The new PS Plus is available in Poland from June 23. I had more than a week to learn about the Sony service. It made a positive impression on me, but also led to a rather sad outcome.
You have decided on the PS Plus Extra plan. As I have already emphasized in other materials, the classics did not interest me at all, so I did not even think about PS Plus Premium for a moment. I didn’t buy a PS5 console to be able to see the titles that were originally available on the first PlayStation consoles.
At the same time, I understand the other side of the barrier, namely the older recipients who grew up on these songs from PS One or PS2 – for them, PS Plus Premium would be a beautiful return to the past, or at least on paper, because in practice, the releases work Singles are a classic in the PAL version, and so on with a 24fps limit and cumbersome lines on the sides of the screen.
First steps with PS Plus Extra
After browsing through a fairly large library of PS Plus Extra games, I immediately decided to download a few smaller games, which I hadn’t really bothered about yet – either because I didn’t have time for them, or because their promotional material discouraged me from buying. It doesn’t really matter.
The same disc includes Shadow Warrior 3, Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood, Telling Lies, and The Long Dark. I started with the last production because I heard a lot of positives about it from survival fans. Plus, its creators offered a fictional campaign, so it took hold of it in the first place.
What a great career when I found myself in the world created by the indie team Hinterland. Graphically, The Long Dark not only represents PS3 level or worse, but the game is also incredibly rudimentary. The mechanics emphasize very slow-paced gameplay, and the 30fps lock doesn’t help either. Sometimes I got the impression that I didn’t even try those 30fps, because said survival works poorly on PS5.
Then I picked up the inconspicuous “Telling Lies,” which is more like a movie than a game. In the course of the game, we delve into the lives of a dozen or so characters (there are four main ones) and try to solve many puzzles by searching for key phrases on a laptop belonging to the secret services. The assumptions were very interesting, but the production had nothing to encourage me to solve puzzles for long. I guess it wasn’t a title for me, because one of the first films available in Telling Lies I got bored.
In contrast, about Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Earthblood is not much to write home about. Production fails at every step (I can’t believe the fairly good developers of Call of Cthulhu were responsible for this), and if it wasn’t for a decent combat system I’d uninstall it after the introduction. By controlling a guy who is capable of transforming into a werewolf, I felt like I was wasting valuable time that I could have spent on a better, proven game, an interesting series or just a break from the daily console takeover.
Shadow Warrior 3 to the rescue
The only game I was able to finish out of the above set was the original Shadow Warrior 3. In this case, I was super excited to complete the funky FPS from Flying Wild Hog, as it leaves the PS Plus Extra on July 5th. .
At first, Lo Wang’s adventure fascinated me. Constant hitting, fine settings, many interesting finishing touches, and interesting skills or weapons made it so much fun for me to destroy the following hordes of sticky opponents.
However, there were budget constraints, and from the middle of the plot I began to miss new things – especially new weapons. Repetition is starting to creep in, and with the final chapters of the game I’m already starting to look at sources that show how much time I still need to spend in Shadow Warrior 3 to get to the end.
Sometimes there are exceptions…
And it’s not that Shadow Warrior 3 is a bad game. The problem is that I don’t feel like making much smaller works – there are gems like Ken that I like: Bridge of Spirits or Disco Elysium, but these are just units. PS Plus Extra only confirmed my previous conclusions, which show that I spend my time at my best and happiest in large, high-budget productions packed with content.
That’s why I’m glad Microsoft and Sony both have their own services where I can check out smaller titles. Independent developers are getting an extra service from the companies, and undecided ones (like me) can see if they can break their “hate” of low-budget video games this time around.
