Planetside2 left me with strongly mixed feelings, great potential, but not quit there yet.
The basic concept is similar to the battlefield series, but on a much larger scale, You can fight on a huge map choosing one of the three sides taking part in the conflict, and your goal is to take and hold as much ground from the enemy as you can, you achieve this by capturing strategic installations, like outpost, tank factories, futuristic airfields and more.
Welcome to Auraxis!
I really liked the scenery; the various compounds look good and have a feeling of purpose. In the beta three continents where available a frozen tundra, a desert and a lush mediterranean region. The huge (and i mean huuuuuge) maps offers great variety and the different locations pose different tactical challenges. You will suffer ultra-high casualties when assaulting an airfield on a mountaintop, luring a hostile armored unit into a narrow valley can easily mean a death sentence to the enemy. The down side to the huge maps is that you can easily get lost, and sometimes it just takes too long to get from A to B.
Gears of War.
You can choose from a lot of weapons and vehicles to use, but sadly they aren't well balanced and there are some super units. Who wants a light tank when you can get the double barreled heavy armored main battle tank? You can chose from multiple classes witch play quit differently, the cloaking device equipped sniper hone your predator instincts, while the heavy assault troops with their rocket launcher are a good choice if you need to vent some steam. The classes have weary different skills, so you need to figure out their right playing style for them. Yes that's right figure it out for yourself, everything, witch isn't exactly easy when people are shooting at you... Planetside2 doesn't have a tutorial, you can only guess at some things, a game of this complexity should really offer a boot camp or a weapons range to test the stuff in a safe environment. Heavy AAA fire isn't really helpful when you're still looking for the controls.
Character development.
The Achilles heel of PS2. You can upgrade your health, weapon and vehicle handling skills, unlock new guns and learn to use med kits grenades C4 etc etc. If you want to get a decent upgrade for free be ready to spend 30-40 hours of gamely to unlock a single item... or you cloud always grab your credit card, which leads me back to the tutorial issue, you can't try out the guns before you buy them, and the descriptions are sometimes misleading, this is a big fail since you actually have to buy this tuff with real cash (or spend a week unlocking it)
Verdict
It's a decent game, great potential but needs a lot more work, I don't recommend it for casual players like myself, but if you like to shoot a lot and don't mind paying the prices, then this game is for you, find a decent clan, two well organized clans battling it out has a great feeling. But if you're looking for a casual shooter stay clear since this isn't one.