PS4’s ‘Ghost Of Tsushima.. The Way for Honor, Stealth, And Revenge

PS4’s ‘Ghost Of Tsushima.. The Way for Honor, Stealth, And Revenge.. Ghost of Tsushima, which Sucker Punch is releasing Friday, is the last major game exclusive to the PlayStation 4 before Sony Interactive Entertainment rolls out the PlayStation 5 this holiday season.

Realated; PlayStation 5.. All what you need to know

Another month, another big release for Sony.

While Ghost of Tsushima may not have the ultra-hype or controversy that surrounded The Last of Us Part 2, Sucker Punch does seem to have landed a hit here, judging by early reviews of their evolution past the Infamous series into wildly new territory.

The samurai game is racking up solid scores across the board from major game sites and major YouTubers alike.

The Metacritic/Open Critic score seems like it’s going to settle in the mid 80s, a fine showing, though it’s still changing with new reviews coming in.

A few outlets are pushing back that while it’s beautiful, is a bit of a plain open world adventure when you really get down to it. Here’s Polygon, on that idea, in their unscored review:

“Ghost of Tsushima has a distinctive aesthetic, after all, but it’s only skin-deep.

The core game underneath that alluring exterior is a pastiche of open-world game design standards from five years ago; it lacks a real personality of its own.

Ghost of Tsushima offers a lovely world to explore, and there’s value in that, but it should have been so much more than a checklist of activities to accomplish.”

With Ghost of Tsushima, likely the last major new first-party game for Sony’s PS4,

I got a surprising number of these questions over the past few weeks. You might say they were surprising because Tsushima is an entirely new game series, not a hotly anticipated sequel.

But the surprise came in a different form, as all of my friends came out of the woodwork to essentially ask me the same question: “Is this new Sony game hopeful?”

PS4 fans are likely still reeling from the console’s last major exclusive, June’s brutal Last of Us Part II—a game that revolves around the biological and social devastation following a global pandemic.

TLOU2 is a brave, challenging, and compelling game,

but the consensus I’ve gathered is that people are hungry for a different kind of adventure right now.

So I’m starting my review of Ghost of Tsushima by loudly and emphatically saying yes, this game is hopeful in all of the best ways.

The latest adventure game from Sucker Punch, makers of series like Sly Cooper and inFamous, has come out of nowhere to blow me away.

I’m stunned in part because I nearly wrote the game off as an Assassin’s Creed clone when its gameplay was revealed in April. You wouldn’t be blamed for doing the same; we’re now roughly 400 years into the “open-world adventure” trend, and these games sure do blur together.

There’s no blurring here, though. Tsushima stands out for many reasons, perhaps most crucially because it does something I haven’t seen in the genre since Grand Theft Auto San Andreas.

it nails the world-building relationship between the player, the protagonist, and the supporting cast.

I rarely lost my sense of purpose or place while striving to bring honor back to my family and country as Jin Sakai, the game’s hero.

When he made friends, formed alliances, meditated on loss, or faced tragedy, I was there with him every step of the way, and this feeling was aided by a smartly paced stream of new samurai superpowers.

Ghost of Tsushima offers some elegant solutions to the superficial problems with huge, open games like this.

Instead of little icons and mini-maps cluttering up the screen and making you feel like you’re playing a satnav, brushing a thumb across the controller’s touch-pad summons a wind that ripples the long grass and guides you to your next destination.

Instead of map markers, you can follow golden birds towards interesting places – that is, if they don’t get stuck up against a building or a cliff and disappear.