September’s PS+ Titles Drum Up Familiar Battles With Street Fighter V, PUBG

More and more, these months leading up to the release of the new generation of consoles has felt like a transition period, and that’s reflected in the free titles offered by the Live and PS+ subscription services. For the big console players, they each now have two separate paid services with incentives in the form of included games. On the Xbox side, the Games with Gold sub benefits are included in the higher-tier Game Pass; on the PlayStation side, there are separate services with separate charges and, theoretically, no overlap. Thing is, September’s pair of PlayStation Plus games are included as downloads through their PlayStation Now program, which means there’s no additional benefit this month for being a customer of both. Is this a suggestion of what’s to come? It doesn’t help that the games being offered, while popular and from noteworthy franchises, are also suboptimal versions of titles. In all, not a great month, one where it’s probably better to point towards getting a Year Subscription Card to PlayStation Now at Amazon instead of PS+.

Street Fighter V

Fans of the Street Fighter universe are no strangers to there being multiple versions of a particular game. There can be “Super”, “Turbo”, “Hyper”, “Ultra”, “Championship” and other upgrades or quiet remakes, sometimes combining several of those words into yet another iteration down the line. Debate sparks within the community about which of the later versions are superior to the others, but there’s one general sentiment that the Street Fighter games share in common: the first version is rarely the best, most refined or complete state of the game.

The initial release of Street Fighter V stands out for being one of the most incomplete at launch, though, in a combo of deliberate game design and lack of polish. Despite the praise for its fighting framework, this one took a lot of heat for its “season” method of slowly including popular characters into the roster and for its pricy DLC. The edition offered here, unfortunately, isn’t the Championship Edition, so the DLC’s on the player.

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds

PUBG is popular, to such a degree that typing out the full Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds almost seems like a waste of time since so many are more familiar with its acronym. Since its release three years ago, the game has spread out to almost every platform one can imagine – yes, even to mobile; nope, no Switch version yet – and has become an eSports all-star for its accessible, inventive player-versus shooter concepts.

For the most part, this popularity revolves around the non-console iterations of the game, and that’s largely because both console ports of PUBG have received highly negative marks for their performance. Between the time that this game ignited the “battle royale” game craze and the point of its PS4 release, more polished competitors have been created and established franchises have moved into that territory with similar multiplayer modes. Jumping into PUBG now might not be the most optimal experience, especially on PS4, but at least it’s there for a round of excitement to try out.