PlanetSide

"A fairly good online game and a nice First-Person shooter."

Planetside is a futuristic Massive-Multiplayer Online game. Massive Mutliplayer means thousands can play at one time. Instead of creating and joining games on FPS like Counterstrike and Unreal Tournament, all the players connect to one server of their choice and team up or fight against thousands of other players. There are three empires fighting over control of the planet Auraxis. The Terran Republic, a powerful, but oppresive empire which ruled for over a thousand years. The New Conglomerate, a rebel faction who fights for freedom from the Terran Republic. The Vanu Sovereignty, an empire who uses alien technology as an advantage for both research and weapons. So how does this game do as an MMOG?

Graphics - 9/10 - Good graphics. Not the latest and most realistic stuff. The shiny graphics you see for Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and Doom 3 is offline for now. The game world is pretty colorful. Green hills and forests, snowy mountains, vast deserts. Rain and storms are a nice feature also. A lot of people have had trouble with the graphics, so you need a good video card with the latest drivers.

Sound - 8/10 - Each continent has good theme music that goes with it. The sound effects from weapons and vehicles is good. Many people, however, are having issues with the sound.

Gameplay - 5/10 - Hear we go. The gameplay gets half-credit because of the way everything is set up. Your character is completely customizable. You can pick what their head looks like but thats it. All the players end up looking exactly like each other. The certification feature is great. You earn certification points which lets you buy certifications that give you the ability to use certain weapons and vehicles. That gives gameplay half-credit. This game suffers from the same thing over and over. The object of the game is to find an enemy facility and take it over. Once you hack it, you have to wait 15 minutes until it completely belongs to your faction. This game has a lot of waiting. Congratulations, you and your squad successfully captured a facilty. Guess what? Now you get to do it again! And again! And again! This never ends. But you can make it fun if you set your own objectives such as taking certain towers and facilities to help conquer a whole continent. But the main objective gets repetitive.

Servers - 6/10 - I always rate the servers for an online game. This one was rushed. I was in the beta test and I knew that it needed to spend a few more days or weeks to work out a few bugs. But they went ahead and released it anyway, despite the bug reports from beta testers. Now they're suffering from server problems such as massive lag, zone crashes, and whatnot. As of June 3rd 2003, Sony said they will be fixing the problems.

Final Verdict - If you like First-Person shooters, go ahead and give this a shot. There IS a $13 monthly fee which turns many players away. But you get the first month for free as well as a 7-day free trial CD Key. Good graphics, mediocre gameplay. Awesome when it comes to teamwork. Sony did a nice job.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/04/03, Updated 06/04/03