Over 100 backward compatible PS4 games may have issues with PS5

While the vast majority of PS4’s over 4,000 catalog of games work fine on the new PlayStation 5, around 115 games on the US PlayStation Store have a warning: “When playing on PS5, this game may exhibit errors or unexpected behavior, some available on PS4 Features may be missing. “That doesn’t mean the games aren’t working, but they may not work perfectly.

We first encountered the “Unexpected behavior” error on Ubisoft Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Ubisoft posted a support article listing the game as not working on PS5, only to have the article removed later that day. Assassins Creed Unityand other Ubisoft games listed in the article are all on the Unexpected Behavior list. As Stephen Totilo found out earlier this week Assassin’s Creed Syndicate actually runs on the PS5, albeit with some very annoying shadow bugs.

For a full list of PS4 games, with the caveat of backward compatibility for PS5, we used a nice tool on github that scans PS4 games for their PS5 compatibility status. The list is displayed by filtering the list for “bootable” and “UP”. When removing duplicates, I came out with 115 titles.

Of these 115, we downloaded and played several. So far, we have not encountered any completely devastating problems. There were mostly minor annoyances here and there, if at all.

• Griff: Played several races, no noticeable defects.
• Everyone is golf: Flickering landscape graphics, mostly trees. A PS5 update is in the works for this one.
• Pixeljunk Shooter Ultimate: No problems other than remembering how fun Pixeljunk Shooter is.
• Flinthook: Slightly slowing down.
• Hellblade: Senua’s victim: Odd blurred areas in graphics while opening.

It is certainly possible that we missed something in our tests. It could be one of those games that completely wrecks the bed several hours later. Maybe a multiplayer mode doesn’t work. Or maybe everything is working fine and these titles have not been thoroughly tested before starting the system.

Our suggestion would be to check for widespread problem reports online before purchasing any of the games with “unexpected behavior”. That and bookmark Sony’s PS5 backward compatibility page for the latest updates.