FirstPlay has been a long time coming, however today it arrives on the PlayStation Store with Episode One just hours away. Luckily we have already managed to view the first in the series, so we thought we would bring you our impressions just before you get the chance to see it for yourself.
On loading up Firstplay you are greeted with an advert, this week the ad is for Just Cause 2, allowing you to visit the website of the game or sit through and see what all the fuss is about. Fortunately once you have watched an ad in Firstplay you are then able to skip any subsequent viewings and once you have viewed a today of five ads you can actually skip all of them. We are actually unsure if subscribing removes the ads completely, however that is something we will get back to you on.
Once the ad is out of the way you are greeted with the online magazines four sections accompanied by the voice of Lucy Porter. The first section highlighted is the one everyone will be interested in, featured downloads. Episode one includes an exclusive Just Cause 2 parachute for your to download, along with a Firstplay theme, other than that though the section is fairly empty this week.
Other sections include the Screenshot Galleries which this week includes screens for Red Dead Redemption, F1 2010, Ghost Recon Future Soldier and also Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands. The great thing about the screens is that they are accompanied by Lucy Porters voice who explains the game for those who may not know much about it. Even better, you can save the HD images to your HDD. Nice.
One of the main sections is the Network Highlights, here you are greeted with another four sections. The first of these is the very welcome Video Store Round-up which separates the bad from the good. Next up is The best of PSN, here Lucy gives us a rundown of the best games and content to be had on the PlayStation Store. The third section is LBP’s best levels which gives an overview of the best user created levels out there and finally there is the Minis Round-up which basically gives reviews on the latest PS Minis, although not necessarily the best ones.
The final section and probably the most important to the service actually being worthwhile is the HD Reviews and Previews. This week we are treated to a review for God of War III and Just Cause 2, which to us is fairly disappointing considering how long these games have been available for. We have no doubt that the service will get some exclusive reviews at some point, however it would have been nice to see some for episode one.
To be fair to the service the reviews are actually of pretty top quality, they are split into a few sections such as story and gameplay and throughout the reviewer tries to inject some humour while also providing a great overview of the game in question. The videos seem well edited as you would expect and they look absolutely fantastic on an HD screen.
Also included in the HD reviews and previews section is a video review for Zombieland and also an exclusive look at 2010 FIFA World Cup. It’s great to see the service get to grips with the latest FIFA game and at least shows that they will be trying to get previews and reviews up first to keep the service relevant.
Firstplay seems like a well thought out online magazine and it works well. The menus are slick and easy to navigate and the content is of very high quality. The only worry we have is that if the content is not up to date then the service may become irrelevant, however if they go out of their way to get exclusives and great downloads then Future Publishing are definitely on to a winner.