➤ Disco Elysium The Final Cut: PS5 version review 🎮

It starts in total darkness, without a clue, without an idea of what is happening. The first minutes of Disco Elysium are a great interior monologue of a being without identity, without a face, who tries to convince himself not to return to reality, where only disappointments await him. However, the journey of our protagonist has already been faced once and we know that it is absolutely worth it. Here is ours review of the PS5 version of Disco Elysium The Final Cut.

We go back

Disco Elysium The Final Cut: PS5 version review — Disco Elysium: vestiges of a past greatness

Disco Elysium The Final Cut is recently available in version PlayStation 4, PS5 and Google Stadium, with the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series X | S versions expected for summer 2021. Furthermore, the one just released is not a direct port of the base PC edition of the ZA / UM game, but is one of its own enhanced version, a Final Cut that adds various extras.

But let's take a step back and let's try to better frame Disco Elysium, a title so well known but that could have escaped the radar of gamers devoted purely to the console world.

We are a cop, a detective tasked with solving a murder case. Too bad we don't know this at first. Our nameless character wakes up in a hotel room, after a night of drinking and perhaps doing worse, with the likely willingness to end it once and for all. In a way we succeeded, because upon awakening we don't have a single memory of our life and it will be up to us players to decide how to shape our new identity. We will not be alone, however, because our "statistics" will be at our side.

Disco Elysium is an RPG, but if all you see when you hear these words is The Witcher or Dragon Age Origins, you are on the wrong track. Disco Elysium is an investigative game, a game of dialogue (whether internal or real) where violence is constant, but only as a consequence of an argument or as a failure of a roll of the dice (more on that later).

What we will have to do, therefore, is to develop our statistics, that is, to define what mental and physical characteristics distinguish us, soon realizing that it is not just a small number in the background of a secondary menu. Let's explain: have you enhanced your logic, empathy and your authority? Very well, in the middle of a dialogue with a non-player character all your traits will fit into the speech, they will give you suggestions, probably even conflicting ones, as if in your mind there were many people screaming over each other and trying to get out. . Of course, the final choice is always up to you.

Not everything is conditioned solely by the dialogues, however. Like any good role-playing game there is a roll of the dice to pay duty and the chances of success depend both on the level of the associated statistic (also conditioned by the clothes you will wear), and on a series of traits that you can learn during the adventure, which grant bonuses (and malus) for certain situations.

The strength of Disco Elysium The Final Cut is obviously in the quality of the writing, who does not hold back in the face of any topic, regardless of how uncomfortable and complex it is to deal with. We will not have to deal only with drama and suffering, however: ZA / UM was in fact able to mix the darker side of humanity with the more absurd and comical, which will make you escape a few laughs.

Good the second?

As already mentioned, however, the quality of Disco Elysium is known and, if you want to deepen the matter even more, you can read our original review. Now, we are here to understand if the arrival on consoles (and more precisely on PS5) did good or bad to Disco Elysium.

First of all, you should know that The Final Cut is available as a free upgrade for all PC players who already own the game. No need to repurchase or even just buy a DLC. But what are the news?

Disco Elysium The Final Cut propone new characters, new missions, a new area, but also new clothes and new cutscenes. One of the most interesting novelties are the Political Vision Quests, these are four optional missions that are mutually exclusive: activating one means losing the others. They are not essential for understanding the main plot, but they allow you to delve even further into the political history of the city and meet the already mentioned new characters. The idea of the developers is to allow players to give vent to one of the political ideologies to which the character is affiliated in the course of the adventure.

We also remind you that, compared to the very first version (released at the end of 2019), The Final Cut also includes hardcore mode (released in early 2020) which makes the experience even more complex, increasing the bonuses but making the malus even more pressing.

But let's give the bad news: the game has not been translated into Spanish. If you don't have a good (or better still excellent) knowledge of English, forget it. At least the dubbing (always in English) comes in handy, which gives rhythm to the reading and makes it easier to approach the enormous amount of texts. Compared to the original version, there are many more lines of dubbed dialogue, including a narrator: the protagonist is still silent anyway.

The real merit of dubbing, however, is its ability to characterize each character in an even deeper way. ZA / UM has played perfectly with accents, in particular, which allow you to experience the cultural and ethnic differences of the game world in a more direct way. However, we must report some bugs that, from time to time, eliminate the dubbing within a dialogue: fortunately this is an occasional problem and linked only to single sentences and not entire discussions.

But let's talk about the technical side. Disco Elysium is a video game that, while almost aiming to be an interactive book, does not put aside the visual side: the work of ZA / UM has a unique graphic style, divinely made; each area is always new, fresh and interesting to explore. Now, on PS5, we can do it at 4K and 60 FPS. You may have read online that the game has performance problems: however, we point out that the work has already been patched (version 1.1); the update has practically solved these problems. A drop in frames could always happen from time to time, but nothing that detracts from the overall experience.

Now, let's talk about the elephant in the room: the control system. Before even saying a single word about it, let's point out right away that mouse and keyboard are always the best choice for this type of games and with Disco Elysium it is no different. How comfortable (or uncomfortable, if you prefer) is the console version interface? Not too much, in theory. The menu and non-environmental actions (e.g. using cure or zoom) are well assigned to the DualSense keys: Disco Elysium doesn't require too many buttons to manage, so mapping the controls wasn't an awkward undertaking.

The problem is the interaction with the game world. ZA / UM has not opted for the more direct solution, which is to leave the pointer in the game and assign its movement to the right stick. Such a solution is after all a neutered version of the PC system and is slow and imprecise to use.

The developers have decided to allow the game, regardless of the position of the character, to switch from one element to another - among the various selectable on the screen (doors, NPCs, objects ...) - by tilting the right stick in the right direction. Unfortunately, the system can be a bit inconvenient when there are many elements in a small area. Furthermore, even if the correct object is identified immediately, pressing the X key does not always trigger the interaction. Sometimes it is necessary to press several times before the action is recorded and in some cases the character simply positions himself in the vicinity of the object (through a pathfinding a little slow to react), without activating it. Fortunately, a patch (1.2) has already been announced that should solve all the problems mentioned in this review: at the time of writing, however, it is not yet available so we cannot comment on the correctness of the expected corrections.

It is not a limit as much as a lackimplementation of DualSense on PS5. The controller has haptic feedback functions and adaptive triggers, but they have hardly been used (for example, the triggers vibrate when you reach the zoom limit, but it is not a central feature in the experience). Nothing serious, but it certainly would have been interesting to see them implemented in a serious way.

Comment

Resources4Gaming.com

9.0

Readers (9)

7.7

Your vote

Disco Elysium is a masterpiece, but this has long been known. The Final Cut is its definitive version, with new content that does nothing but increase the value of the package. The PS5 version can enjoy maximum resolution and frame rates, but has to contend with a control system to refine. It was also an excellent opportunity to broaden the catchment area by proposing a Spanish translation: this was not the case. At least we can enjoy a first level expanded voice acting that makes the game world even more profound and believable. In conclusion, the PC version remains the best choice but, if you only have a PS4 or a PS5, Disco Elysium is still a game to live.