll be second nature—and easy—to not just start playing but let anyone catch you as well. That partake button should also ready it second nature to upload video of anything caller that just happened in a game, posting it to Facebook and, eventually, Sony says, to more flexible services like YouTube.

I'd like to tell you how terrific surgery terrible every of this online PS4 stuff is, but I can't. I prat merely report my initial findings and steer out that the economic value of a elite group network can only be stubborn when there are a ton of people along it. On Tuesday night, November 12, 2013, as I write this, there are non a ton of people online with the PS4.

Present's what I've done:

  • Gone to the PlayStation online computer memory, queued up some games to download then hopped about the system menus. No hassles there.

  • Friended co-prole Jason Schreier online...saw his PlayStation Network ID lead off to show up in my activity feast equally he started playing Assassin's Creed IV...conveyed him a "true name" call for and accepted one he dispatched me, and then saw him surfac more in my activity feed under his real name. I did this with separate people, too, and found that their real name calling didn't e'er show up in my feed.

  • Started playing arcade shooter Resogun...ressed the controller's Share button and chose the disseminate option...completed I needed to create a Squeeze account and did so finished the PS4...and then livestreamed some of the plot spell Jason spectated archetypical just past spotting ME in the Last PlayStation country of the dashboard that features popular streams (I was favourite by default) and then through Twitch... atomic number 2 even typed a few comments! Here's how that looked:

  • Tried using the share button to capture and upload clips, which more often than not worked, though I was disorganised as to how to reliably ensure that the scheme was capturing what I was hardly playing. I'll motive to test that more, but, at worst, there are just a few kinks to play stunned there. Notable: I had to exit the game I was playing to trim the clip I captured from it and I can lone plowshare my clips to Facebook as of now.

  • Unsuccessful to control my PS4 victimisation a Vita via the systems' Remote Encounter boast but managed little more than a slideshow connected my ne'er-abstract Brooklyn, NY Internet connection. Jason had more achiever using a PS4 and Vita in Manhattan simply needs to test this feature more before we can tell you how reliable it is. In my house, I can say, it looks like the Wii U will still outperform the PS4 for off-TV playing period.

The sharing functions are very exciting. I also same the social feeds. But I say all this now when I've in time to see if the sharing crumbles under weighty bandwidth usage and if the ethnical feeds testament turn too cluttered. It's impossible to know this overeat until crowds of people are using the PlayStation 4's meshing. It's also lignified to tell how unfree an ideal PS4 experience will be on having hot base Net. Sony's servers for the PS3 were ne'er anything to brag about and dragged, at any rate for me, while Microsoft's Xbox 360 ones blazed. I've only tested the PS4 online using pokey Time Warner Cable in Brooklyn, NY and will be involved to see how much quicker clips upload and my activeness feed populates when performin on faster connections like those at Kotaku's NYC HQ.

We did hit one ironware hasten bump that we're hoping/guessing is an anomaly

Aside from totally this online stuff, there's one other awkward detail that I can't accurately evaluate at this consequence. It's this: the number 1 retail PS4 we got from Sony didn't puzzle out. Now, please, don't panic. Information technology's impossible to tell how much of a fluke this was or whether this is the stoolie in a char mine of pending PS4 hardware troubles.

Here are the facts: In the recent week, my Kotaku colleagues and I have victimised one pre-release PS4 and 3 retail PS4s with no more problems. I've also heard from fellow gaming reporters World Health Organization've utilized their PS4s with no problems. But the first retail unit that Sony provided me failed to work when I plugged it into a TV in Kotaku's office. A colleague and I were able to compare IT to a second PS4 that did work and we found that the emergence was rather simple: the bad social unit had a faulty HDMI jack that we couldn't fully plug an HDMI cable length into. Information technology couldn't make a concrete connection and hence, apparently, couldn't transmit a stable signaling to our TV. We tried disparate cables and monitors. The issue was with the console.

I surely hope this is a fluke. I've asked Sony to contribution any insights they accept into how general this cut has been. They've not provided whatever official reply yet, but a rep did seem dumbstricken when I first told him about it. Apparently, we'll be keeping an eye out for whatsoever other reports of this event. Again, to be clear, the new four units we've proved opening-hand have worked fine.

Things we worried nearly, like mandatory installations, are really no problem at all

Eastern Samoa the PS4 begins to sell to thousands of gamers, we'll read Thomas More virtually how the automobile holds dormie: what it's good at and where information technology struggles. Our team at Kotaku and I have for now proven to do our best to anticipate some of the possible stress points.

We've pose our ears to the unit and been pleased to barely pick up the disc drive spinning. Don't worry, this thing is no leaf blower.

We've reacted to the news that altogether games must be installed and tested how long information technology takes to cause to hold back to play a 20 or 30GB game after the world-class time you put its platter in the machine. Good news: only just about 30 seconds.

We haven't dropped the console. We haven't put information technology in a sauna. And, no, we've non put it in a liquidizer.

We have played some games thereon, and, well, they're found games. They'Re OK, not amazing. One of the reasons I'm non yet recommending you run out and get a PS4 is that, as cool as a great deal of the system is, there's zero game on that that you just have to play and pot't play anywhere else.

We've checked out some multiplatform games like Assassin's Creed Four and Skylanders: Swap Force and marveled at their graphics. We've popped Craze in and wondered if we were looking at at a PS3 game.

I just wish the launch games were meliorate

I've by and large exactly cerebration about what can come of this PlayStation 4. The PS4 has a compelling agenda to make console gaming feel not just more social, but to facilitate better sharing of games and to stir up Thomas More conversation almost games. I'm excited, of all things, to not antimonopoly curse about the tough parting of a game but to hit the share button and show off you that annoyance section ripe while I'm silent fired up about information technology. I'm excited to manipulation the PS4's true name system to make Pine Tree State feel like the people with whom I connect on gambling consoles are historical masses who I know and who practice things with games that I can care about. And, yeah, I'm frantic almost all this satiate that is scantily tested and is on a system that doesn't offer many gaming moments that I lack to partake in yet. (Scan our reviews.)

The console starts out way better than the PS3 did

The PS4 is antimonopoly starting, and as it is, it is corneous to experience the PS4 doltishly nearly the machine that came before it. The PlayStation 3 made an undreamt journey, from rotund Resistance and Lair-playing political machine to the console of The Last of Us, Puppeteer and The Undressed Swan. The console got skinnier. It got better. And it aroused playing some of my favorite games always.

In November 2013, the PS4 is hopefully both a peachy file name extension of the PS3 and, queerly, a clean break. Information technology's not backwards-compatible, after all. Not yet, not until 2014 when Sony plans to deliver streaming games to those of us with good enough Internet connections to remote-control PS3 games housed on some Sony server somewhere. For now, the PS4 sits next to the PS3 without fully displacing information technology.

Picture this Friday as a crucial here and now in the great Sony electrical relay race. The PS3 is handing off the baton, and just as it happens, time seems to freeze. The next runner, the PS4, has confiscated the hand-off but hasn't rather landed its first stride. The PS3 bequeath keep running for a time, coasting on its own momentum. The PS4 looks equanimous, ready charge forth. We arrogate it'll happen. But that hand-off is still in progress. It's too soon to tell what happens next.

The PS4 seems like information technology'll be a hell of a console table, only it's mostly potential and a bunch of other tools in need of some awesome games for them to work along.

I think you'll want one finally. But, chilly as the PS4 is, a lack of a mustiness-play game means you can afford to wait. Do you demand to have a PS4?

(This review will be updated end-to-end the coming weeks to see to it we've covered altogether the basics and adequately tested altogether the social features with a growing PS4 userbase. Each Kotaku reviews that persuade a "Non Yet" are intended to eventually conclusion up as a "No" or "Yes". For a console, that will happen if/when the system either proves hopeless Beaver State winds up having some must-play, must-own games.)