Excellent, if perhaps a little big dated feeling. A few gameplay quirks and a dated feel to the engine hold it back.
-The campaign lasts roughtly 8-10 hours with a good variety of missions, it probably takes alot longer on Elite Difficulty where you die in 1 or 2 shots.
-The story was fairly impressive, not as egregiously over the top as some other FPS have been getting (Call of Duty/Black Ops). It at least SOMEWHAT tried to stay true to it's roots.
-Sound effects were HUGELY improved over MAG, and voice acting was very good (if unspectacular).
-It features custom missions and co-op games, pretty good options here.
-It also features traditional online multilayer with numerous modes, as well as the hardcore no-respawn classic SOCOM modes.
So on the surface,all of that should equate to the SOCOM franchises' return to glory after being essentially MIA on PS3. On paper this game should have been a 9.0+ easily. Unfortunately, there are a few areas where this game missed the mark.
1st and foremost the graphics engine for this game, while adequate, also felt like something from about 3 years ago. That is not to say it looks terrible, because it doesn't. It is certainly on par if not more solid looking than games like Black Ops and Modern Warfare 2 on consoles. But those games were already criticized for using a dated engine, with a brand new SOCOM game built from the ground up for PS3, you'd expect alot more. Essentially the graphics on a game like Uncharted 2 make the game, it adds to the experience. Here they aren't particularly negative, but it was disappointing that they weren't an additive in any way. They were just... flat.
Secondly, there were a few little quirks with gameplay which I found a bit odd. The camera angles can be troublesome occasionally, which was not expected in a SOCOM game. Sometimes it gets too close to you and essentially causes your character's back torso and head to take up half the screen, the camera directly caused me to fail one of the stealth missions several times in a row because coming around a corner trying to stick close to a wall I had no way to evaluate the environment in front of me with this odd camera angle, I ended up just having to go a different route to not encounter the camera angle quirk going down this certain path. Additionally there was the bizarre lack of ability to switch the camera over your right or left shoulder which seems to be fairly standard in other games, unfortunately you ALWAYS have it over your right shoulder and have no direct control to switch it, which again causes some awkward camera angles
Overall this game does offer alot more than some other shooters lately, but in a crowded market it sadly doesn't really separate itself as significantly higher quality. It does features tactical squad gameplay, but it's much more shallow than even a game like Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. It also lacks the "open world" feeling of that game. However being a PS3 exclusive it does have a bit more polish than some of the multiplatform games.Additionally being SOCOM it will probably have a dedicated community playing online for YEARS, throw in a fairly lengthy campaign (relatively speaking) and decent co-op modes, it is certainly worth picking up.
8/10 in my book for being solid, but to score a 9/10 it would have required a more modern looking graphics engine, with some more refinement in it's game-play.