This game is massively overrated, this game is rushed as hell, giving the devs less time to weave out the massive imbalances and bugs. The RPGs are equivalent to Nerf Water guns, the Max is unfair to play as and against, players are complete **** it's just a mess. Though the maps are nice, and what is does well, it does really well, not to mention it's a guilty pleasure.

This is a game with a lot of unrealised promise, which suffers at the hands of a new community.
I love big, class based FPS games, I even loved MAG, but its pretty difficult to love PS2. Its scale is awesome, but you are unlikely to see most of the map given the spawns and hotpoints tend to be at small locations many Km apart. Its gunplay is pretty poor, guns are uninspiring and bland with no impactful feel.

There are youtube guides out there that state that the most important aspect of this game is logistics. This is true, the most useful people are usually the ones flying mobile spawn points but they are far above the action. As such, people rarely fly the mobile spawn points because the most useful part of the game is also incredibly boring.

The other problem this game suffers from is that there is no sense of achievement, even when you capture an entire region of the map.

The community at the minute is still adjusting, so while it may get better in the future at the minute the 10% of people that arent playing snipers are running round wildly with LMGs.

The game is incredibly demanding on PCs due to its scale, and still has a lot of lag and bugs in the EU servers. The concept behind the game is excellent, the execution at the moment is just incredibly bland. In addition, for a game with this much stuff and scale, there is no real tutorial to speak of. A few notes exist in the in the pause/map screen but at the start of the game you are pretty much dropped in a warzone and told 'GO!' leaving you puzzled asking "go where? do what?" until you die.… Expand

The Game: Planetside 2 has the potential to be a great game marketed as a Freep2Play game there are a huge number of issues and if you really want every weapon you will have to shell out a whopping 400 USD for every weapon + subscription that costs you 15$ a month. Air: huge pay2win advantage (People who pay real money get rocket pods and AA rockets which are both overpowered hard) Tanks: mild pay2win (Regular tanks are hugely competetive and pay2win is almost non existant here.)
Infantry: mild to high (Free2play guns are super effective but you do gain some advantages with paid guns)


All in all i won't be playing this for a long time because it's based on such a blatant model,I mean seriously 7$ for a gun.

The GamePlay: Planetside 2 has it's charm,it's a fun game I admit but there's a big number of glitches,none of the game-breaking just annoying at times.The class system is well thought out and the upgrades are reasonable.The maps are huge and it's fairly balanced with some discrepancies here and there.

Conclusion:


All in all a descent game 7/10 but with the pay2win model it's really not the game for the intermediate-hardcore gamer this is a game for 9-5 person who has 2-3 hours to play and a lot of spare cash (kids,job people)
As a hardcore gamer I can say this is not a game for me,but I recommend you to try it and if you have an extra 400$ over a year to really enjoy it. I prefer my games in the 50$ area.… Expand

I've now played Planetside 2 since release and have come to a conclusion.
Planetside 2 sucks.
Its not your regular sucking though, its an accumulation of issues that makes this game unenjoyable, tedious and down right rotten at times.
The decisions by the staff are mind bogglingly stupid and don't seem to take into account a long term picture of the game but rather short-term profit min-maxing.
I would not recommend buying anything from the store as half of the gear and items are broken or will/have been changed since release. As an example, lock-on launchers from the store have been changed to not be able to be dumb-fired anymore, destroying any sense of utility they previously held.
Horns for vehicles were recently added for ~6$ a pop as a "micro transaction", funny thing is they don't even work when you equip them.
The game is a total mess, its full of hackers, lag, draw-distance exploits, bugs, and crashes. The game should have been released in a year.
Not to mention there isn't even anything to do in the game beyond shooting dudes in the face while running.
The gameplay is so incredibly basic that even Battlefield 2 had more variety to it than Planetside 2 does. Spawn, cap a base, move on, cap another base, get rolled by the zerg, die, spawn, die, spawn, die, spawn, die, spawn, die, log out, repeat next day.
Once the novelty of seeing 100 tanks wears off the game is nothing more than Call Of Duty with vehicles (badly controlling vehicles).
There are a thousand things wrong with the game, at the very basic level, and I could go on forever, but the conclusion is simply this: It sucks, and its not going to get better.… Expand

Had great potential. Seems to have very bad optimization for Amd processors. Very low frame rates and game looks blurry even with settings maxed.
I'm sure that it's a decent game, but it is unplayable on a mid range desktop.

This game lures everyone in with it's free-to-play style only to force (to stay competitive) the spending of money for "side-grades". Which are really either useless or a significant upgrade to give an advantage over new players. With the lack of good item descriptions or a community wiki the stuff you pay for may or may not be what you expected, not too mention most purchases fair greater than $7.00 which is outrageous. If you were to buy everything in this game you would end up spending nearly $350 doing so. The subscription feature at $15 month is barely worth it as well, you get a priority que, 500SC and some xp and resource boosts. Your money would be better spent on blackjack and hookers.

The game is constantly changing and still feels like a beta. As long as "x" amount of the community complains to Smedley and friends, there tends to be a change in the upcoming patch just for them. The hacking is apparent within the first 10 minutes of jumping into the game. The combination of free-to-play and the ability to simply use throwaway email accounts without the need for any other authentication attracts trolls from all bridges inside the internet.

The worst part of this game? There is barely any story or character development. It's almost as if someone spent an hour at most thinking about the lore and story of this game and decided that's what will be released. There is very little point to the game as well, let me summarize this. Launch game>>pod into somewhere>>farm xp>>farm xp>>farm some more xp>>about a day or two later>>unlock item>>rinse and repeat for months>>unlock all items>> ???. You'll quickly find out (especially in voice chat) how obsessive people become about unlocking the ultravortexcannon3000 for their hoopty that really the only thing that keeps people playing is the need to unlock more and more just to try and be the "best" or have the higher advantage. The game preys on the player's materialistic mindset. No one seems to care about base captures or defending, but rather KDR and just plain out kills and XP. Even capturing an entire continent (somehow the community's self-created climax of the game) feels completely pointless. The developers continue to produce more weapons and items (again "side-grades") to keep the players into the never-ending gotta catch em all mentality. Outfits, or guilds or clans or whatever you want to call them... Yes they can fix some of the above problems, but they can also create some of their own. Most tend to shy away from fun and get a little too serious. You'll find that out quickly when 15 old Billy gets home from the school and and logs into his squad leader account only to turn into a complete power-hungry douche. Billy will then give your squad orders to go defend the bottom corner of the map that hasn't seen action since the release of the game for hours on end. Oh and don't you dare question his authority or he'll make sure to start yelling "clear coms" as he's trying to talk to his dad about what their neglected mother is making for dinner. Who says "clear coms" anyways? "Standby" sounds a million times better and that's coming from someone who works with communications and radio on a day to day basis.

The community for the game as a whole really just tends to complain to oblivion. You can see this by logging into any of the popular message boards and half of any given page will start out with the titles "Suggestion", "Bug", "Why", "When" or "PSA"... Hell look at me, I was part of the community for the last three months and all I do is complain now. Prime example. Good day.… Expand

Before you even start playing this game, bear in mind this is a pay to win game. Sure, you *can* obtain everything in game (that's not cosmetic) by experience points (and therefore certification points). But it would take you an immeasurable amount of time to do it. Second, lag, lag LAG. Enemies will teleport around while they fight you, so sometimes it's pointless as you get pummeled out of nowhere (yes I got 22mbps fiber). Queues - sometimes the queues will get bugged and you'll be waiting all night, though to be fair you won't have to wait for queues for the most part. Don't let me get started on flying vehicles. Noobs - not to blame them, there is barely any guide on where to go at the beginning of the game, so most seem to be lost and you rarely get coordinated mass assaults of the sorts. Weapons - the weapons are just retarded. Using default snipers is just rage inducing, I know about leading the crosshair and bullet fall, but it's very hard to hit people. Sniper sway... All in all the thing that pisses me off is all of the huge advantages paid characters will have (pay to win model) and the rage inducing gameplay. I know it's a successful model for Sony and they wouldn't have it other way, but I wonder if they could do something like Valve's Dota, where you win by skill, not upgrades - you only get cosmetic paid upgrades. You may like or hate it, so by all means give it a try. Then decide- it's "free to play" after all.… Expand

Metacritic cutted my review in half , i won't bother rewriting all that text again .... -.-'
I'm changing my score to 2: and adding more issues: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Can't get out of vechicle, magically disappearing vechicles, vechicles and soldiers falling through the ground, the game breaking bug - sunderer spawning doesn't work or works at random. Reviving doesn't work. Heavy assault shield not working. Poor explanation of anything for e.g. most people don't know that engeneer have 2 ammo pack, the second one is when you press 'B' befor deploying your turret. Fps dropping to 0.5 ( my computer isn't strong but i get the avarage of 30, 0.5 fps after loading the game is a bug). Poor performance on better computers. Spawns placed in a way that encourages spawn camping (with tanks.... pointing at the spawn.. usually there are about 50 tanks in such place... yes you shouldn't spawn there, that doesn't change the fact that 90% of spawns are located in such places that ->encourageleft arrow->backspaces(to erase /say command)->write /platoonsay, but that's not the case for for e.g. /squadsay that's sticky after typing it once. Whole text chat (e.g. channel switching) is counter-intuitive. If your teammate spots something (Q) most of the time it won't pop on neither your minimap nor HUD which makes the most important aspect of that feature broken, most of the time you don't know exactly where is enemy even everyone is spotting them. Infiltrating enemy base and spotting targets is useless for your teammates but will get you killed as enemy can hear you shouting. Only thing that spotting can be used for is spamming it in every direction to find a well hidden sniper. Deploy and redeploy button sometimes doesn't work. Drawing distance is different for infantry and vehicles thus most of the time when flying you're being shot by enemies your not even close to seeing. And that's just a peak of the mountain. (no longer valid score: Why 5 and not less?) If you want to know what are the good sides of this game read any other review. Just forget about the "so much teamplay" arguments because there is none. Just mindless zerg rush one spawnpoint -> one cover (so much people helping me, so much teamwork aka 30 snipers at the only hill that's not outside the drawing distance, that are most of the time killed by other clases or driven over by their own tanks). Ps. I think that metacritic should allow for at least some text formating... enters and such... you know… Expand

Bugs, screen flickering, graphical distortions and lag issues make this an horrible experience. This game feels rushed and unfinished which seems strange because of the lengthy beta.

I will try it out again over a month i think. Maybe after some patching up these issues will be resolved.

At first I was really blown away by the game, then things started to get really boring, seeing as how SOE makes it extremely difficult to get different gear without paying for it. So customization is out the window. There's nothing really much to the game that's different from any other fps, other than the fact that you have very big maps, but even Arma easily covers that area. Then, I step back even further from the battles, and I see that basically, there isn't much chance of a faction winning an entire map, so it's just an endless war. After playing for approximately 6 hours straight, I'm not really impressed. I'm not shelling out money to enjoy myself.… Expand

When I first saw the trailer for Planetside 2 I thought "wow" this game must be awesome... and I am sure it has a great potential, so I am not going to talk about what others praise here about it, instead I'd like to tell you about my own experience with the game. Ok first of all I am aware there are video tutorials for this one, but I'm telling you get ready to suffer because the game is not newbie friendly , so the first time you play you are launched in the middle of the field with nothing more but a small message like "good luck and kill your enemies" thing, so you are in this space pod falling down from above and the first thing that you will face as soon as you touch the ground is death... I thought to myself in disbelief "holly crap are there people camping spawn spots? how is this allowed on first place", btw something to notice is that I was killed by "generalfart" so that will also give you an idea of the kind of community thye are cooking there, I should have known better...so I started all over again and same bs... once you manage to get into an ally base you are not told what to do and whatsoever so this game sucks, is not fun to play , after all what did you expect from SOE and a freemium game, if you are into that sort of games (cashshop included) maybe this one is for you, otherwise move along and don't waste your time downloading and hd space installing this piece of crap… Expand

4/10 - has potential but is just frustrating. No orientation or clear objective, nothing to acclimatize the player to the controls or HUD, just pick a class and shoot things. Less than thirty seconds after entering the game for the very first time I was shot by a level 30+ player I couldn't see. In fact I spent the majority of my two hours in-game in a near-rage being killed by higher-level players with better equipment who I couldn't even touch because starter equipment I had did as much damage as a water pistol. Constantly re-spawning and dying is not my idea of fun, thanks.… Collapse

This really is one of the worst games I have ever played. This is not a snap decision about the **** interface and ugly graphics - I played for over 30 hours before writing this review. I was a fan of the first Planetside, and I play many other FPS games, so I wasn't unaware of what I was stepping into, and really wanted to love this game. It failed me, totally. What I found in dropping into this game was a severely unpolished and unbalanced festival of frustration and endless active waiting.

If you like constantly running through empty expanses of nothing, only to be shot and killed in less than a second upon encountering an enemy (you had no idea was there) only to wait to respawn so you might do the same thing again, and again, and again, you will love Planetside 2. If you want an experience that is fulfilling in any other way, look elsewhere. It's free, but you get what you pay for. Everything about it is designed to make you want those real-money-guns just so that you might manage a kill or two, and the fun might actually start. They won't matter, you're still going to be randomly killed from any angle before you can locate an enemy. Ideally, you could play long enough to buy them with in game points, but in the 30 hours I played waiting for it to get good I only racked up 150 out of the THOUSAND I'd need for ONE GUN. Seriously, save your time, and definitely save your money, because you don't want to award that to this poor piece of f2p marketing garbage.… Expand

Has great potential but the gun play is completely lack luster, the skill ceiling is incredibly low, and if you want to win just get a tank and spawn camp capture points before moving with the zerg to do more of the same, at the same time the other factions will be doing this elsewhere on the map. If the game was less focused on vehicles and more focused on infantry combat then it would be a step in the right direction, but as it stands at the moment the game is fun for about a week then you realise it completely lacks any depth or skill. A shame, I had high hopes for this game. Oh; I also forgot there is no anti-cheat, and if you do get banned you just make a new account and change your ip, that is right they ip ban you, oh dear as if anybody who doesn't drool on themselves can't get past an ip ban :/… Expand

A brilliant game at it's core with potential unlike any other. But as with all games, they're only as good as their worst. In Planetside 2's case, this is the controls, gun accuracy, SoE's illegal billing department, laughable iron crosshairs that miss like the gun of your barrel is bent, abundant vehicle HP and overall balance between the three different factions. As it was with P1, Terran is still the most overplayed faction to date with no xp consequences, allowing the one with an advantage achieve even greater boosts through zerging tactics. But one of the flaws that stands out the most to me is the Terran guns. All of them have an insane rate of fire which either brings out two frequent scenarios: 1. Your gun shoots so fast to the point that the server cannot keep up and 2-4 of your bullets will not be affected by the initial recoil, leaving a gun that would normally not be able to hit anything past 3 yards suddenly gain the accuracy of a sniper rifle. Or. 2. Your gun shoots so fast that the proper amount of bullets is either increased or lessened, often with a rubber-band effect, causing a yoyo effect in one's DPS. Stack these along with the constant overall lag with hitboxes and hackers (which is to be expected in a game such as PS2) and your shooting experience will be ruined most of the time. Going back to balancement, in the beta, MAX units could effectively take down aircrafts with dual AA gun attachments if they came too close or didn't spontaneously move. What did they do to resort this? Remove the weapon completely from the entire beta, relaunch a 80% hamstered version into the release and only allow 1 per arm which you'll now have to purchase for an insane amount of in-game money. All because of a whining community on the forums, crying that their ultralight scouting airplane got shot down as it was flying a few meters above enemy towers. The situation is currently much the same, Sunderers for example, a transport/spawn vehicle require roughly 6-8 rocketlauncher hits before dying and it has no weakspots, be it rear or flank. A heavy assault unit can only carry 4-5 rockets at a time (with upgrades which also require you to pay for) which means if you happen to run into an enemy Sunderer, you will not be able to take it down without an ammo-refill, even with no opposition. The game is poorly thought through&executed and even more poorly managed. Even so I hope one day they will actually confront these issues and iron them out, not just leave them to fester like in P1 but alas, SoE has not gained the reputation of being massive incompetent cu nts for nothing. R.I.P, PS2.… Expand

This game is a ripoff of the Battlefield franchise if it was to be turned into a MMO. You can get the MMO feeling every second you play this game. This game suffers from low production quality and poor optimization. Also I personally believe that the mircotransaction system is extremely tedious and annoying. I would rather pay the 110$ I payed for BF3 (+ premium) than waste my precious time on a game that is a huge uninspired world that has no goal and purpose to exist.… Expand

Well after hours and hours of frustrating gameplay from the beginning of beta to the games launch I can honestly say Planetside 2 is the best continent simulator I've ever played. You don't know thrill until you have driven on a shaky ATV 4000 meters to a frontline only to get instantly killed and repeat the process. My framerate has been consistently bad on this game because it has 0 optimization for amd users. They released the game far too early and it is still riddled with strange bugs. I'm afraid this awful piece of crap software is going to melt my computer. I've known about this game for a long time and was a supporter of this amazing idea. Then I got into beta and realized that the devs do not know how to make a game and it's the same pay 2 win style of tribes ascend but with slow agonizing gameplay. At best this game is you charging up a hill and taking out as many of the enemy as you can with a grenade. At worst this is you sitting at a checkpoint trying to capture it for 15 minutes only to get sniped by a sniper who you LITERALLY cannot see because the game hasn't generated them yet because of some bug or something. No wait the worst moment is walking outside a spawn facility and getting shot by the 20 Vanu that are milking the place for kills and having NO way to stop them. Oh wait no the worst part is walking outside and getting killed by an overpowered tank. NO NO the worst part is that the heavy class that kills you in 2 shots after you fire a whole clip into them. WAIT NO the worst part is this game had such amazing potential and failed so badly. Planetside 2 is literally indescribable, it's like a whole new category of crap games. My experience in the beta is that the devs didn't listen and were aiming for a target audience that does not exist. They ignore the veterans, screw the noobs, and pander to the rich. I once stepped on a nail barefoot and had to walk 100 meters over rocky ground. That was a better experience than this game and was more friendly. Maybe if the devs had listened to the intricate 10 page posts some fanatics posted. Maybe if capturing bases wasn't a pain in the a**. Maybe if performance was good. Maybe if everytime I got killed it didn't feel completely unfair.

Listen heres my advice. If you have 10 friends with good gaming rigs and high end processors you should get a hold of them and go play this game with them. Now for the rest of the population. Go play this game to waste your time and see how truly bad it is. If you like getting in a tank dominating for 4 minutes and then waiting 15 minutes to be able to spawn it again than you'll love this game. I give this game a 1 out of 10 because it is a good way to kill an hour when you first download it.… Expand

There are some amazing, inventive ideas in this game, its whole brilliant concept being something rarely if ever seen before (except in the previous title in the series, of course). Unfortunately, that sweet center is tucked away inside a crispy shell of pure manure: The actual gameplay is thoroughly rotten. With clumsy, awkward movement and dull, bland gunplay, Planetside 2 is only as good as its weakest link: Not good at all. The amazingly lazy visual design that ensures new players won't have the slightest clue what anything is without looking up in the wiki helps make it even worse. But at least you can buy yourself more hit points and other advantages with cash, right?

Unless you're already a Planetside veteran, or have the patience of a saint and absolutely no money to pay for a real game, don't bother.… Expand

Game is broken. Full of cheats and hackers - they can even teleport other players to their death now. Bugs - lots and lots of bugs, like falling through the floor, the ground, gun turrets that sometimes work and sometimes don't. I could sit and list all the bugs in the games, but I just don't care. SOE doesn't care - why should we care.

Game is basically chinese grind fest. Amount playtime required to unlock even crappiest upgrades is horrendous. Game lacks auto balance, anti-cheat software and has somewhat unbalanced factions. In servers 3 sides means 1 is getting ass handed by 2 factions. So even when you get exp bonus those are worthless experience is not equivalent to bonuses you get by controlling large area of map. Game is just ripoff from working first person shooters like battlefields doesn't really add anything new to genre.… Expand

Gameplay wise the game is great. Sure there may be some balance issues especially concerning the infantry vs vehicles part, but in general it plays very nicely. Battles lasting through day and night cycles are something I've personally enjoyed the most. But there are some problems not related to the gameplay itself that prevent the game from being truly good. The first one is the last of ANY tutorial, lack of ANY explanation of what all the icons means, lack of ANY objective information for the player which left me simply disoriented for first few hours. Sure, once you figure it out, the game becomes much better, but seriously I'm probably not the only one with this problem considering a very small subset of players who actually follows the objectives rather than mindlessly shoot each other. The second, and in my opinion - much more important - issue is the F2P model. The game was being advertised as not being Pay2Win game, which after a couple of hours becomes an obvious lie. Everything in game starting with abilities, weapons, mods, vehicle stuff, cosmetics, etc. is unlocked with a single currency you gain while playing the game. Now the problem is that on average you make about 25-30 credits per hour (about 1 credit per 4 kills) and upgrading a single perk to max level costs about 1500 credits - that's about 60 hours of gameplay for one perk on a single class on a single character. New weapon? No problem, 700-1000 credits + 200 credits for the mods. As you can see fully unlocking a single class takes about an eternity. This means that you end up buying weapons for 7-9$ each which is yet another misunderstood implementation of the MICROtransactions model. If this was a $60 priced title it would score at least 8 (because of the lack of initial tutorial and some game balance issues), but thanks to the greedy, falsely advertised payment model the rating does down to 3.… Expand

Planet Side 2 is a "free-to-play" but "pay-to-win" game which is so far away from entertaining me. A huge sized map with no enemies around, sucking game mechanics, bad spawn locations, buggy graphics and horrible fun factor make the game unplayable for me. You can give it a try like me; I tried it and gave it 3/10.

I'm not enitrely sure of the words to sum this game up. Ambitious, yes. Technically brilliant, yes. Amazing idea, certainly. But there are also other words that apply. Boring, buggy, overrated, uninspiring, underachieving, poorly reviewed by 'critics' (as always) and rage inducingly unfair. This is a free2play game, so some might say being overly negative isn't appropriate. I disagree however, the game is still an income source and therefore should be revealed as it is, an image different to that shouted out by the masses it would appear.
Positives- The big battles. This, apart from ambition, is the only thing I can find good here. When hundreds of people actually bother to attack a target instead of pretending to be lone rangers the action gets intense, tactical and most importantly, fun. It's also important to note the technical achievement. Que applause. The Negatives- Where to start? People. They kill this, ironically. The forums are a hotbed of rather pathetic trolls and juvenile kiddies. Ask a question, expect 9 trolls, 6x10-7 flamers and 1 genuine answer. F2PNewbs. In game, team killing is common, and rather annoying. It is a good concept to add, but nobody bothers where they land/drive/walk. They then complain and revenge team kill because they can't accept their mistake. Coordination is also particularly hard if you aren't in an outfit, as everybody disappears or gives up halfway through battles. I'm forever suddenly finding myself alone in the middle of an enemy base because nobody can be arsed to drive another few sundy's up, or spawn a tank. The much hyped big battles are cool, but so rare that anyone who isnt blinded by a shiny new game will instantly realise the game's main point isn't so 'main'. Flying is dame near impossible. Even if you make it out of the spawn area, good luck mastering the controls before you're shot down. They make absolutely no sense whatsoever to anyone who's ever flown a real plane, or a simulator, or even ace combat. Health intrigues me. Countless time in my play testing, both in beta and the 1.0 release I have flanked and shot AFK's at the enemy rear. One clip later they turn and headshot you. Clearly a bug, but an extremely common one, unfortunately. The same occurs during firefights, I've emptied whole clips into individuals (and hit, flamers) and they still kill me with a 1 second burst when I pursue them. Weapons. Or water pistols, whichever you prefer. They all look the same, sound the same and do puny amounts of damage to the rather large health bars. I haven't once felt like I've been carrying a real weapon, even in a hugely overpowered MAX. Bugs. I couldn't even begin to list them, there are far to many. Learning curve. Point and shoot isnt hard. Abilities, flying, deploying tactics etc. are never explained and rather backwards in their implementation. Anti-air is useless. You can sit on the crowns top level shooting away all day and probably get only one or two kills. Fighters are too fast to hit, defeating the purpose of anti-air as MAX's and tanks can hit the galaxy's better than turrets. Direction. There is none, and as previously said, rarely do people actually attack en masse.

Conclusion-
Whilst this game has potential, it is killed by these factors:
-People(kiddies) thinking they're clever ruining the games online rep through immature forum antics
-People not playing properly
-People team killing
-People pretending it's a solo game
-Endless bugs
-Poor direction
-Poor controls
-Completely atrocious health/damage balance.
-Terrible guns(underpowered, generic etc.)
-A pervading sense of boredom and frustration.

That last point is most important. You can look over the game's endless drawback after one good firefight, but its just like a drug, alcohol for example. Once the effect wears off and you realise whats actually going on you're left feeling crap and swearing never to play again. Especially when you read the sickeningly stupid 'critics' reviews. I'll admit, I see their profession as next to pointless. That's why I spend my time on this site. People's opinions are often far more 'on Earth' than these strange layabouts. But in this case, both are outrageously pathetic, although some have seen the light and look at the game past its face value, something which the ordinary bullet spamming, COD noob masses fail to do, making this game seem so much better than the failure it actually is.… Expand

Soo many hackers. every big battle has atleast one hacker. You can even find live streams of them, it's rediculous. The game feels so bland too, all people do is spawn kill and capture and recapture the same **** all day.

Another great idea with poor making. The Beta hum well this is where one works on bugs. Not this group. Gcard driver problems leaves you looking at a white monitor. The makers should have worked with grapic makes for the game. Another BIG thumbs down it Tking in the game........ You wait all day to build up points to get your lets say tank and then some as....whipe kills you. Maybe they should have asked the so called beta testers what they need in a game... TK FORGIVE or TK PUNISH omg really??? So much more but the key points for me. Yeah I even paid for the year thing. Just another good idea but a bad build..… Expand

After issues starting the game, all the text was bugged and saying ##ui and i had seach for a fix... i tried to fix and crash. reboot and fix the text issue and crash again... so loaded and play for about 5 minutes and find there is no guide or idea whats going on, then it crashed again
in total i played for another hour and decided its boring, graphics are average to poor and gameplay is like bf3 with no excitement.
The only saving grace is its free and been an online game there might be some large updates which make the game interesting.
Back to BF3 for me… Expand

An MMO-shooter, which is good concept, but needs to be thought out more. Imagine playing WoW, but instead of starting at lvl 1 and going through questing zones and learning your class, you start at lvl 20, and are dropped into BattleGrounds and told "figure it out" while all the veterans farm you for points. And this is the beginning, middle, and end of the game. I played this game for about 4-5 hours, disliking it the whole time, but I assumed that I just hadn't found the delicious chocolate center inside this harsh, unwelcoming game. But once I realized that there was no such center, I stopped playing. So try it, it's free, but you better play with friends on skype/vent who know what's going on, or you'll be lost, confused, and free food for all the other people on skype/vent.… Expand

PAY TO WIN...YOU ARE WARNED

I give this game a 3 out of 10 only because they created a f2p MMOFPS on a massive scale...but that's it. The gameplay feels cheap, the controls feel clunky and the combat is not as exciting as they make it out to be. I agree with a lot of the other reviewers here, most people are being blown away by the sheer size of the game and the fact its f2p. Well, just because a big budget game and f2p, does not make it a 10 out 10 blockbuster game. This game has pay2win all over it. It takes a hell of a long time to earn anything in the game and the teams are horribly unbalanced... every time i log in, my team is pushed back to furthest corner on the map and we have no chance of pushing back. It seems as if most gamer's jump ship to the winning faction and call it a day. For the last two weeks, we have been stuck in the same corner trying to fight our way out and we are not making any progress. If your looking for that next mmo/fps hybrid, look past this one. Great idea, poorly executed. Hey SOE, maybe you should of created some sort of cap or auto balance for the teams. The fact that anybody can join the wining and steam roll the entire map is BS. And why on earth would you make it so hard to actually earn better weapons?? It does not sucker people into buying your premium crap, it turns people away from the game. Look at what GW2 did right and learn from them. I suspect this community if going to die real quick. Especially with the release of Firefall coming soon. You guys need to get over the fact that you can create huge worlds, you need to work on balancing, gameplay mechanics, combat, and..well...just about everything else in the game. Huge worlds do not cut it anymore. The game is boring... FAIL… Expand

Could be so good but it just isn't.
You as a new player will have little fun in this game unless you wanna spend a decent amount of money. After playing a good 20 hours i havent even got 1/10th of the points needed for a decent upgrade. The grind you would need to do as a new player is just ridiculous, and the starting weapons is utter useless, same goes for the tank and plane weapons, wich means not only will you have the disadvantage of not knowing the game, but you will also have your skill removed due to ridicilous spread and weapon recoil, lesser health lower wpn dmg ect. ect. As a guy who normal do average in shooters i ended with a K/D ratio less than 0.3. Nuff said.… Expand

New player experience is horrible in this game. No tutorial, no training grounds, nothing. You just spawn in the middle of a warzone having no idea what the objectives are or how to achieve them. While you try to figure out how the game works you keep getting killed over and over. Worst first impression ever. For me, this is indicative of an unfinished product. Uninstalled after 20 minutes. I'll check back when it's a complete game and not a torso.… Expand

Great potential, that unfortunately falls flat. The graphics aren't amazing, but that's not surprising considering the scale they were going for. The biggest problem I have with this game is how much the game mechanics encouraging Team Killing. Seeing your supposed allies killing Sunderers (Mobile Spawn Points) so they can deploy one of their own in it's place in order to collect the exp just ruins any enjoyment I had in the game.… Expand

Massively overrated. If your not being killed or run-over by your own team-mates, your either running to a fight and generally one-shotted by enemy players that you could have been unloading a whole clip into their head. Either that or they are lag jumpping around. I have a high end PC and i find the graphics for this disappointing. If you get in a good fight of 50 to 150+ it can be interesting but thats all this game is, an endless fight over buildings nothing else… Expand

Don't play unless you're willing to shell some real cash, game is a true 'pay to win' game, and is very unbalanced. The game also renders poorly causing enemies to at times vanish or fail to render at all. Planetside is also very crash prone, It will crash at startup, it will crash while in game frequently, and will crash out half your squad at the same time. I've even had the launcher crash continuously forcing a re-install

Short: Don't Play.… Expand

the only part of the development team that brought there a game was the art team game looks great but every other part of the design is flawed. after spending a month with this game i feel i would have to wright a 7 page essay for you to truly get across the depth of the flaws that scar this game and will keep it from lasting for more then 6 months the game may be "free to play" but this game is not worth your time because its not worth my time. were only in the world for so long play a game that can respect that.… Expand

Yeah this game is pretty overhyped. It was a poor choice to take on such extreme graphics for a F2P game. It looks great, but runs like trash. The scaling in reduction of graphical settings is subpar at best. This leaves anyone with a mid to entry level gaming rig excluded from enjoying this game. The gameplay is a whole different story. The map is a **** giving you so much information you cant process what is going on. There is no clear objective as to where you should be headed or going unless you are in a squad and receiving orders from another player. The scale of the game is questionable at best. The game draws heavily from the Battlefield series, but fails to deliver a controled mechanism for preventing an all out **** to occur. I have found myself kill spawned over and over and over. I have found myself spawning in a group of friendlies only to be pinned down by superior enemy forces. There really is no protection or passive base defenses. Aside from this the battles can last for hours, or dare I say days? This kind of scaling isnt fun for the average gamers, if you cant sit down and accomplish something significant in a 30-60 minute period, than the game development has been designed to accomodate a niche group of hardcore players. All in all Planetside 2 really has some potential for further development. The scale of the game and the sheer rigorous pacing of the game will turn many players off.… Expand

Keeping the original game's thoughts in mind, I feel they have completely disregarded the fan base in which brought this game into being. I will not be spending the dozens of hours in which I did during the original PlanetSide, just my opinion.

Somewhere between boring and frustrating.

The game throws you right into battle without teaching you anything about what sort of objectives you should be doing or what options are available to you. All of the basics are exactly what you would expect, but it takes a while to learn how to change classes, or logically pick a spawn point, or spawn a vehicle, etc. A simple legend would have saved me 20 minutes (the amount of time I played before realize that they weren't about to explain anything about they key in-game systems and I had better look them up).

After watching a few of their videos I learned what some of the objectives were, although some things (like how to cloak) I never really found out. I'm not particularly inclined to. MMOFPS sounds fun but the problem is that battles are silly and one sided. You'll spend a bunch of time taking random bases on the front lines with no resistance, and you'll spend time trying frantically to defend a base from overwhelming resistance. How do 3 guys with rocket launchers stop 50 guys with tanks and engineers and invisible snipers? They don't.

It's boring if you're on the team with 50 tanks. It's frustrating if you're on the team with 3 rocket launchers. After 30 minutes of watching tutorial videos and 3 hours of playing I can say with certainty that they need to rethink the MMOFPS concept before it will be able to create engaging gameplay. There are a lot of low points :airplanes can kill new players with impunity (new players literally have no way to kill aircraft until they unlock heat-seeking rockets by paying real world cash or playing for 10 or 20 hours), spawn points are often humorously far from any objectives you care about (2+ minutes), some of the worst graphical glitches I've had in a few years, and long waits for continent switches (you might need to wait 10 minutes to be allowed to spawn on a continent with enemies).

Despite a lot of sloppy unpolished presentation, I'm not sure the concept itself is even valid. I had a little bit of fun running around doing 1v1 at some remote base or being involved in big team on team battles, but that action is few, far between, and still less compelling than any FPS I have played in this generation or any other.

This is easily the most boring game I have played in a decade. If they ever make some basic "quality of life" concessions and find a way to create compelling combat in the MMO genre this might be worth another look, but as it stands I think the game is about as compelling as the Pinocchio game on Super Nintendo.… Expand

Planetside 2 is essentially an unfinished game that is still in Open Beta and it retains none of the spirit and iconic features and game-play of the original. It is poorly optimized and still has a myriad of bugs, some of which are game-breaking, to put up with. Compounding these issues is the fact that SOE has the gall to charge money for side-grades/ monthly memberships for something that is essentially a COD/Battlefield clone. Also the game-play is repetitive and boring, and as for tactics, the zerg is the meta-game. Its a huge step back from what should have been a huge step forward, especially considering all of Planetside 1's good points, none of which where improved upon/implemented in Planetside 2. My verdict is that PS2 = fail.… Expand

This game is dying very fast ... servers had very high population and every map was full of people and epic fight. Now every server is medium to low and only epic fights are on INDAR ( one map). AMERISH is always empty and ESAMIR almost too...
Faction are very unbalanced and population is another topic... this game has a very bad problems in population and vehicle/weapons balance...
ZERGS.... WTF is this ? If you go with zerg it will be boring and easy mode for noobs.... if you go with small group you will be killed by enemy ZERG :D really?.
Less and less people play this game every day and this game is all about mass fights with many people. But if this game doesnt have people, it will not have mass fights and everybody will return to BF3/COD ...
This game will play only fanboys who say as always :" its a great game"... NO IT ISNT.
This game has a great potentional but if devs dont fix all this problems they will lose a lot of people and money of course.
I have played this game many many hours and spend a lot of money on it... and I can give you a advice... try it, have some fun and leave it if they will not fix it... DONT SPEND MONEY… Expand

This game has a great premise, but unless you wanna shell out money in the cash shop, you'll never get anywhere... I'm all for pay2play, but not pay2win. Plus, getting team killed by frustrated beginners or douchey vets its a pain in the ass; and don't even get me started on the lag... It's not horrible... but it feels like a game thats still in beta.

So for whatever reason I can run BF3 on nearly high settings, but this game won't even run on the lowest. The devs did not optimize this game very well at all. FTP should also not be the future of PC gaming.

- Pay to Win - Endless Grinding for Cert. Points - Takes up a butt-load of Disk Space and Processing Power - Minorly infested with Speedhackers and Aimbots As a new player, the only thing you can do is merely run towards an enemy, kill him if you are lucky, and then die. You rinse and repeat through this process because you mainly can't even see who is friend and who is foe that early into the game. You die yourself through the game.
Pick a Sniper - you take like 10 shots to kill somebody, while some enemy Sniper just takes one shot to kill you.
Pick Light Assault - Enemy's Machine Gun is always better and you die like in 2 shots.
Pick Heavy Assault - Fire a Rocket right next to the Enemy, no damage. Enemy's Rockets are like Atomic Nukes.

Most negative part about the game is of course, IT IS PAY TO WIN.
All the guns you can get for Cert. Points? Yeah, you can buy them with Cash.

Planetside 2 is a horrible garbage game that has no intention of ever improving and is just merely a cash-cow for Sony.… Expand

Lol at this game "becoming" an esport. The dev's made a terrible decision in this route. The game is far from competitive in the sense that there is absolutely no accomplishment in winning or losing. It is more of a marketing campaign than an actual competitive campaign.

This game tries to be a bit of everything, and everything of nothing. The game is mostly over-hyped and doesn't live up to its reputation at all. Frustrating game mechanics make some very weird deaths. Like being killed by your own spawning turret, spawning under a Sunderer (mobile spawn truck) and getting killed by it, or getting killed because your tank couldn't push away a stack of crates. The money mechanics is basically terri-bad. You spend a large sum of "certs" only to unlock a weapon nearly identical to your default in terms of stats and looks.

Battles are somewhat interesting but not rewarding in the slightest sense of the word. Captured bases are only to be found retaken back by the enemy 3 minutes later. The entire continent you play on seems like a big deja vu, every base has the same structural features as the previous one.

All in all, if you come from the Battlefield franchise, you will be very disappointed in the game.… Expand

The cheaters are out of control. The game is pretty boring. Every battle not at The Crown ends up being the more populated faction spawn room camping the less populated faction. There is little to no metagame. There is no reason to really play this game for more than a week or two. I like to call this a FTP throwaway game. Try it, toss it, go onto the next FTP game.

its fun if you pay for better things but if you want to play a balanced F2P this is not your game its gameplay is unbalanced, graphics are ok, this game is boring and unbalanced, this game had a chance for it to be good but its not, most f2p's arnt anyway, wait till survarium or warface

Countless bugs, almost no friend/foe ID unless you mouse over for 5 seconds, so by that time, if it was a foe, you are dead. Also, you die in 3 hits unless your armor is built up. Another free to play, free to die, pay to win, pay to survive game. Don't waste your time on this one.

what's wrong with the critics?? this game is painfully dull and pointless. fps on a mmo scale? great idea except for the massive lagg which kills the whole zergfest. even being free this does not worth the bandwidth to download

...seriously just an "OK" game. Mostly a place for spam players and campers. Playing as a team or solo, you feel useless. If you're a fan of Black Ops, Modern Warfare, or the old Counter-Strike, this isn't the game for you.

This game is just amazing. But he is killed by his community. In fact, on my server 85% of Terran use hack. More than, cheat engine is available on all server, it is very stupid and destroy the game. Maybe 1 month for this game if nothing happen...

This game is dying. Steam stats show a near 50% decrease in users over the last month. One month ago it read out 19,299 peak Planetside 2 now it reads 11,299 peak Planetside 2. Its obvious as to why all the players are leaving. The game is not worth spending even $15 on. The servers are becoming increasingly smaller and some are just plain out unplayable.

PlanetSide's development team doesn't seem to understand what the game needs anymore, and the wrong people (those bridge-dwelling pieces of feces) seem to be the ones changing the balances to favour themselves.

Once upon a time (Beta) I had faith that this would be an extremely successful game with some optimization that could keep the game from looking like **** on any standard non-gaming devoted PC.

I think I started losing that faith when SOE introduced a weak store and jacked up prices. Not to mention that people started to realize that certs were taking way too long to acquire than before. It seemed like the devs' new idea of balance was a system that involved making aspects of the game much too expensive to even bother unlocking for most people. The slow xp gain rate seems to have been made to keep players hooked due to a lack of content.

I understand this is F2P, but doesn't anyone remember when Higby talked about how the gap between grinders/payers and casuals would be removed? Can anyone really say that's the case now? I don't believe so.

It's been nice participating in this game's (d)evolution.
I wish you well Sony Online Entertainment.
Perhaps I'll come back when you guys sort your shyte out, but then again, I might come back only to find empty servers and lost potential.… Expand

Spawn camping is a major problem and essentially shuts down almost any battle regardless of size. Nobody enjoys being hit by a liberator or tank round the second they leave the spawn. It greatly limits a factions ability to defend a base and makes capping significantly easier. Defending and resecuring bases is punished while attacking is significantly more rewarding. The meta game simply is not rewarding enough or important enough to even convince people to leave Inda. Low population servers. People bailing out of vehicles the second before they explode. (This is something that has just been annoying not really to big a problem)… Expand

A game should be fun, not a tedious grinding experience. In general it's an abusive environment with absolutely no immersive content. It's filled with hackers and players exploiting the unoptimized engine. There is absolutely no reason to spend any amount of money on this game and certainly is not worth the disk drive space on your PC.

Bad: Buggy, hackers, counter intuitive if you've played a lot of FPS games, over hyped, terrible hit registry, waste of time, download speeds are terrible.
Good: it's free, it's good for pointing out BF3's failings, might be passable if you social life purely exists online.

You play for 4 hours to capture or defend a base, next day its lost again. yes the battles are epic but it all seems so pointless. Air dominates, spawn camping gets frustrating. pay 2 win scheme. it was fun for a week but i'll be moving on to games with actual progress

When I first heard about Planetside2 I was beyond psyched for the release. I was a die-hard fan/junkie/addict of Planetside 1 and the thought of a new, up-to-date version of what I would have considered to be one of the most groundbreaking FPS games of my generation gave me goose bumps. I was fortunate to get into late beta and played for the final 3 weeks of beta through release. I've currently logged well over 300 hours of post release play time.

That being said. I really wanted to like this game. Every time I log into the game I don't think, "this game is so awesome". I think, "Man, I really miss Planetside 1". The truth is that the developers, Sony Online Entertainment, took what was an amazing original game and essentially threw it away. This is NOT a sequel to Planetside 1. It is a dumbed down, watered down, shallow ghost of the original. They managed to turn what was an amazing online shooter with a rich degree of depth and character into little more than a large scale COD-like fragfest with virtually no strategy or depth of play and where everyone is focused on K/D instead of teamwork and strategy. Combine this with massive in-game vehicle and infantry balance issues and the fact that that the development team has very little interaction with the player base and you have a recipe for low population of players on most servers where the term "Massive" is starting to become a bit of a stretch.

Planetside2 was clearly released to market way too soon. The game should have stayed in Beta for at least another 4 months. There are many bugs in the game and way too many balance issues at this time to retain a strong player base. At its core I think its clear that the folks in charge of this title (with such amazing potential) at SOE are the wrong people for the job and are basically steering this title into the ground.… Expand

Hackers are everywhere. So far, I've seen Teleporters, Flash Gordons, Shoots Through Walls Man, Sees Through Walls Man, Magic OSHS(carbine) Engineer/Light Assault Guy, Invincible Man, the classic aimbotter, etc. I really regret spending money on this game considering hacking isn't going away. PS2 doesn't even have any anti-chest software, they ban solely on reports and stats. And sometime it takes a week for someone to get banned. Plus they only IP ban and we all know that isn't going to stop anyone from making a just new account with a different IP.… Expand

Oh. God. The. Bugs. 2/4 times I have played this the game glitches on respawn, the whole world becomes this half transparent mess were you can no longer see buildings or cover and requires a complete computer restart to fix. When the game does run it still has major problems. I managed to get enough cert points for the longest range sniper scope in the game. Turns out its completely unusable because the world draw distance is shorter then distance the scope zooms to making the scope completely useless. Iv been in fights were I see our teammates dieing, I zoom in on my scope from the rear of the fight and see absolutely nothing. but when I move to the front of the fight suddenly an entire army appears. An army I should have easily been able to see from my elevated snipeing spot behind our lines. Iv played Alpha Builds that had less bugs then this "finished" game.… Expand

Oh god when will the bugs end? I've put up with it since release, but I'm done now. After the most recent game update the game has become unplayable for me. I highly regret the money I've spent on this game as things continue to grow worse. In large battles I'm lucky to get 4-10 fps when a month ago I was getting 30-40. I have a Phenom II 960T and a 6870. It's ridiculous.

Never played PlanetSide but heard wonderful things about it. Gave this a try while seeking something to replace Tribes Ascend. Needless to say the game did not live up to the hype. The gorgeous sprawling environments do not make up for a complete and utter lack of direction as it pertains to basic objectives within the game. Having logged a few hours I can say with reasonable certainty that I have no idea who is on what team, why they're all shooting at each other, or even if we are winning. Confusion of this level is only compounded by the terrible vehicle controls, counterintuitive interfaces at terminals, and frustrating lack of instruction regarding basic class advantages and disadvantages. I have no doubt that all of this will see its way into a future patch (should the game survive long enough) but one has to wonder why PlanetSide 2 was released at all as it is so obviously unfinished.… Expand

For me, this game is frustrating, not fun, and essentially pointless. I suppose part of the problem is the learning curve. You start out just thrown into the map somewhere, with no clear assistance in figuring out where you should go, what you should do, why you should be doing it, or how to succeed. In my experience, I just ran towards some apparent objective getting murdered over and over again. Either that, or I just ran around the humongous map with no one at all anywhere near me. The whole experience was just terrible. I pored several hours into this, but just couldn't find the motivation to stick it out to see if things would get better.… Expand

I used to think Battlefield 3 was bad, wait till you play Planetside 2, you can’t even compare the two as Battlefield 3 is miles ahead of this piece of garbage. Gameplay sucks, there is not much gameplay here it’s a big spam fest where supposedly 100s of players are working as part of a team to attack a base, there is no team work involved its everyone for themselves as a so called platoontoon leader screams down the microphone saying how he will kick those who do not follow orders and on top of that its pay to win, its a huge cert grind where all the weapons are overpriced and it takes you weeks to unlock a single weapon without spending any money on XP boosts. Graphics suck,yes they suck nothing new here plenty of other games have better graphics than this game even in 2004 doom 3, half life 2 had better graphics and lower system requirements than this. The community sucks, on the forums you see people “talking about the game” when they barely hit 20 hours in gameplay, I spent 600+ hours on this and regret it all especially now as soon as you begin climbing the leader boards every player you kill starts reporting you and telling their whole outfit to report you accusing you of cheating and making other false accusations when they barely play the game at all. I regret getting suckered into this game with the false advertising, because frankly this game is pointless to play there is no sense of achievement there is no metagame, all you do is run to capture a base which the opposing faction captures 10 minutes later, so you repeat the same thing all the time, as sony thought that grinding certs in order to unlock weapons would be a brilliant metagame. Feels like I’ve been to hell and back.Thank heaven there is Battlefield 3 it sure felt like a huge relief returning to a traditional shooter such as Battlefield 3, where I pay money for a finished product. Not this free to pay monstrosity that is attempting to sucker in the Average Joes money so that they buy a new weapon, yes last point to make, every single base, every single weapon, it all looks exactly the same. What did you expect from a pay to win lazy developer to give you? Better spend your money on a traditional retail game, even Black Ops 2 is money better spent. Never again will I spend money in a free to play cash cow.… Expand

Bad attempt to make awesome multiplayer. First this game have one of uglier graphics this year, but this is not crucial for multiplayer game anyways. But, game fail in all other aspects. Glitchy, bad spawn points ruining the action, bad shooting are only few of bad thins this game bring to the table. Only good thing is free to play because if they charge for this would be really cheating.

This game looks good; that's about the only good thing about it. There's no backstory or reason why these factions are fighting each other. There's a 30 second intro video and then you get dropped into battle. The first couple hours of me playing was me trying to look for a fight (playing at midnight) and when I did, I instantly got killed. High learning curve. Also, in a fight, you'll mostly be trying to get outside of your base because there's constant spawn camping. I REALLY REALLY tried to enjoy this game, but I couldn't. There's nothing to pull you in. This game isn't necessarily hard; it's more annoying or frustrating.… Expand

If you enjoy being canon fodder for spoiled geeks who never leave their mother's basement and spend their entire allowance purchasing upgrades to make them invincible then this game is for you! Absolutely NO BALANCE in this game! It takes for ever to upgrade your equipment because you're too busy being mascaraed every thirty seconds. No fun, extremely frustrating!

I wouldn't bother with this game, but chances are you will try it just due to all the hype.
Let me start with the main problem with planetside - It is far too graphically demanding. Even some of the top end PC's and gaming laptops struggle to make this game run smoothly and it may cause you to buy better software and still discover the game cannot run. "But wait!" I hear you cry "My PC is amazing!" Then go play a far more enjoyable Free to play FPS such as Team Fortress. There is nothing unique about planetside other than its large scale gameplay, and if MAG taught us anything it's that this simply doesn't work. Combat is frantic and guns have no attachment to the player since they all feel generally similar and scenarios often involve two players meeting and the one winning being the one who clicks first. After a while this just gets boring and repetitive.
Lastly, although it is beneficial for the creators to advertise this game as "Free" it is a micro transaction game, meaning if you really want to get anywhere with it your going to have to fork out.
To conclude, I'd just say it's shocking how some people would rather play this than decent FPS' like battlefield or Halo.… Expand

John Smedley failed with SWG sinking it into the ground. Within one year he took a game with 1,000,000 copies sold down to nearly 10,000 subscribers still playing, then lied to the public on his failures. Why anyone let him be in charge of Planetside 2 is beyond me..

Where to even begin? Well, it's buggy, laggy, poorly optimized, and completely imbalanced.

"Oh, it's got it's problems, sure," the other reviews say. "But it's all worth it for the huge glorious battles!" Those don't happen. Sure, you'll have ~100 people one one side of the battle, attacking in a giant convoy of vehicles. And they'll dominate the half a dozen brave souls who try to defend, rather than joining their attacking teammates. Who are on another continent. Because enemy numbers are lower there.

See, the whole "huge world" thing sounds good on paper, but in actuality it just encourages most people to take the path of least resistance. Battles are always lopsided, and the attackers always win because they have more people.

Now, ignoring all that, let's assume for the moment that this is actually a good game, rather than a bad game. A good game does deserve to be paid for, even if it's a free-to-play that borders on pay-to-win. However, Planetside 2 goes far beyond pay-to-win; it's more like "pay-a-substantial-amount-to-be-good-at-a-single-class-or-vehicle."

In short: complete garbage with no redeeming characteristics. I have nothing good to say about this game.… Expand

My rig can play all the F2P games with no issues, except for this game. The FPS is so bad I could not be bothered to finish the training level. Optimization for this game is typical for many PC titles very poor as usual.

Planetside 2, some mix Massive shooter with RPG (?), in my opinion idea this game is great and underdone.
On the + : Big maps, vehicles, graphic (not bad textures for that big game maps), re-spawn protect (!),
On the - : Fight and flight too much arcade style, where is RPG system (?), after 40 min. is boring

The game is only free to play if your intentions are dying to spawn campers and the constant feel of losing. The game ultimately feels like a massive grind-fest if you do not give into their high priced bonuses and items.

Hackers. Hackers everywhere. Now the new hack added to all the regular ones is to somehow mess with the collision in the game to send you flying from the spawn half way across a continent to fall and die. This game is riddled with bugs and hackers everywhere.

I would like this game. If it wasn't so much pay to win. Say, you want a gun so you play for 5 hours straight and then you get it (only if you play good) BUT if you have the money, you buy expensive credits and get the gun instantly. Game should be called Pay 2 Winside 2

If you like futuristic FPS with setting in 27th century, somewhere in the space, with unrealistic projectile weapons and unguided missiles like from WW2 then this game will suit your needs. You may even try flying a machine which seems to have an antigravity engine but is controlled like biplane. If you like hugely unbalanced challenge with one side designed to win and one to loose then feel free to try it as you really don't have to pay for extra content which gives your opponents extreme boost.

Great concept of MMO FPS and design of the game world are two reasons I give it 2.… Expand

This game had potential, but SoE's pay structure ruined it. Anyone with skill who doesn't want to spend money on the game can't enjoy the game because it's a struggle to level. While children with equally childish player names who spent their allowance on Station Cash sky rocket to level 30+ and then commence to harass anyone with unearned levels. Games with pay structures that affect direct purchase of gear and leveling just don't work and won't last.… Expand

Free to play? lol. More like free to hack. Have fun spending $50+ dollars on items that are bound to a single character to get you your competitive edge, only to have a hacker spawn kill you for 10 minutes. This game is the most overrated game I have ever had the displeasure of playing. There are no active GMs, there is no anti-cheat detection. The only method SOE uses is reports from players followed by stats tracking. Sometimes it will take days to ban a hacker. Oh, but the game is FTP so what is stopping the banned hacker from just creating a new account? Nothing.… Expand

Key points ~ It's a shooter, and a persistent world. You can play any class at any time and optimize as you see fit . It has ground vehicle/infantry/aircraft mixture. It is a strategy game, caveat being it's largely MMO shooter based .. so can tend be be fairly random as to it's nature. Sometimes this emergence is fun, sometimes it's frustrating and defeating.

This is not a pay to win game. This is not a free to play game either in a sense of fairness, there are basic weapons you will want to buy.

this is a grind game, so in the initial start for instance very few .. very very few have even optimized a single class the way they see fit. You have to grindand even a scope may take you a couple hours to work toward. Advatage unanimously goes to the game whales, this means people paying money will be better off buying farmed characters than paying for gold (I don't recommend either the game is actually fun). The most disconcerting thing in this game is the sheer rockface of farming that ust happen to achieve, it is likely to create a very selective player base .. which has nothng to do with "what" type of game they prefer .. but what a couple hoursof your freetime a night will profit an average player.

This game is a descendent of tanarus and then planetside 1 both of which came out over 10 years ago.
The strategy and fun is still there even while farming for weapon upgrades ect. But the whales will have a significant advantage maybe 20% over the new guy .

I give this game an 7- 8 (going with 8 for now under benefit of doubt) for 2 reasons mainly ~ too many indistinguishable hacks/glitches, and 2 much farming. Otherwise I would give this game a 9 for it's creative / sandboxy feel and gameplay. This is also a very difficult game, in the sense a new player is going to have a rough time trying to get their feet in~ which is fine. But because it's bot farmy and difficult I think 2 strikes will not attract new players .. but rather only game abuses.… Expand

This game is free to play as a spectator, If you want to help your team or be anything other than cannon fodder then you have to spend money. I was looking for a game to play that I wouldn't mind paying some money for a couple extras, but, being defenseless and building my char around my credit card, terrible.

Okay, for a free to play its a masterpiece, but thats not saying anything now is it. Lets see here, its a bit of a free to play, the physics are BLEH (First time I bought a tank... i moved 3 feet, then fell out the world, and a few other players did the same). The gameplay consists mainly of finding where the action is, and when you find it, the game starts to open up and you see the beautiful flour that is Plantside 2, and it is beautiful. But when the action stops, you notice what a smelly flour the game is. The UI is complicated like all F2Ps, the flight controls are dumbed down, the exact opposite of a simulator, meaning your jet (that looks like a box with jet engines on the side of them) flys tight, so tight that it makes flying boring and dull. I did say the graphics are good, but the textures are bad when you look at them closely. The world is large, true, but its filled with nothing besides a few out posts and 3 massive structures for the main spawn. While we are on the spawn, spawn camping is a bit of a problem, you can have a firing squad outside your spawn and you cant do much about it besides pushing and grinding your way past. And while we are on grinding... this game is a grinding simulator, you need to spend hours and hours just to get a scope for your **** weapon. The bolt action sniper rifle is a 2 hit kill... whats wrong with that you might ask? Simple, it takes about 3 seconds to rechamber a round, and by then your opponent will be behind cover, rendering the rifle relativly useless for the player jumping into the game. This game deserves a 6. What the game can improve on is the physics, balancing, and optimization. My 7970 can run bf3 on ultra and have an average of 60 fps. In this I get an average of 50 on high... if I put everything on low... I get 53... so it needs tweaking. Go play it since its free, there really isnt anything interesting holding you there besides waiting for the next epic battle so you can watch your frames plumit… Expand

Instructions: none. Tutorial: none. Upgrades after 4 hours of gameplay unnoticeable. Constant prompting to buy cert points via cash shop: annoying. Hacks: prominent. Maps poorly designed: windows everywhere in buildings. Support classes: easy targets. Spawn in middle of rocket blast: instantly dead. So many glaring issues: will not pay to play.

At first glance, Planetside 2 looks like what FPS fans would describe as a perfect FPS. Heaps of guns, huge maps, people running everywhere, vehicles and just generally massive scale warfare. Sadly, it is far from it, it could have been, but isn't. Planetside 2 is a game plagued with bugs that haven't been fixed, pay to win business model, especially when it comes to vehicles, optimization easily the worst I have ever seen (20-30 fps on my high end machine with every setting on dead low), disgusting textures (1997ish textures on low, impossible to play it higher), hackers everywhere with no solid attempt to overcome them (even though it is impossible to get rid of them in a F2P shooter so why bother i guess), awfully confusing UI, so bad that it actually causes performance issues, horrifically slow progression (after playing 70 hours I have unlocked 1 weapon which is the cheapest ones). Balance is pretty bad, players will never be able to be a pilot without spending money to unlock the must have items for the aircraft, and tanks can be improved as the default machine gun that most of the vehicles have are god awful. The price of the items are ridiculous, as usual with all free to play games, $15 subscriptions basically get you nothing and guns are like $7-10 dollars. Seriously, has any company actually tried selling their products at an acceptable price? Perhaps they would be more successful if they catered to people who aren't rich or have no sense of value with currency.

Planetside 2 could have easily been that amazing MMO-FPS game that fans are really wanting, but with all these horrible issues that still haven't been fixed, or even improved upon after I returned to playing Planetside 2, I am quite skeptical that this game will ever be worth your time.… Expand

If you like being frustrated and annoyed, play this game. If your sadomasochistic, spend money on this game. What I find most frustrating is the huge potential of this game, SOE just doesn't have what it takes to make this game into what it could have been, it's a shame really. I have been playing and waiting for it to deliver since the game first came out, but I have given up on PS2 and SOE.

Uninspired levels, horrid sound, boring bland weapons, lag lag lag lag and altogether wasted untapped potential that is just a few of the things that planetside 2 suffers from. Don't waste you're time with this atrocity until the developers pull up their pants, sew their heads back on, lace up their work boots and realise that just because you make it free it doesn't mean that you can spoon feed people crap and that you actually still have to make an effort...… Expand

What a joke at the dumb reviewers saying this game is way better than any battlefield or any other fps game out there.. and giving this game a 10 out of 10. If you think a broken, bland, pointless, game like planetside 2 is better than any other mutliplayer shooter out there then you have either never played 1 single damn game besides this, are 10 years old, or you have the worst taste in gaming that I have ever seen. About the game, all i can really say is, devs dont have the common sense to help out newbies so people get turned away from the game so less player base, and HOW can anyone say this is a better game than battlefield when all you do in this game is capture 1 base at a time with unbalanced classes and vehicles and you do nothing else.... at least in battlefield you can play many different game types, play with friends, better control of vehicles, more rewarding system, better scaling, just about everything is better in Battlefield besides the map is bigger in PS2.... BOOHOO… Expand

Planetside 2 is one of those games that drops you in the battlefield without any experience or knowledge over what to do and how to do it. You're often wondering where the action is going on, and when it's there you're powerless. I had to give it a three because, for a free to play game, it looks stunning, but it's a dead hamster hidden in a beautiful box.

Sadly my review will mostly echo the main criticisms I've seen on here of the game. The learning curve is relatively steep, and though you won't generally get endlessly flamed by your teammates (one individual's failure, on average, can be a drop in the bucket given the sheer scale of combat in the game), unless you are EXTREMELY dedicated and or very very good, don't expect to be upgrading your character's certs with any sort of regularity without dropping some cash on the game. I had some extra Station Cash from my EQ2 F2p days and dropped them on some starting guns, but even that small initially boost was not enough to alleviate the utter curbstompering I experienced at the hands of the most modestly geared opponents. Add to that the insanely high system reqs (to be expected when there's a couple hundred people in one warzone), and you have a very frustrating gaming experience with very, very little payout in terms of seeing your "character" progress.… Expand

This is nothing more than a laggy spawn camp. Really not worth the time to bother downloading it. Go play just about any other shooter for a better experience.

I played this game for four hours and this game is insanely overrated. Have fun figuring out what to do given the fact that if your new the servers population doesnt give a sh*t about you. I couldnt even find enemys in my four hour game time do to the fact i kept getting team killed by players who just thought it was hilarious to spawn kill all of thier team mates coming out of the teleporters. There is little to no weapon balance as begginer players will get destroyed ans stand no chance until the rank up and your crazy if you want me to play for 12+ hours to just be on even ground. So overall if your not a fan already, ignore this garbage.… Expand

A game with potential ruined by an idiotic company boasting illegal billing departments and moronic producers. In an effort to make as much money as possible, in-game items require insane amounts of grinding, especially for MAX units (Robots) which have to buy not one, but TWO of each weapon if they want to dual-wield them or go to the easy alternative and purchase "Station Cash" which you buy both weapons, attachments and othet stuff with, sometimes even before anyone else can get them effectively making this a solid "Pay 2 Win" title along with probably being one of my top 5 games with no/crude learning curves, dropping people into the action, instantly, without any chance of even changing settings. Being a veteran, I caught on quickly but I still had a rather funny introduction where I was drop-podded centimeters from an enemy spawnpoint and bum-rushed as my game was lagging like crazy both FPS and latency while having a mouse sensitivity of 5 pixels turn around. After that, the game proved to be quite fun given the right circumstances with substantial amounts of tweaking but the longer I played, the more bullsh!t started to happen ranging from being repeatedly teamkilled in spawn to being shot by things I can't see far away due to rendering distance (No visible projectiles either) and some of the balance-decisions being made is just laughable at times, be it vehicles being able to soak up insane amounts of damage (Airplanes can soak up tons of Anti-Air damage and avoid all of them by doing a simple nose-dive, blow flares against missile-seeking rockets every 15 seconds and generally be very fast while all weapons against them have extremely limited range or Sunderes, being able to take ALL the damage an heavy assault soldier can possibly dish out with maximum ammo capacity for rockets, even from the rear) to most of the TR weapons shooting at such speeds so they avoid recoil add&substract the actual amount of bullets being fired for increased DPS, creating a faction-imbalance where one faction may have as much as 30% more populance and have literally no consequences whatsoever. Being able to continue this seeming rant in retrospect, it is simply the status of the current product and I urge anyone interested in this game to go in without expectations and avoid any kind of payments or micro-transactions like the plague since SoE will either deny you your refund rights & human rights or overbill your card without permission. You have been warned.… Expand

Pointlessly overcomplicated Noob killing fest. Let's start, that my experience on online shooters ranges from the early-early Desert Combat games, all the way to BF3. I'm not really into the MMORPG, but for this review, doesn't need any.
So, let's start with the positives. I like the idea. I like the ambitious effort and pushing the envelope to make online shooters progress to new, uncharted territories. I like the idea of giant battlefields and mixture of doing different things at once. I also like the seems to be endless upgrades and making the players progress somewhere, let that be new weapons, outfits, vehicles and higher ranks. All these are all present but a diamond in a rough form in Planetside 2. Here comes my rant. I can understand the fact, that after a while everyone gets a grip of what is going on and how to read the map and figure out how to upgrade etc. But I'm afraid, it may be too late by then, since the immediate impression will turn off many, before they would start become interesting. Lacking any tutorials, or perhaps off-line maps with bots would help a lot. Almost all games we play including shooters- has some sort of an introduction into the mechanics and/or a walk through in real-time (not youtube videos!) In other words The game is making every newbie UNWELCOME. 1. Sign up; choose your passwords; pick a class; pick a side
2. Get dropped into the battlezone and get shot dead.
3. Try different things; run around the map; be confused about many things, get shot dead within a few minutes. 4. Rinse and repeat step 2 and 3 for a while. ...
Problems right off from the first impression: I. The mini map is utterly confusing and pointlessly over complicated to a point, where it isn't even functioning as a map. Congested and displaying all sorts of stuff not really useful, or just simply too much. I'm not sure if it can be customized or not, I haven't found the option yet, which I would assume most newbie neither. II. The whole design of the large deployment map. I'm trying to figure out, if there are any differences between the middle; the corners and between, regarding what buildings/terrain/objectives variations there are, but after 9-10 hours of gameplay, it all looks like a photoshop pattern of basically repeating features and buildings. Actually, giving in a thought, they could have used 1/4 of the size of the maps, since it doesn't really matter when you get dropped into the fight zone, you know exactly what buildings you gonna find and you just gonna follow to find the power generators and the capture points. There isn't a memorable location, since you won't be able to memorize much, but you will know exactly what is what. III. Upgrades. There seems to be unlimited number of upgrades, but they all seem to be unreachable for those, who doesn't want to spend a bucket load of money. I leave that right there.
IV. Balance. Many game in similar category gives the players the chance to familiarize themselves with the game, so they usually give the option of servers, based on experience level. We could have novice, intermediate and pro servers, just for this purpose. They could have made the game, that a newbie could enjoy a pro-server, but count on being the cannon fodder, but perhaps reward his bravery by making him gain exp. points faster, than on a noob server. Same deal in reverse. Pro player joining with high hopes of mass murdering the noobs, would end up not gaining much, perhaps revoke their super-duper maxed out equipment and make them fight with the basic given weapon and outfit. Or perhaps "ship" the pro players to a new planet or continent, where they face off similar high-level pro players. But no. Instead pro players seem to be mass-r.ping the newbies to gain more exp. points. Basically the game rewards those, who rather play like bullies, while leaving the newcomer in the dust. It may sound fun, if you got the equipment, but eventually it will destroy the game on the long run. Why? Because new people won't be joining, and old pro-players may just move on to whatever newer game come out in the near future. Eventually the servers will be abandoned to a point, where you gonna have these giant maps and only 10-20 people playing instead of 100. V. No real rewards. Weapons, outfits, masks, optics, extra ammo all sounds great, but what's the point? You gonna be doing the same thing with them over and over! What happened to rewards given to teams? Or what about giving rewards for platoons and factions, who conquered half of the map? What's good about having 3/4 of the map conquered compared to only half or 1/4 of it? Nothing. There should be team/platoon/squad based experiences given. How about a tactical nuke, or ability to call in airstrikes, indirect/direct artillery or orbital strike? Just some ideas. As of right now, this game is still just a newbie-hostile beta test, with missing objectives and limited real feel of progress.… Expand

For new players this game is the worst. There is no learning area, you are thrown into battle without a clue and put up against the games seasoned p2w players and just killed at will. The game offers no path to learn the game. I can not stress how this is the worst game to start as a new player. The vendor greed is totally shown and knows no bounds. The frustration can not be described. It's enough that I don't even think I try anything Sony puts out again nor anything else with the Sony name on it. I can't get over the greed of this vendor to start asking for money before you can play or even see how to play. The frustration is beyond words. That aside, the game also froze twice adding even more to the frustration.… Expand

When I first started playing this game I actually enjoyed it. However, I started quite late and after a while I started to find this one of the most frustrating and unfair first person shooters I have ever played. New players are thrown into a battle as a level 1 and are mostly against lever 20s, not to mention the countless level 40s and even level 70s. They have much better weapons than you and even if you get the first shot you can almost bet your life that if they start shooting back its over. They also have better armour. The snipers in this game are ridiculous, yielding very powerful semi-automatics at a higher level. Eventually I found myself aiming to get one kill for every spawn in a battle because it was inevitable that either I will get shot to pieces by an experienced player or picked off instantly by a sniper.

Even if you're good at first person shooters don't expect that you will do just as well in this game. I guarantee that when you experience your first battle you'll be instantly killed with a few shots from a more experienced player with a much better gun than you. I stopped playing after I realised I was only re-spawning to be killed again. This game is unfair, unrewarding, frustrating and simply not fun. As other people have said, it's just a complete mess.… Expand

Based off my personal experience with this product it wouldn't be too far fetched to say Planetside 2 is used to torture political dissidents in Iranian prisons.

The TTK or "time to kill" is absurdly low; 0.49 for most guns. That's crazy for a laggy game like Planetside 2. If you don't discover the person first then you'll be dead. There isn't any time to react. This is what brings Planetside 2 down. Not to mention the fact that using the Auto Join Squad feature puts you in squads that clans use who then proceed to kick you from said squad. Crappy UI mechanics also bring Planetside 2 down.… Expand

Piece of go play Quake Live. Still mostly waiting around to capture ****ty barrier and "restricted area" Gameplay is dull and repetitive.

I would like Planetside 2 alot but theres one problem the damn P2W (Pay 2 win) style of gameplay.

Many of you might say it's not a P2W game but in reality it is P2W game because they made collecting in-game money really slow and weapons costs way too lot that you can buy by in-game money.
Also i found that theres some huge balance problems that in some faction have lots of players and other don't on server where you are playing.

About the P2W thing ithat those don't by weapons and items for real money it takes very long to get them unlike people that buys weapons and items for real money they can get really good stuff on low lever that helps alot.
For example, if there 2 players on 1 VS 1 and both low level players on same class, the other guy have the basic weapons and items that you can get from start of the game and other guy buys weapons and items for real money from start, the guy that buys weapons and items for real money owns the guy that don't buy weapons and items for real money unlike the other guy with starting weapons and items don't have any chance to kill that guy.
So it force you buy weapons and items for real money to win 1 VS 1 fights other then that you need always have 1-3 teammates with you even fights turn out be 2-4 vs 1.

But there was something good about this game and that was 2000 players each server, really big maps, really good looking graphics for F2P game, Controlls are almost perfect.

Also not forget that sometimes the server balance is so bad you end up fighting like 20 enemys at same time own base where is only 2-5 own team mates and sometimes you and up fighting all 20 enemys alone.

After i found Planetside 2 be alot pay 2 win style of game then i just stoped playing it and not waste of my time for collecting in-game money that you can collets very long time for single weapon.… Expand

Let me start out by telling what Planetside 2 gets right. The maps are large and made to feel like what a war zone should be like, and the sheer fact that the game is actually an constant everlasting MMO-FPS like promised is something mind-boggling. That alone deserves praise from people all around, whether you like the game or not.

But about right there is where the good times stop, very abruptly. You spawn in for the first anywhere: you don't get to choose. You could end up lucky and spawn at a deserted base, or you'll get completely screwed over and spawn in the middle of hell with enemy fire hitting you from all directions. Either way though, you're still practically a sitting duck because you'll immediately have to go through the controls to learn how to PLAY the game. I don't care who you are, a tutorial is ALWAYS a good idea for those that are new to the series and have no clue what the hell they're doing.

Another major problem is that it is as repetitive as every single modern shooter with very little to no change. The only change you may see is that you've been blown up by five tanks instead of five rocket launchers. Go to this base, shoot this guy, die because he's played more, go to that base, shoot that guy, die again, get in a "plane," crash because you weren't given a tutorial on how to fly, and then wait for another spawn, and so on, and so on until you get bored or until your computer mercifully crashes to save your sanity.

The third problem of the game is it's major lack of story. Yes, there are three factions, yes it's on another planet, but which planet the game's on nobody knows. Why the three factions are warring is a question only people majorly invested in learning the cannon know. Or who leads any of the factions is left to speculation as far as I'm aware. The game has less story than a game that doesn't look like it needs one (i.e. TF2).

But the major, overall problem with almost every SOE Free2play MMO is their incessant love for in-game currency or real-money in-game purchases for better weapons. In other words, the game is a pay-to-win system where the rich get to use fancy weapons and hi-tech gear that can kill any player just by looking, while the new player just sits back and repeatedly slams his head into a wall because it's more entertaining.

Overall, the game is a grand promise of grandeur and amazement marred by horrible design choices, a pay-to-win system, multiple glitches, hackers, and spawn campers, and NO story at all. As far as a F2P game goes, I would recommend anything from Team Fortress 2 to Warframe. Yet, as it is a F2P game, you won't lose any money off of playing, so... test it...? Maybe you'll like it, but I sure as hell wouldn't even begin to call this game good, let alone call it an MMO of the year.… Expand