What you like to say that to my BFR?
Imagine a galaxy were everyone fights for land and technology. A galaxy were everyday may be your last and if you manage to survive having to go back out and fight again until you either die or kill off everyone who opposes you. That is the galaxy of PlanetSide.
Now like every other first person shooters comes a handful of guns, violence and pure pleasure of bragging to your friend after you dismember him limb by limb with your gun until nothing is left but of course PlanetSide doesn’t have that type of violence. Now I know what you might be saying “why should I buy this when there are games like Halo 2 out there?” and here is your answer, PlanetSide is online. That’s right Planet side is a massive multiplayer online first person shooter. Now with every online game comes good and bad. The obvious one is it is online. This means subscription fees. The good part of this though is it’s online. The next problem is servers. The good thing about servers is it allows you to play the game online, the bad part is server sometimes fail and get disconnected. Now I can keep going on like this but I would never get to the review so I will stop there.
The idea of the game is to control every base. Each planet has main bases which I refer to as forts and tiny bases which I refer to as bases. Lets start off small and describe bases. These are basically towers with respawn points in them. Some have mounted gun turrets on them but not all of them do. Now for forts. Forts are giant bases. Forts have stuff like vehicle bays, ship bays for aircraft, spawn points and so on. Each base also has special abilities. These abilities add stuff to the game such as a tech plant which allow access to advanced vehicles and bio lab which shorten respawn times and upgrades medical terminals. A list of these will be at the bottom of this review. Every fort links to each other. So lets say two bases have a vehicle bay but only one has a tech plant, well if both are under your empires control they both have advanced vehicles. This adds a great deal of strategy to the game.
Now for the guns and vehicles. Each empire has it own version of a gun. Although each empire is supposedly balanced the guns/vehicles may differ from each other a bit. Now some guns are common pool which means every race gets them but some races get better versions. Take the New Conglomerate for example. They have the Sweeper which is just a shotgun and the Jackhammer. The Jackhammer is basically a supped up shotgun being able to shoot at a nice rate of fire or shoot 3 blasts at once. You can grab these guns from daed players via a backpack they drop when they die. You can access this backpack grab the gun and/or ammo and put that in a locker for later use or you could use it then. There are a nice variety of vehicles everything from a four wheeler to a tank. There are also a variety of aircraft. There are three support vehicles. Each does something different. The Router teleports players from one point to another, the ANT (Advanced Nanite Transporter) carries energy from warp gate bubbles to a holding silo were the base and other things can get powered for a time, and last is the AMS (Advanced Mobile Station) which allows player to spawn to a location and grab some basic gear. Vehicles and aircrafts also have trucks you can put extra ammo and stuff in. Each vehicle has pros and cons and add even more strategy to the game.
Armor allows you to take more hits and carry more stuff. Some armor has special abilities such as the infiltrator suit can cloak. Each armor slows you down but that is to be expected. Speed for protection and carrying capacity. MAXs (Mechanized Assault Exo-Suit) specialize in killing three things. These things are aircraft, vehicles, and infantry. Now you can use an anti-air MAX to kill a vehicle it just wouldn’t be as effective as an anti-vehicle MAX. MAXs are the highest armor you can get and cant hold anything but ammo. Well you can hold guns but it is pointless sense you cant use them.
Another thing to set this game apart from other first person shooters is the level up system. Yes in this FPS you can gain levels. You have two different level up systems battle experience which you et when you kill something and command experience which you get when you control a squad. I don’t know how command experience works exactly but I do know you get rewards for leveling this up. These rewards are shin/wrist guards and a back pack. When you level up your battle experience you gain field promotions. With field promotions to gain certification points and with certification points come equipment. With these certification points (certs for short) you can get vehicles, guns or armor. This is were the game become the most tactical. You have the ability to choose how your going to play. You can spend all your points to gain aircrafts or vehicles, you could get guns or armor, you can even mix it up, a little here and a little there. The only problem is you don’t have enough certz to get even close to everything. I don’t think you even have enough to get half. There fore use your certz wisely. Luckily there is a forget button. This does what is says, it makes you forget what you learned and gain the certz back. So if you make a bad choice don’t cry just forget it and learn something new. But there is a flaw in this. When you forget something it takes a while before you can forget something else. It use to be at 24 hours before you could do it again but they lowered it and I am not sure what it is at now.
If you don’t feel like being a martyr and dieing for a cause, I am speaking of the front liners, you could be a support character. These come in handy. They are capable of repairing and/or healing players. Engineers repair vehicles and armor while medics heal players. Two classes I don’t know where to put are the snipers and the hackers. Hackers come in handy for opening locked doors. Bases have locked doors and so non hackers can’t get in unless someone came out. Hackers also get the ability to have faster hacking times and supply stations such as lockers, medical terminals and certification terminals. Now keep in mind non hackers can hack bases and doors but it takes a lot longer then a hacker which make sense. Now there are advanced forms of medics, engineers and hackers but you can look up the advantages on the PlanetSide site. Snipers do exactly as the name implies, they snipe.
Now although a good majority of the game involves base takeovers a nice chunk is open land combat. Now if you’re a pilot then you can have a grand ol’ time taking out land based opponents unless they have anti-air. Vehicles can have a jolly time killing and infantry they please. And last BFRs (Battle Frame Robotics) can kill any of the three. Now this is not saying this will win always. Everyone is open for and attack and everything has a weakness. Keep in mind there are no NPCs and everyone you see is a player. With the Core Combat expansion you can go into cave like areas and fight but I have never done it.
Now when attacking on the open fields or taking over bases you can team up and form squads. The nice thing is squads can team up and become platoons. I don’t know how many players can be in a platoons or how many squads can be in a platoon but the highest I have seen is about twelve to fifteen. This allows for a nice chunk of your friends and/or guild mates fight together to take over bases. Before I quit they added a feature to share experience in a radius based on you squad leaders location but I don’t know much about it because my comp died and it has problems running it. I get about 35 frames per second in open field combat and 20 in fort takeovers. Now keep in mind having a squad is a good thing. They allow you to share experience and help you survive in fort takeovers which can get up to uncountable amounts of players throwing immeasurable amounts of firepower at each other.
Well that’s about all I can think to say so here is a wrap up.
PROS
- Online
- Nicely balanced empires
- Non stop combat
- Excellent player customization (Play wise not appearance wise)
- Level up system adds strategy to the game
- Well done party support
- Fort battles become huge in scale
- No gore
- Able to grab other empires equipment
- Lockers keep everything safe from everyone else
Cons
- Graphics are becoming dated compared to new FPSs on the market
- At times the empires can seem amazingly unbalanced
- When you die a bunch spawn time increases
- Not meant for PCI video cards from what I have seen
- No gore
- When you die with opposing empires weapon you lose it