PS Plus keeps whiffing.
Back in September, Sony quietly raised the subscription price of its PlayStation Plus service. At the time, I wrote that it was a pretty good reason to cancel your membership.
Sure, the price for the base tier—PS Plus Essential—only went up by $20 a year, but I’ve started looking at the subscription economy through the lens of a death by a thousand papercuts. When Netflix, HBO, Hulu/Disney+, Apple TV+ are all raising their monthly rates, you pay for Spotify and Amazon Prime and Apple Music and maybe The New York Times and some craft coffee subscription and you’re getting Blue Apron meals sent to you and gas is through the roof, it all adds up.
Death by a thousand subscription services.
But at least with Netflix I’m getting something pretty valuable each month. A lot of Netflix content is garbage, sure, but right now I’m making my way through the excellent Blue Eye Samurai and I still haven’t even started House Of Usher or watched The Killer. On Apple, Slow Horses just dropped its third season. On Hulu, Fargo Season 5 is off to an incredible start.
But for Sony’s PS Plus Essential lineup in December we get three “free” games:
This isn’t exactly the kind of end-of-the-year lineup that gets the blood pumping. All of these games are decidedly just fine but nothing special. This isn’t a total bomb of a month, but it’s nothing to write home about, either.
Power Wash Simulator has a 75 on Metacritic with a 6.6 User Score, though it has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam where a lot of people seem a bit surprised by how much they enjoy washing things in a video game (as opposed to real life). The consensus seems to be that it’s just fine, a chill way to kill time. I suppose that scratches a certain itch. I just spend enough time in my life cleaning things that I’d rather shoot or stab things when it comes to video games. Or fly. Or stomp Goombas.
LEGO 2K Drive fares worse with both critics (73) and users (5.5). On Steam it does a bit better. While its overall user review score is “Mixed” its more recent reviews reflect improvements in the game, with a “Very Positive” collective response. Unfortunately, a lot of the negative feedback is about the overbearing monetization scheme, with a ton of microtransactions plaguing the title. This will be less of an issue for people not playing, but it’s still disappointing for a game geared toward kids.
Sable, an indie game with a really cool art-style that’s mostly about exploring a strange post apocalyptic desert wasteland, does better than either of the other games on Metacritic. Critics give it a 76/100 and gamers rate it at 7.0. The game gets a Very Positive rating on Steam where gamers admire its chill nature and cool artstyle.
Overall, like I said, not the worst games in the world, but also nothing really stands out. They’re all just . . . fine. Two of the titles are combat-free “chill” games about power-washing or exploration. One is a racer geared toward kids. It’s all just a bit mediocre especially after a big price-hike just a few months ago.
And this follows on the heels of November’s lineup, which were Mafia II Definitive Edition, Dragonball: The Breakers and Aliens Fireteam Elite. The first of these is a pretty good game, but also just a remaster of a very old game, and unlike the remake of the first game, isn’t much of a remaster at that. Dragonball: The Breakers has a 53 on Metacritic from critics and 4.9 from gamers, and a Mostly Negative user review score on Steam. That’s even worse than the widely panned Aliens Fireteam Elite which has a 69 on Metacritic (5.8 with gamers) which says a lot.
So we have a relatively disappointing month following a massively disappointing month and all that disappointment just piles up on top of the increasing price, not just of PS Plus but everything we subscribe to, not to mention we already pay for internet, and it gets harder and harder to justify continuing to pay when you can still stream shows and movies and play free-to-play games without a membership.