Though the vast majority of the 4,000+ PS4 game catalogue works without a hitch on the new PlayStation 5, around 115 games in the US PlayStation Store are tagged with a warning: “When playing on PS5, this game may exhibit errors or unexpected behavior and some features available on PS4 may be absent.” That doesn’t mean the games won’t work, but they might not work perfectly.
We first ran into the “unexpected behaviour” error with Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Ubisoft posted a support article listing the game as one that would not work on PS5, only to remove the article later that same day. Assassin’s Creed Unity, as well as other Ubisoft games listed in the article, are all on the “unexpected behavior” list. As Stephen Totilo discovered earlier this week, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate does indeed run on the PS5, albeit with some very annoying shadow glitches.
For a full list of PS4 games with the PS5 backwards compatibility caveat attached, we used a neat tool on github that searches PS4 games by their PS5 compatibility status. Filtering the list by “bootable” and the “UP” region brings up the list. Removing duplicates, I came out with 115 titles.
Of those 115, we downloaded and played several. So far we haven’t encountered any completely devastating issues. It’s mainly been little annoyances here and there, if at all.
- Grip: Played several races, no noticeable flaws.
- Everybody’s Golf: Flickering scenery graphics, mainly trees. There’s a PS5 update in the works for this one.
- Pixeljunk Shooter Ultimate: No issues except remembering how much fun Pixeljunk Shooter is.
- Flinthook: Some slowdown.
- Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice: Odd blurry areas in graphics during opening.
It’s certainly possible we missed something in our testing. It could be one of those games completely poops the bed several hours in. Maybe a multiplayer mode doesn’t work. Or maybe everything works fine and these titles just didn’t get thoroughly tested before the system launched.
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Our suggestion would be to check online for widespread problem reports before purchasing any of the “unexpected behavior” games. That, and bookmark Sony’s PS5 backwards compatibility page for the latest updates.