I bought a used Playstation 4 Slim in late 2017 from GameStop with a PSVR. I've been using it fairly regularly ever since. Now that we're a few years into the lifetime of the PS5 and I've had some time to put off buying one, I thought it would be the perfect time to start reviewing the PS4 and its contemporaries.
Hardware
The PS4 is powered internally by an AMD Radeon GPU based on an early version of their GCN architecture. GCN was able to hang onto life even in the desktop space from 2012 or 2013 all the way up until 2019 without really falling too far behind in the product categories it competed in, so this component is pretty strong.
However, the PS4 is also powered by an 8-core version of the AMD Jaguar mobile CPU. So, the PS4 has 8 "cores" of computing power at its disposal, all within a strict power budget. In reality, that's 4 cores with 8 integer units between them, like most of AMD's CPUs of the time. This is weak, and I'll touch on where this becomes a problem later, but this is just some foreshadowing. It sucks. It works, but it sucks.
The system comes equipped with 2 front-facing USB ports (yuck), and physical power and eject buttons. It has the usual set of ports on the back for a cheap modern console, power, 8P8C Ethernet, HDMI, and a mystery "AUX" port used by the camera and basically nothing else. It has a Blu-Ray drive above the power and eject buttons.
From a design aesthetic perspective, the system is solidly serviceable. It's an unassuming black slanted package, which I hear is designed to help hide the cables when it's lying flat. There's a slice in the middle, through which all of the system's airflow happens. The USB ports and the majority of the I/O are in this slice, and the power/eject buttons are on the top face of the bottom slanted segment. Again, it's serviceable. Nobody is going to look at your home theater cabinet and point to it as particularly ugly, or beautiful. It does come in different colors, if you want to get fancy.
Controllers
In a few words, these are best in class. They've got the broadest range of features out of all of the controllers of the time, featuring traditional rumble (no gimmicks), analog triggers and joysticks, a trackpad, gyro and accelerometer sensors for motion, a light bar for tracking by the camera (VR, AR applications). The usual Sony face buttons are present, along with a traditional D-Pad. There's also a "Share" button for the social side of the console. The controller is charged via micro-USB (hate it or love it, it's what was available at the time, C did not exist yet), and it has an accessory port and a headset jack on the bottom between the thumbsticks. It uses a rechargeable internal LiPo battery. To service the controller, you need to remove a total of 4 screws on the outside, and a few more inside. On the whole, there are no nasty hidden snaps (that I remember, open with care since I haven't done this in a while on a fresh controller or just ask someone else).
I have a bone to pick with people who say the DualShock has 4 buttons rather than a D-Pad. This is false. Sony made the design decision of molding the case in front of the D-Pad, but I encourage you to take it apart if you don't believe me. It's got the same center post as any other controller, and the actual pad itself is indeed one piece. You can't push left and right at the same time unless you broke your controller. Actually, this plastic molding decision has one huge benefit- it's really easy to determine where the middle of the D-Pad is by just feel. There's no guesswork about where center is since the molding on the case is a set line that your finger will always feel. In addition, since it's a cross shape, you can often times even tell where your finger has drifted to if it has drifted. The Steam controller and Xbox One controllers both fail in this regard.
For a variety of reasons, the DualShock 4 is probably still the best controller you can buy for PC use, too. It has a standard set of functions with no extra bits nobody supports, and Steam Input lets you map the gyro sensors to aiming, so that you can properly play Halo with a controller. It uses Bluetooth to connect to the PlayStation, and supports traditional pairing by holding the Share button while you power the controller on. The light bar will flash in a unique way when you've got it right.
Some of you think the PS4 controller's thumbsticks are a little stiff, and honestly I can't deny that they're not perfect in that regard. However, the thumbsticks are internally virtually identical to the Xbox controller's. This means you can buy a set of replacement thumbcaps for the Xbox One or Xbox Series controllers and simply install them. This will give you exactly the same thumbstick weighting as the Xbox controller. If you want to go extra fancy, you can even install the thumbsticks from the Elite controller, giving you swappable magnetic caps. At that point, the only difference with the thumbsticks is the position of the left stick. I've been able to adapt to each style since the first time I tried without issue, but I hear some people have problems with this, so make your own decisions. If you don't own an Xbox, I would recommend getting used to this style, myself. If your thumb starts slipping off the left stick during an intense action sequence, if you have my size hands you can reach across with your right thumb and hold the stick while you re-position your left thumb. This is much harder with inverted sticks.
Ergonomically, the controller is serviceable. It's not offensive or impressive, but it works and I don't have any major complaints. It's not particularly heavy and the triggers don't require much force to actuate when Steam is set to hair trigger, making it a great choice for FPS games and motion aim.
Software
This is where the PS4 really starts to stand out. Sony's logic with the interface is generally really consistent, just like it was with the PS3.
Main Menu
The home screen is sorted into 3-4 rows of icons. At the top are system-level settings. These are above where your cursor sits by default when you start the console, and include system settings, account settings, trophies, and chat functions among other things. The second row is a list of the most recently installed/played games, sorted by how recently the game has been launched/installed, and included in this list are any folders. If you play a game in a folder, the whole folder is promoted to the top of the list rather than pulling the game out of it. Folders work much like the recent line, but they have a fixed order. They remember which item in the folder was last used, so it's always available. Going into the third row (fourth if in a folder) is details about the game. Somewhat annoyingly, you need to be online for this to work, but it includes links from the developers of the game, streams, trophies, and fun facts about who else in your PSN friends list is playing the game and what trophies they got. That's about all there is to the logic of the home screen, but there are occasions where you can press "options" to bring up a context menu. This works like right click on a PC, so it's also pretty easy to follow.
I just typed a lot about that menu. What I want you to come away with though is that that's a pretty complete operating manual for the system menu. There's very few exceptions to that general structure, and finding things is usually very quick and easy. About the only thing worth mentioning is that they call "Eject" "Remove Disk" in the system menu, so if you see it, that's just Eject not a 'delete everything' button. This represents a trend towards over-simplifying everything to avoid confusion, which usually makes things more confusing. You could probably guess I'm against this trend.
Games
Sony's library with the PS4 is world-class. They have among the best console exclusives ever launched, such as Ghost of Tsushima, God of War (PS4), Ratchet and Clank (PS4), Uncharted 4, DriveClub, Horizon Zero Dawn (now on PC, but the port happened around when the PS5 launched), Persona 5 Royal, and many, many more. Those are just what came to mind. Because it's a comparatively powerful system next to its contemporaries, most multi-platform games play their best on PS4 out of all the consoles.
Games also don't need to fully install to disk to play. Most of them will launch within a few seconds of putting them in the disk drive. Those of you with Xbox Ones will probably find this very refreshing, the difference is dramatic.
Web Browser
Be careful to turn off JavaScript. The browser isn't very well optimized, and JavaScript makes most pages absolutely useless.
The browser also doesn't support a lot of tabs open at once. You'll need to be careful not to leave anything important open, since if you open too many other things (first of all the performance will suck, but at any rate) the tab may disappear.
This goes for any console, but just avoid the browser. The CPU isn't strong enough to support it properly.
I should also note on the topic of CPU that the CPU also limits some games somewhat, so even if a low-end old computer with a similar GPU can run a game, don't expect you'll get exactly the same performance out of the PS4. It may be better if it's optimized for the specific GPU in the PS4, or it may be worse because that CPU is so weak. It's weak enough it was a talking point on launch back in 2013, and almost 10 years later things certainly haven't gotten better.
Conclusion
Man, that was a dry review. I don't have a whole lot more to say about the PS4 without bringing in a lot more about the other three big consoles of the time (Wii U, XB1, Switch), so I'll save that for later. Suffice it to say I'm not sure whether I have more PS4 disks or Steam games right now, and whichever library is larger is larger by a very small amount.
If you don't have one and you've never owned a PlayStation, buy a PS4 off of someone who just got a PS5. The library is vast and enormously high-quality. The PS4 also sold really, really well for a home console, currently the second-best selling home console. Finding one shouldn't be an issue, as a result.
I didn't mention this before, but the PS4 also does not need to ever go online to function. That makes it in a class of its own in terms of usability into the future, there are no major functions that you lose out on in terms of playing games, either. As far as I remember, even trophies work offline (though don't quote me, they're very careful to prevent people from hacking trophies they haven't earned so the system does require a time sync for that if the clock battery has died). If you put it in the attic for 20 years and it works when you pull it out, all of your downloaded and surviving disc games will continue to work just fine. That's actually the main reason I consider buying disc games, they can survive both the individual console I own and the online services and still retain a copy of the game for me. If that sounds good to you, you'll like the PS4 quite a lot!
So yeah, I give it a 994. You can decide the scale for yourself, since whatever number I give it is meaningless; just make sure it's on the positive end, since I don't have anything major to complain about, just minor nitpicks I'll mention in future posts about the other consoles.