PlanetSide

"Great Idea, Mediocre Execution..."

Introduction
Planetside is a one-of-a-kind game, and you'll find nothing else like it. It is a combination of a FPS mixed in with the ''leveling'' system of an MMORPG. The game involves massive battles between the Terran Republic(TR), the New Conglomerate (NC), and the Vanu Sovereignty (VS). Since this genre of game is unheard of, I was not sure how to rate this initially, so I didn't; but after 3 months of playing this game, I feel I can adequately review this game accurately.

Graphics (5.5)
Wow, Let me start by saying that this game is visually stunning...if you own a godly computer. However, 80% of computer gamers don't have the type of specs needed to truly run this game in it's finest form. The consequences? An ugly, blocky game. If your comp doesn't have about a MINIMUM of 1 gig of ram, and a strong graphics card (128mb, recommended 256) you will be looking at quite an ugly game. Sure, the game will work fine with low and Medium graphics settings, but it seems unreasonable to expect all users to have top-of-the-line computers. For this reason, I gave the graphics overall a 5.5

Music/Sound Effects (8.5)
I'm going to say that Planetside's music is fantastic. it truly fits the atmosphere of the game in every way, and it was constructed beautifully. I had no complaints whatsoever with the music other than that I wish there were more tracks, but no points are lost for this. The sound effects are good too, but don't look for anything extraordinary. All in all, this is the most satisfying part of the game, the sound. I gave it a 9 overall.

Gameplay (2)
This is where the game went to hell in a handbasket. As stated in some of the other reviews, initial gameplay provides some real excitement.....but wears thin quickly. But there are far more serious problems in this game then replay value, so I'm going to address them in this section.

*****Glitches/Bugs*****
This is my biggest problem with this game. When your paying 12.95 a month, you expect some real tight gameplay with little to no technical problems. That is not the case in Planetside. Some problems at first seem tedious, such as doors not opening and closing, invisible enemies, going Link Dead (LD), or Server crashes. However, these bugs come out in full form during a heated fight. To provide an idea of what I mean exactly, I'm going to give some examples.
---During a heated fight, your squad tries to sneak in the back door, which is bugged and won't open, and then your squad is murdered by the enemy
---During a valuable hack, your computer goes LD, and you don't get the experience points for the hack
---While defending a base, an invisible enemy wipes out your whole team, when they are not in an Infiltration suit
this is not acceptable to be paying money for this kind of poor maintenance.

*****Lag*****
Wow...the box shows you the minimum requirements to play this game. I will tell you in advance that those requirements are nothing but a lie. If you do not have a broadband connection with a moderately powerful computer, you will NOT be able to play this game. Also, even those with powerful computers WILL lag, not because of their connection or their specs, but because the server lag is just that bad. Don't worry, there is NOT a way to prevent lagging at least minorly.

*****Customer Support*****
This downright pisses me off. Frankly, when there is a repetitive problem that is reported, you expect a response to correct these problems. Well, that doesn't happen in this game. Instead, you'll receive an automated message response that says ''Thanks for your time, delete this appeal''. Now, that sounds good right? Wrong. in fact, don't expect any support at ALL from SOE here, because your not getting it. Frankly, for 12.95$ a month, that just sucks.

*****Experience and Replay Value*****
The dumbest part of this game's design is the fact that it's completely one-sided. There are only 4 ways to get experience in this game: ANTing, hacking, attacking, and resecuring. None of these involve defense, so basically the game encourages you to work like locusts: you sweep from base to base, and then abandon them immediately after acquiring the experience. the bad part about this, nothing is ever accomplished. At night you can go to bed owning and locking 3/4 of the world, and wake to find out your team only owns 3 bases. As for replay, I stated before, expect it to start getting stale in 1 month or less.

*****Dying Game*****
Because of the problems mentioned above, it seems this game has lost a SIGNIFICANT amount of players since it was released. When I started playing the game in May, the servers were packed all day and night, and there was ALWAYS a good fight going on somewhere in the world. Now...you can go for hours running into a mere handful of other players. I believe that this game is on the dying path, and will be forgotten soon at the rate it's going.

After all these problems, I came up to give this game a 2.0, which I feel is generous. This game has a great idea, but poor execution causes it to be forgotten.

Buy it?
No, I can not recommend this game at this point in time. Maybe if SOE gets it's act together, and they really work on this game, I might recommend it in a few months, but as of now, I would tell you there are better games out there. If you really want to try this game out, download the 7-day trial from www.fileplanet.com, but I implore you to try before you buy.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 07/25/03, Updated 07/25/03