Planetside 2 - Three Worlds Collide

Format: PC
Players: So, so many
Genre: MMO, FPS
Price: IT'S FLIPPIN' FREE!
Notes: Vanu Sovereignty Forever!

Released officially to the world just the other day was the epic new Sci-Fi MMOFPS Planetside 2. it had been in beta for a long time and has now finally been released to public, for those of us unable to receive a beta key and play in the past half year or so (me and my shit computer).

For those of you who don't know about Planetside, it's a game all about capturing bases and huge firefights. You can find thousands of people on a server at any given time, so there will always be something to shoot at. Anyway, let me explain a bit more... The concept of Planetside 2 is that three factions which you can choose to be in, the New Conglomerate, Terran Republic, and Vanu Sovereignty, are fighting it out across three huge continants, to capture territories on the planet of Auraxis, the story behind it all is quite complicated and if you ask me, completely irrelevant as none of it is mentioned in that game as far as I have seen. The point is you capture territories and try and take over the world, so yeah do that.

Look at all that lovely purple VS territory... What? No I'm not biased, not biased at all!

The battle is constantly taking place, that is one of the charms and nuisances of this game, as you can often find yourself fighting for hours to capture this one large base, only to come back the next morning to find you've lost it and many others and have to capture it again, it all depends on the kind of player you are as to whether you love or hate what goes on while you're asleep, or even just eating dinner.

When flying airborne vehicles you get a lovely view of the action, like from this beautiful VS Scythe, all ready to blast those fascist TR planes out of the sky!

There are, however, 4 problems I have with this game and to be honest I think a lot of them are probably only problems to me because I'm not used to PC gaming, like, at all. I find the controls awkward yet at the same time I know they're initially quite well structured for a PC game, WASD to move, E to interact, the standard stuff, and you can reasign the keys if necessary to suit your preference, vehicle controls are one of the more annoying things, because moving the mouse continues changing where I look, I can often find myself traveling forward, wanting to turn left so I move the mouse (Wonder why? I'm so bad at PC gaming I only use the 'W' key to move and rely on my mouse to turn me) and I crash because of it. Very irritating.

Another issue of note is what I call 'Call of Duty Syndrome', this is just one of those games where it's too quick to kill or be killed, it only takes a few accurate shots from a machine gun to kill, and that often means if you find a guy and machine gun him in the back, he'll be dead before he even has a chance to act on it, which is a little bit unfair, if you ask me. The next problem I have is the difficulty, because I assure you, if you play this game, and you're a pretty casual gamer, you will get killed over and over again by PC gaming pros with their special gaming mice and Alienware keyboards and fancy stuff, they'll have gotten all the best upgrades for their weapons and you will hardly stand a chance, so stay away unless you're up for a challenge. The last problem I have is that to really make a mark in Planetside, you can't really go it alone, so make sure you have some friends along, and make sure you're able to communicate with them, as typing '[/s]Let's go capture point xxx right now!' in the middle of a firefight will get you killed. and if you're wondering why having friends is a necessity here, it's because I tried capturing an entire base on my own once, there were no enemies there initially so I though 'screw it let's capture this place' but I only got 3/4 of the way done before the enemy had caught on and went to kill me. So yeah get some friends.

The game has an awesome day and night cycle too, makes the VS weapons fire look particularly beautiful when taking out New Conglomerate scum
.... I told you I'm not biased!

But despite all this, I'm still going to play Planetside openly and lovingly because it still holds so much of what really makes a game - Fun. It's very fun, capturing bases from the enemy and pushing them back is it's own kind of thrill and when the 'Facility Captured' notice finally comes up it's a great motivator. I haven't even talked about everything there is to say about Planetside here, there's so much more fun to be had on Auraxis, you may as well just go check it out yourself, and if you don't like it, there's a money back guarantee.