Leveling drags down the shooting mechanics, making leveling necessary to simply get kills, unlike typical shooters.

User Rating: 7 | PlanetSide 2 PC
The huge environment and varied styles of bases makes this game a joy to play. I love infiltrating a base and taking out its defenses or defending them. The problem with PS2 is in the shooting mechanics. Players really need to upgrade their characters (often including buying a better gun with real money) for them to truely enjoy the simple act of shooting enemies. Typical machine guns have a lot of recoil, throwing off aim rather badly. Seriously, the easiest way to level is to be an engineer and repair stuff instead of actually just shooting enemies. Once upgrades are achieved, the guns still need even more improvements. On top of that, a lot of game money is needed for each improvement. Really, PS2 is cursed with typical MMO problems, despite staying true to shooter concepts by not having any real character leveling and being all equipment improvements. This game easily becomes a lot of work. The irony is that PS2 has problems that most MMOs don't. In typical MMORPGs, as the characters level the enemies level too, giving the player a fair fight all the way through the game. The only exception is in PvP where the player must fight players of varying levels. Since PS2 is only PvP, leveling is a noticable problem.