PlanetSide

The reality is certainly worth the experience - the feeling of being deep in the midst of a desperate fight to protect your base, or part of the offensive sweeping across enemy territories is hard to match. There is considerable freedom to do your own thing and head off to play lone wolf, but the real benefits will be felt as soon as you join someone's squad for the first time.

Basically, on your own and without a lot of the hardware/skill privileges available to higher tier players, your experience tends to go through a less than enjoyable cycle of spawn, tool up, walk out the door of a friendly facility and, shortly afterwards, get gunned down by somebody with a ridiculously more powerful weapon and seemingly impervious armour. Even if you get the drop on them, you always seem to end up worse off.

Annoyed by this, you may try spending some of your early certification points (the game's inbuilt experience reward system) on buying the ability to pilot a nice gunship, or buy a suitably meaty suit of personal battle armour.

And then you find that you still end up getting shot to pieces - trying to win the war on your own leads to a rapid demise.

However, the experience is transformed when some friendly person lets you into one of the hundreds of ad hoc squads in play at any one time. Indeed, you can flag yourself as 'looking for squad' to highlight your gun for hire status, which is certainly a useful matchmaking tool.

Once you get into a squad, you're free to play exactly as before, but now you can share a squad-specific comm channel, agree on objectives, or just chat for a while. Ideally, you'll find yourself working with a variety of players, with all those handy medical, engineering and hacking skills that you can't quite afford yet, not to mention hitching a lift in a friendly transport, or even riding shotgun in the squad tank. Even better, all the experience earned by any member of the squad is given to all other squad members equally (rather than divided between them), so you all get something out of it.

Most importantly though, it gives you a sense of purpose and some mutual protection in a raging warzone, with no cease fire in sight. You'll find quite soon that you'll make a few online friends (that you can look for each time you're online) or join one of the persistent outfits (very clan-like) that abound. This sense of belonging makes the whole thing more worthwhile, and drags you back just as much as the desire to get that elusive advanced engineering skill.

In terms of game play, the strategic aim is purely control of the dozen or so bases scattered across a continent, with 10 continents representing the total land mass of the planet Auraxis. The balance of power tends to be fluid, as squads move from base to base, concentrating more on capturing enemy bases, than on securing and holding their hard won territories. This, combined with the fact that there is no in-built total victory scenario can make the game seem more like an excuse for all-out combat, than a war for domination of the planet. Of course, that's exactly the hook for the instant action crowd, so not necessarily a big problem for most.

That said, the options for coordinated strategy are delivered by the second type of experience system, which is your command rank. As you carry out more tactical leadership activities (leading squads etc.), you acquire command experience, which unlocks further command-related ability. Being able to broadcast to everyone on a continent the need to defend a key position, for example, is clearly a useful tool. But only if people listen to you...

The ebb and flow of combat is chaotic, and suffers from the lack of overall control of a remote strategist, but the fact that this is potentially possible within the game's structure, once players start to get more organised, is quite frankly exciting.

In terms of system/hardware requirements, this game is quite a monster. On a new PC running at 1.8Ghz, 512Mb DDR RAM, with a low to mid-range graphics card (128Mb Radeon 9200), ADSL 512 connection, I have had a fairly pleasant playing experience. The connection is entirely stable in about 1 month of play so far, but lag and slowdown still occurs when battles get crowded. But crucially, not enough to have me reaching for my copy of good old Battlezone.

My suggestion is very much to take advantage of the free 7 day trial available at FilePlanet (and also via a PC Gamer cover disk) to install the entire client and road-test your PC's and internet connection's suitability to handle the strain. This is exactly what I've done, and I'm now happy to pay for the full game, subscription and all.

The first steps of the game are straightforward as you exchange your initial free certification points for skills, such as weapon handling or vehicle driving, at a certification terminal. You can gain more certification points by getting experience on the battlefield and improving your battle rank. When you've done this you can select the weapons, armour and support gear and so on that your certifications (certs) allow, at an equipment terminal. You can try out every weapon and vehicle in the game in the virtual training area on your home sanctuary. This is useful before choosing your certifications. You can also 'forget' certs every 24 hours, allowing you to use them for other skills. People change certs a lot.

Once equipped, you can use the Instant Action function to join an ongoing battle that your faction is involved in. It's hard to be effective going solo. You can't take a well-defended base solo because group firepower easily out does individual firepower. Solo experience is also slow to build up. The game is really about squads. Squads can be up to 10 people. The best squads have members with a range of abilities such as hackers, who get into enemy bases, medics who can quickly heal colleagues, pilots who can fly fighters or transport aircraft and assorted vehicle drivers. There are always squads looking for members so finding one isn't usually a problem. If you can't find one you can have a go at being a squad leader yourself and try and get some command rank points. They are useful for gaining specialist command skills for coordinating large battles. Once a squad is formed, everyone can set off for battle.

There are several ways to travel to a battle. You can create your own vehicle at sanctuary and travel using roads and the warp gates or you can use the game's in built High Altitude Rapid Transport (HART). Squad leaders can set waypoints for squad members to make it easier to meet up. You need them. I found that even if my squad all used the universal HART system, people would often choose the wrong drop point and end up landing a long way from other squad members. May be it's because most players are still new to the game. If your squad, however, is the only one planning an attack on an enemy base, it can be delayed for ages if you are waiting for your hacker to arrive from the other side of the continent to get you inside. Even when you finally arrive at the battle zone, you can find that your faction has won already and is just mopping up enemy stragglers and the new frontline has moved down the road.

Once you get into battle the game really takes off. Being part of a large assault force, where several dozen of your faction are moving in on a heavily defended base with player controlled aircraft from both sides whizzing overhead can be quite exhilarating. I have to say it does seem harder to defend bases than attack them. Bases might on the surface seem quite formidable with their defences and facilities but once enemy hackers get inside your base with Max personal armoured troops right behind them, it's not long before the game is up.

When you die you have the option of respawning at a nearby friendly base or a mobile respawn station. Sometimes there may be no respawn points on the continents and so you have to go all the way back to sanctuary, leaving your squad members to fight it out on their own until either you can get back or they get wasted.

It's worth mentioning the vehicles, many of which can carry several players allowing, say, one to be a driver, a couple of others gunners and the rest mere passengers. The airborne Galaxy troop aircraft can fly whole squads plus a small vehicle into battle. If you are on an aircraft or ground vehicle you view the battle from its perspective. Impressive!

There is one busy European server and four American ones, each with a 5,000-player limit. If one faction becomes too numerous on a server, the game offers enticements such as health bonuses to encourage new players to join one of the other factions.

I think Planetside is a good game but it needs expanding, as I can't see people paying to fight the same battles month after month. Gamers need to feel that the battles are worth fighting. Defending towns full of player owned houses, apartments and stores would be more meaningful than the anonymous bases.

Beware, the computing demands of Planetside are severe! The graphics are nothing special so it must be the sheer activity causing the problems. My AMD 2000 system with 512 Mb Ram and DSL connection struggles to run the game at all when lots of players and vehicles are all gathered within a very small area.

Also, unlike a certain MMORPG I used to play, you do not have to be highlevel to have a chance in the PvP. That was the biggest problem with some MMORPG's; from level 1 you had nothing to do but slow, boring, xp'ing. In this game, you start with the ability to get decent equipment from the start, plus safe weapons/vehicle training, and that lets you jump right into the action.
And travel time in the game is not a problem. At any time you can recall to the sanctuary (safe home island), from which you can be transported anywhere in the game (besides other sanctuaries). You can also fly, which is quite fast. Travelling between islands is done by portals, and finding the right portals is easy.

Although it is a great game in many ways, it is not really addictive to me, but still better than any FPS I know of.

I hope the review has been helpful.