Ever since Valorant began its console beta on June 14 I haven’t been able to put the game down. I’m not new to Riot Games’ tactical hero shooter, but the console version has reignited my love for it, and it has to do with the port’s headlining new feature: Focus Mode . The difficulty in putting any tactical first-person shooter onto console is that it will never feel as accurate as it does on PC (at least that’s what competitive players will tell you).
It’s also why mouse and keyboard is seen as the superior input method for any first-person shooter, as the movement of the elbow and wrist gives players a much finer control over movement than a controller’s joystick does. Focus Mode seeks to address that issue, and after a weekend of playing on PS5, I can say the feature does a phenomenal job. What exactly is focus mode? Essentially it replaces the typical “left trigger to aim down sights” design ethos of most modern shooters, and maps Focus Mode to the left trigger.
When pressing the trigger, the game quickly shifts how sensitive the aiming joystick is. It markedly lowers it compared to shooting from the hip, though you aren’t actually aiming down sights (PSA: You can enable traditional ADS in the settings menu). By doing this, it duplicates the fine-tuned control of a mouse.
Not perfectly, but well enough. I haven’t seen another shooter on console do something like this before, and while it might not work for every game it works in Valorant. Valorant PC.
