Planetside 2

[Charon]

I don't know how many of you know about this game, but I played a bit of this back in the day when the original Planetside came out, and once I saw that Planetside 2 had come out, and that it was free no less, I decided to play.

For the ill informed, Planetside 2 is an MMOFPS on a grand scale where the player can join one of three factions, the Terran Republic (the Old Guard, trying to get everybody back together and get back in contact with the homeworld), the New Conglomerate (Freedom Fighters tired of the oppression of the Terran Republic who want to build something new here) and the Vanu Sovereignty (Let us use this Alien Technology to advance our civilization!). None of the factions like each other and as of right now they are battling over three different continents (though several more continents are on their way). The map of who controls what changes constantly as factions sweep in and conquer, or get pushed back in bloody fighting. It is a whole ton of fun. A single character can play as any of the classes, of which there are 6, and each is distinct and valuable in their own way and missing any one of them can seriously hamper an assault or a defense.

Holy shit is it awesome. This is not WoW or Battlefield my friends. This is not those at all. It calls itself an MMO but it's strong FPS features mean it has nothing to do with what we consider to be more traditional MMOs and the simple scale of everything and the importance of teamwork and completing objectives over getting a kill count blows games like Battlefield out of the water. There have been times (such as today) where I was caught up in an epic conflict that started when I came online and was still going when I left two hours later that essentially occurred over a square kilometer of land. Armored columns clashed, were shot down by guerrilla rocket sneak attacks, flanking maneuvers expanded the conflict over a broad area, air support was called in, with all three factions involved in a three-way fight over the area with an amount of tanks and planes involved that I honestly lost count of. It was a glorious fight that swung back and forth multiple times but never really got anywhere and it was still fun as hell. What's even better is that I wasn't even playing as one of the assault characters. I was playing as an engineer. Which means it was my job to keep tanks repaired and to drop supply packs for my allies to resupply themselves on the battlefield whenever they ran out of ammo.

All in all it is a lot of fun, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys large-scale FPS with quite a bit of tactics and strategy thrown in for good measure. This is a game that you almost *have* to play with a group of people. If you try to lone wolf you generally won't get very far.

[White Haven]

NC-Jaeger, when I play. Recently I've been swept back up in The Secret World, so I've been on a bit of a Planetside vacation.