PlayStation Plus Premium Impressions

As promised a couple of months ago, Sony has finally combined PlayStation Plus and PlayStation Now into one service, PlayStation Plus Premium. Available across three different tiers (including Extra, Premium, and Essential), it features a tier of services to choose from, depending on what players want.
We decided to hop on board to see how the service fares. Now the real question is…can it possibly live up to what Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass is capable of? Or does Sony have its work cut out for it in the months ahead? Let’s look under the hood.

The Problematic Interface
The first thing we noticed about the PlayStation Plus Premium page is its interface. It’s here that Sony attempts to highlight several games in its service right off the bat, through a variety of categories. These include classic games, new games, games you can play via cloud streaming and more.
But here’s the problem – the interface is bland. Unlike Xbox Game Pass, accessing the full list of games available is a pain, as they’re divided into categories. So let’s say you want to find a specific game like Ratchet and Clank, right? Shouldn’t be a problem…but it is. You’ll find the PS3 games with ease, but not the PS4 games. To find that, you actually have to do a search for it in the search bar. It should be much easier than this.
Not to mention that the game menus themselves don’t show much pizzazz. With Microsoft’s interface, you get a good look at the games that just debuted on Xbox Game Pass, via images or easy-to-click boxes. But with the disorganization of Sony’s page, you can’t really see too much outside of certain highlighted titles, like Ghost of Tsushima and Red Dead Redemption II.
I mean, you can still access a number of favorites, so it’s not a real loss. However, there’s more that can be done to make PlayStation Plus Premium a lot easier to navigate.

How Do Games Perform?
Next up is the speed of the service. Which, to say, isn’t bad. Sony’s been doing this for a while now with PlayStation Now, and, with its combined PlayStation Plus Premium service, it’s not bad.
We tried out PGA Tour 2K21, The Crew 2 and a few other games. Thus far, performance is very good. Granted, the high-end games can get a little chuggy if too much is happening with servers. But fortunately, these problems are few and far between. The streaming service is about right, though there’s still a light bit of preference to Microsoft’s in terms of how quickly games load up. Just a slight bit.
PS3 and classic games also perform reasonably well, and Sony even has the option to download games you may have purchased previously on the PlayStation library. It was a blast downloading Jumping Flash and playing the heck out of it on a PS5, without missing a beat.
The PS3 streaming is about what you’d expect it to be as well. While it’s slightly disappointing you can’t download those games just yet, it performs strongly enough that you’ll still want to try them out. The only letdown is that the PlayStation Now library has been significantly cut down. Favorites like Wet and Sonic Generations are, sadly, long gone.

That Leads Us To the Games
Finally, there are the games themselves. And overall, there’s a good variety here.
The PS4/PS5 titles are excellent, particularly Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Returnal and several other favorites. And they download like a champ. However, not all the games are available for stream just yet. We assume Sony is working on this, but it’d be nice if the games could get up to speed so we can enjoy them without clogging that hard drive. Maybe over the next couple of weeks.
The ”classic” games aren’t too bad either. There aren’t nearly enough PS1 games, though Jumping Flash and the Worms games make for a good retro treat. But, honestly, some of these choices are just bizarre. You’re going to put Tekken 2 on the service instead of Tekken 3? Also, where are the PSP games we were promised? We wanted to take Ridge Racers for a few rounds.
We assume the library will continue to grow as time goes on, starting with Stray arriving next month and other new games debuting from there. As it stands, there’s a good game library here, but accessibility and some choices could use a little extra work.

Overall?
In the end, PlayStation Plus Premium has a lot of elements in place that work in its favor. The game selection is excellent, online performance is pretty sharp, and there are plenty of features to try out.
That said, it’s still got some problems, namely with the availability of titles to stream, as well as the lack of PSP games and the loss of so many PlayStation Now classics. Eventually, the service may grow, but whether it can get to the level of Xbox Game Pass has yet to be seen.
For now, it’s worth it if you’re curious, but don’t expect it to go leaps and bounds over what the competition has in store. Not yet, anyway.

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