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

Planet Side 2 is all about size. Just 1 of the 3 continents is larger than all the MW3 maps put together. The small skirmishes in this game tend to be 20 on 20, medium ones can easily be 50 plus. But where this game really shines is the big battles. Hundreds of people split up across 3 armies all fighting for control of the same zones with dozens of tanks and aircraft supporting them. If you are a lone wolf you will probably become easily bored, but if you enjoy team/squad based tactics there is nothing on the market that compares with PS2.

The big battles when you get lots of particle effects flying around can be a bit of a resource hog. I have heard of people using AMD builds having more issues but can not testify to that as I run AMD and Nvidia. You also want a broadband network connection, being a shooter latency is very important. The good news if you are unsure about what your system can run the game is F2P so there is no reason not to try it.

The one part we need to keep an eye on is the F2P element. While it is nice that anyone can try it time will tell if it becomes pay to win. So far it does not seem to do that. Mostly you buy XP boosts or cosmetic items. You can spend money on purchasing weapons also, so far there are not that many weapons to purchase and none of those that I have tried have been ridiculously overpowered. Most have trade offs like higher rate of fire but greater bullet spread. In the end they so far seem to balance themselves out.

In the end it is a great change of pace from most all modern shooters on the market. As someone who enjoys being another soldier instead of a 1 man army I find the team based game play to be amazing. If you have the machine to do it the graphics look amazing good at higher settings. The servers also seem to be well made, even in the largest of battles I do not experience any real lag. You will occasionally see the random guy blinking across the battlefield but that is them lagging not the server. I would give it 8.5 if I could but will go with an 8. It has room to improve but so far so good.… 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

Now, I think we can all agree that most of today's FPS could use a little more time in the oven, baking out all those little glitches and what not, and the same could be said here, but this here is still pretty damn tasty. I have watched PlanetSide 2 grow from the early stages of beta into its release and if there is one thing I am very happy about, is the community side support. The game took huge strides with improvement when it game to game play during some patches. Of course like most betas, the bugs ensued with new patches, but as the last ones came out, most of them were gone. This game really does deliver when it comes to large scale battles and every battle has the decision between brute force or using tactics. Teamwork and a good gun at your side are always a must. Ground or Air Vehicles. Lasers or bullets. Your choice really stands true here.
Keep in mind this is also an MMOFPS so the action is not always a constant, and part of the problem solving in the game is getting from base to base. Although, they did a fantastic job of fixing the problem of logging in and not being able to get to a battle. Now you can spawn on your squad leader at beginning and that makes everyone happy. This really is going to be a great game for a very very long time, especially if the community support is as good as it has been.… Expand

Best FPS i've played in a long time. Do you like large open maps? Ok, how about an entire planet?? So much better than Battlefield games, and its FREE. Totally worth at least trying it out.

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.

If i was one of the lovely people that gave this game a negative review, I COULD have said something about how the game doesn't run at top speed on my non-gaming computer. I COULD have poked at the fact that it's not the most noob friendly at times. But if I did that, i would be forgetting the part where the game has a) an extremely large map for a shooter b) some sense of teamwork that no other multiplayer shooter has and c) pvp battles in a scale that has never before been seen in any game. Really, a few weeks ago i got in a tank battle that had at least 1000 people duking it out across an entire valley. If 'modern shooter' means '20 person death match' to you, then you can keep your modern shooter. I'll take this instead.… Expand

On the face of Planetside 2 is total brilliance, just the pure concept of the game and sheer scale is amazing. Although in saying this I feel there are too many positive reviews for this game because of people being "wowed" by how dramatically different the game is. The most major downside to this game is not so much that is has a hard learning curve it's the fact the the development team spent so much time in beta asking the community for input, much of this has been seen and is in the game however the most critical part of a game is getting players actually in to the game and actually caring about the faction they're fighting for. There is nothing, well, there's a 2 min into sequence that tells you nothing other that "Alright soldier we need to beat the enemy" and hot drops you onto a random base that has players in it. There is no tutorial on how to play the game, no new players understand what is going on and I'm finding it hard to keep my friends interested because they feel there is no substance to the game. Don't get me wrong, it's a brilliant platform for a game however there is no story that is given to you, no overview of the faction, hell, not even an explanation of why the hell these people are even fighting, it's a piss poor effort and doesn't deserve all the high praise it's been getting. There is a lot they need to fix, this should NOT have been release yet, it's not ready. They only "just" got the 3rd continent out a few weeks prior to release and has had little testing. There is a myriad of bugs that are inexcusable of a game expecting people the throw money at it for it's sheer awesomeness.... There is no polish to this game. A game with no story? That is inexcusable for any game.

On a side note the gun play is frankly crap, you feel disconnected from your weapon because the recoil isn't smooth, it just bounces around unnaturally. Finally, I need to mention this game just keeps failing in the optimization department, if you're an AMD user you can practically give up on having good graphics or a decent FPS, you'll be lucky to get 30FPS in actual "Advertised" fights (more than 40 people in an area) not to mention you won't be able to get the nice shiny graphics provided by PhysX because it will fry your processor trying to use this. Overall..

8/10 For the dev's effort, great so far
5/10 Graphical performance
7/10 Gameplay 0/10 Story/Factions/Lore/Background
2/10 Introduction and training
10/10 for atmosphere (provided you're not getting horrible FPS)

Basically SOE need to sort their game out, sure they have a workable "fun" game but that's expected of a BETA and NOT a fully released game. It feels rushed and at least some effort into a story would have been a massive help to the game. But after a while this game gets very, very bland.

I have some faith in SOE, I've supported them this whole beta and I expect great things from them over them over the next year and hey, maybe this time next year they'll have a game worthy of being called "complete".

I suggest people pick this game up, give it a try and see if you enjoy the concept, even if it's a bit shoddy now it should be awesome down the track .… Expand

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.… Expand

Thoroughly fun and well executed game. You are a soldier allied to one of three factions partaking in massive battles across three large continents. There are various air and land vehicles you can drive, as well as several different classes of infantry. The combat is pretty solidly implemented with only minor changes necessary to certain aspects (such as the Infiltrator infantry class). The game looks good and I have had no performance problems on a high end i7 dekstop PC; which I am honestly very impressed with as MMOs traditionally have huge problems with lag at launch.

The bad parts of this game that I feel worth mentioning are the actual cost if you want all the bells and whistles, minor class problems (as previously mentioned), the continent system and vehicle zergs. Regarding the cost, if you want to buy everything it will cost you a large chunk of money. A lot of items are merely cosmetic, however, I wouldn't go so far as to say they all are (as SOE has claimed in the past). The continent system often leads to each faction dominating a continent each because people have swapped to the winning location. This means you don't get epic battles as often as you should, a lot of the time you are either being steamrolled or steamrolling. During peak times vehicles can become a little too numerous, forming massive groups that blow everything to shreds.… Expand

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

I played the original Planetside and tested this one since the tech test. This game is definitely the sequel of the original MMOFPS. Planetside 2 is MASSIVE and unique with thousands of players across three factions playing simultaneously on the same server. The Sony developers took on a behemoth of a job to recreate the feelings of warfare on monumental scale all around you, that familiar feeling from Planetside where at any minute you could be walking, driving, or flying into a three-way faction showdown. The gun play has been brought up to date and feels responsive and tight as a modern first person shooter should they also have new realistic vehicle physics. The game is built around customization and has so many options your head will spin; you can upgrade your starting weapons, purchase new side-grades from the Depot, and even customize your unique solider or vehicle with different armor and camouflage. Everything in game is purchasable with certifications that you unlock during game play which is very rare for 'Free-to-play' games; you can play the whole game and never spend a penny if you wish. The only thing that you must spend money on is personal customization skins for your solider, vehicles, and weapons; which is not needed for advancement. The developers motto is this game will NEVER be 'Pay-to-win' and they have kept their word. The game play mechanics aren't brand new but they are very coherent and are built from the ground up to support team play. The continents are divided by hexagonal bases that can be captured by any of the three factions. Controlling land is very important because different bases give resources that the factions use to purchase vehicles, grenades, personal med-packs, and other personal items needed for war. Planetside 2 also has a brand new meta game that allows a unified faction to dominate a continent and lock-out the other two factions which gives the winning faction unique passive bonuses for their war machine. There is a lot more that this game has in store for it's players and all this is just the beginning! Thank you for reading my review of the game and I hope to see you on the battlefield!… 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

No other game quite like it, 2000 players on a seamless continent makes for some amazing massive battles which can sometimes last for hours. On top of that the game is free, of course there is a cash shop, but all weapons can be earned through gameplay and are made to be 'sidegrades' rather than just power increases.

It can take a while to get a handle of it, there's a lot to take in and finding out where you need to go on such massive continents can sometimes be difficult for new players. It all pays off though, well worth a download.… 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

Been playing this game since the early beta. It has come a long way since then. Optimization is still a must but my god is this game fun. Solid gun mechanics (nearly perfect ttk), great environments, fun vehicles, and excellent team play. Nothing seems severely imbalanced. The outfit (clan) functionality is excellent and the inbuilt voip makes coordination very easy. First game I've seen that people are actually working together efficiently. Once you witness a tank column of 20 rolling through a ravine while you are perched on top looking across the battlefield cloaked as an infiltrator you will realize that no other fps really compares. Landmark achievement. I'm worried that it's high learning curve might scare some people off so please give it a chance and support the game. We need more epic games like this.… Expand

Planetside 2 is a game that showed great promise. 2000 player servers in a FPS game seems too good to be true, and this game appears to have done just that. However, once past the first impression, you cant really ignore the game's problems. Unbearable fps (15 fps on a gaming rig, really?) means you will be looking at a slideshow most of the time. Terrible balance, 50 vs 5 players is common here. The spawn rooms seem just thrown on the map, and many times only one exist which means it will be well camped. They also seem to be designed to be easily camped. Sometimes the spawn place will be so far from any place of tactical value, that defending a base is virtually impossible. Even something as simple as the colours can work against you here. The game's bluish buildings means the blue and violet teams are well camouflaged compared with the red team, which in addition has a lot of red minimap icons obscuring the (wait for it) red enemy indicators. But ultimately it is the lack of reward that ruins this game for me. When waiting 10 minutes to capture a region with seemingly no enemy players whatsoever , I can't help to feel bored and useless, because , after all, I am. The game does not reward teamplay, it is not balanced when it comes to vehicles, it is not balanced map-wise,It runs worse then the latest games with much, much worse graphics, it is full of bugs, and it takes a very, very long time to do anything useful, or fun, or, most of the time, neither. As one PS2 developer put it, when talking about the game's poor framerate: "If you hear someone saying it's easy, have them show you their game with hundreds of people and dozens of vehicles within a single 100 meter firefight. I'd happily accept their advice. *grin* ".… 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

With PS2, the future of fps looks bright. It's very addicting and shows what evolving technology can do for this genre. It's basically a BF3 on crack. Although the fps mechanics are not as smooth as BF3, they are still very solid and what this game makes up for it is the epic scale and excellent team play. This game has more Battlefield moments than all Battlefield titles combined.

Some warnings though. It's an MMO which means a lot of stuff is not in the game yet. Most notoriously a mission system that should help new players get some direction and additional content that allows for a more strategic meta game. These will all be added though and should not stop you from having a blast already. Just make sure you join an outfit or team up with others to get the best out of this game.… Expand

This game is a FPS on massive scale. The point is to play together cohesively as vehicle, infantry, and air support, and compete against 2 other factions to hold your own, with hundreds of other online players on the same map. On a smaller scale, you can form squads with friends or randomly, and work together to take objectives. If that's not your style, you can go lone wolf as well, but the game rewards group play more, simply because you'll die less in a tight group. I've played since beta, there's a few kinks but those are just slight balancing issues. Overall, a solid multiplayer FPS.… Expand

A truely awesome, epic game. Everythign is well done. And these is just so much to do. You will not see huge FPS battles with tanks and planes Anywhere else. Love it!

Great game. Massive battles with unlimited potential. The dev team listens to the community and really cares about their game. Look forward to a game that will evolve instead of being replaced by a new game 1 year after its release.

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

Planetside 2 is a very good game. the graphics are phenomenal, the controls feel tight and the sheer scale of the game is just astonishing. it's like playing 30 battlefield 3 matches at once in an area part of a gigantic continent in the world of Auraxis. The hit detection is also remarkable and the gunplay is very tight which would make any FPS fan squeal with joy. But since the game requires a lot of teamwork, i felt that finding friends could've been more simpler. Also, the game feels a bit unfinished, for example, the "Basic training" tutorial videos should've been part of the game instead of being only on their youtube channel which is inconvenient because the game is very complex and it makes you think that the developers were just lazy and didn't think about the newcomers for Planetside 2. But overall, Planetside 2 is an uncut diamond, it's not perfect and it feels a bit unfinished but if the developers shape it and polish it, then everyone will see the real beauty of Planetside 2.… Expand

I hate it when I see people try to compare games like this to black ops or halo. We live in an age where people want to be great at a game from the start, instead of investing time into a game that requires some skill. I wonder what these people would have rated such classic games such as Team Fortress Classic, which had such a high skill curve that beginners would be demolished for a couple of weeks before learning some of the more difficult ways of moving around. When I first started playing I was so happy that the game lacked the super accurate Iron Sights of COD, that the scale of the game was massive, and that each faction was unique. Sure, there isn't a great tutorial, and at first the game is can be confusing and frustrating. After an hour or two of playing, you will quickly figure out where you should be, and get the gist of the classes. Pay to win exists to an extent in this game, but skill really will triumph in most cases. With any game of this scale, you can only expect it to improve with time, and SEO has stated mentioned some plans for the future. As it stands now, the game is a solid 8 and it looks to improve. Don't listen to the naysayers, the game offers a lot of good reasons to play, and as people get it better, it will only continue to offer a great MMOFPS experience.… Expand

COMPACT REVIEW FOR TLDR: Planetside 2 will not run on 'standard' systems easily. Planetside 2 is everything that it said it is (FPS,MMO,RPG,Free Roam,Very Customizable,Huge Battles). It is free so try it, and don't downgrade it because your system is not up to date. It is made to play with groups of buddies, but fun either way. The Graphics are awesome. The game is not played for story. It is 100% pvp. There are tanks, apcs, atv, and futuristic aircraft you can fly + more. SOE is not amazing, but these devs are funny and put time into what they do. I have only given 3 or so games a 9/10 in my life, this game is one of them.… Expand

I can give everyone the straight dope here in a few in a brief summary. I played continuously for a couple weeks or so and got up to about lvl 20 so I know the game mechanics well. I was absolutely blown away with P2 initially. It was almost everything I ever wanted in an FPS and seemed to fulfill all the promise of PC gaming. It ran fine(mostly), looked great and had all the large scale conflict and tactics a hardcore ,high-skill ceiling, pc game should. I will tell you what killed it. I knew these two things would eventually be a problem from the outset and they were. Number one: The conflict is meaningless as there is NOTHING at stake for gaining/losing your territory. Sure the fight is fun but for how long when there's absolutely no payoff. A war of this scale without any reward in the offing makes no sense and kills any long term enjoyment. Problem 2: P2 caters to the newer gen Ritalin children who can't comprehend the value of earning a kill in-game and so anybody can get the drop on you at anytime and 1 automatic burst later your dead. You'll spend most of your time in this game dying and trying to get back into the fight. The whole point of the game feels like it revolves around dying. It's absolutely horrendous and ridiculous. By having two hit-points you eliminate 75% of any skill or tactics the conflicts here have. If you had time in a firefight to utilize terrain and tactics the conflicts would be fierce and meaningful as they are in other games that allow for some damage. Instead you just zerg around the map dying and spawning until you outzerg the zergers. Even the heavy's vaporize under minimal fire. I just don't get it. Twice the hitpoints, and it soon becomes apparent who is the more skillful opponent and who deserves to control the battlefield. Why devs don't get this is beyond me and I don't feel like returning to this game even though they'll probably address my first issue. This fantastic game is utterly ruined because you can't sustain any damage. Just like all the other mainstream shooters Ritalin kids thrive on. I don't know who to blame so I jokingly pick on the Ritalin kids. Ridiculous, I'm done.… 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

NEW PLAYERS: There ARE tutorials on the game's website. They are terrifically helpful. Anyway, this game is certainly not for casual gamers. It is intense, complicated, and most importantly, requires strong teamwork skills. Also, a mic is practically a must. The graphics, while colorful, are very low res in the environment, though player models look decent., and the lighting is beautiful at times. The controls are playable, though players seem to have a slower movement speed than in most FPSes out there. This is compensated by vehicular movement and combat, which can take place at blistering speeds, especially air combat. The most stand-out feature of this game is that it is first and foremost a strategy game played at the FPS level. While you can certainly run around aimlessly shooting bad guys, that behavior is very unlikely to aid in victory. I have been in 48-player platoons as the platoon leader, ordering squads around and reading the map while trying to determine the most tactically advantageous strategy for my platoon to take to secure its objective, and had a blast. Most people follow orders well; it is not like Call-of-Duty, where no one works together and mics stay silent. It is closer to Battlefield, but with way more consistency and no time limits or spawn limits - in other words, supremely tactical. It is not about how many kills you get, it's about whether or not you can successfully attack or defend a position against enemy forces. ******* For those concerned with the micro-transaction method: Of course people who put money into the game are going to have small advantages. The game is free to players, but it certainly was not to the developers. Games don't come out of thin air, and they have to make their money somewhere. I have no problem ponying up some dough to say thank you to the game studio, and neither should anyone else. Show some gratitude with your wallet. *******… 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

In a genre that doesn't see an awful lot of games (good ones at that) Planetside 2 sure is a fresh breath of air for me. The choice to go Free 2 Play certainly doesn't hurt the playercount on the large continental maps that SOE have coughed up.

Visually the game has the potential to be great - On par with many modern day shooter if applied a few tweaks to unlock the "Ultra Settings".


The gameplay (the most important aspect of course) is great. Once you join an Outfit (clan) in the game and start playing in groups, you'll really see where PS2 shines. Planning coordinated strikes using a large selection of vehicles and capture (back) bases that are critical to your advance on the enemy.

There is still plenty of room for improvement - continents that aren't "square" shaped being one of my bigger gripes (and the complete lack of water on the playable battlefield), bugs in the marketplace module of the game and various launch day bugs that will hopefully be squashed soon enough.

Final Verdict: 9

Because the game is rather unique in its presentation, it has a dedicated dev team backing it and it shows great potential if nurtured - this may well become the single largest MMOFPS on the market in its lifespan.… Expand

Planetside 2 is a very successful fusion of the FPS shooter with MMO genres. Including very solid first person shooter game play, with customization through unlockable weapons and perks comparable to talents and equipment from your standard mmo. Its a "Free to Play game" and all the weapon choices can be unlocked with time or money. The only things you cant unlock with "cert points" (the game's version of currency used to unlock perks and weapons) are cosmetic items and experience boosts. So i definitely recommend everyone give it a try because nothing can compare with fighting with hundreds of other players to take over a small outpost being defended by hundreds of other players… Expand

Epic mmofps . Thousands of players all on the same map.
The first planetside was revolutionary the 2nd is much the same. It's in my all time if not the best game I have ever played. I can't recommend this enough! First time player has a bit of a learning curve but get in a good squad and or platoon and the fun really starts!

One of the best FPS', if not games of the year. Want tactical action? Check. Large scale battles? Check! Vehicle and infantry warfare? It's all here. Free to play? That's just the icing on the cake.

Want some advice, get into a good squad and outfit as soon as possible. Even a small tactical squad of 5-6 will increase your enjoyment tenfold.

I have been waiting for this game ever since I first saw "Planetside Next" being mentioned somewhere several years ago. Planetside being my first ever MMO (of any genre) just stuck to me. When it went downhill (Duo-Core CPUs causing players to exploit and "cheat" with movement speed etcetera) I quit playing and hoped they were going to fix it all. Eventually I gave up hopes on it and when I noticed the PS website being ruined some years later I hoped that they would some day make a Planetside 2. FINALLY!

Planetside 2 is a great successor to the original Planetside. While I do feel that the way bases are handled now are somewhat more harsh and lengthy I am also happy that they decided to get rid of the base resource system. The battles are bigger than ever as well and bases also yield unique bonuses to your faction if you have them under control, making them worth fighting for.

Graphics are awesome. If anyone tells you that they're outdated, from a previous era or whatever, ignore them and tell them to buy a pair of glasses.
The weather system is a great addition to the game as well as the day/night cycle although the latter can be somewhat frustrating at the time. I do like the combat at night as it gives you the opportunity to try stealth tactics with your squad, platoon and/or outfit.

Combat is great. Think Battlefield but instead of 64vs64 it's 2000vs2000vs2000 PER CONTINENT. You won't ever have a situation where every player of every faction is in one spot because of the extremely large continents and the well spreaded base locations. Unlike the old Planetside base capturing mechanics you now have multiple bases that you can assault. This can lead to interesting results since the base you're rolling out from might get flanked from the south by the New Conglomerate while your intentions are to move east to battle the Vanu Sovereignty and capture their base there.

Years of waiting patiently has paid off. I already had several epic battles. One of them lasting for over 3 hours at a single base, which we eventually lost but regained after 3 hours of fighting making a total of 6 hours of awesome combat!

Certification Points are given at a steady rate per hour (even when you're offline) as well as for every 500 experience you earn and are used to upgrade your weapons, add attachments to them, unlock new weapons and other class specific abilities/utilities as well as unlock things for your vehicles.

Early on you could think that everything is way too expensive but once you start shooting enemies around you, you'll forget about this problem and get used to the way they're earned.

I do have a couple of issues with the game at this time.
* The queue system does not work properly at the time of writing this review
* Players experience random freezes which lead to crashes. Because of the population on the first few servers this leads to long queues.
* I feel that the resources spent on air vehicles vs the countdown time is somewhat unbalanced. Early on, without certification points, it takes up to 20 minutes to buy a Mosquito so players that spend Station Cash are at an unfair advantage as they're able to buy early upgrades which means that players that did not spend any cash have a high chance of losing a battle (if skills are equal or close to).
* Infantry resources give me mixed feelings. I'm pretty much always capped unless I spend everything on grenades and mines.
* The servers are extremely laggy up to the point you see players teleport around (the game just launched so nothing new really. Wasn't expecting a perfect launch although I hoped they were a bit more prepared, see below).

This aside, the game runs smooth even with massive combat going on and the lag will most definitely settle down once everything has been sorted out by SOE.

While I feel SOE could've prepared better (and keeping their past failed MMOs in mind) and should've done more early on, the hype this game created and the amount of players that tried to push their way through that small doorway called "server" shows that there is still a great fanbase out there that's eager to play this wonderful game as well as many new players that want to give this game a try.

I give this game a 9. No game is perfect. Every game has its flaws.
The negative points I brought up have absolutely nothing to do with the fact I did not give it a 10. I just feel that giving any game for that matter a 10 would mean that the game in question is supposedly perfect and wouldn't have any issues/flaws/downsides at all.… 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

Not the best game, but definitely the most fun game. Actually I take that back, it's the best game.

Where is the 9.5 rating? I'll take away .5 for somewhat limited meta-game and vehicle options at release; however this is coming as the devs stated.

Massive battles.. nothing like it. All PC gamers need to give their time/money to this fantastic game.

Let's get straight to the point here. PS2 isn't even remotely close to a finished product. As things stand, it's effectively a large scale FPS sandbox in which the primary objective appears to be kill farming. Territorial control is currently borderline meaningless, resources (used to acquire vehicles and consumables) are sufficiently plentiful as to mean you're unlikely to run out, and the need to actually work as a team (as opposed to merely being in the same place as other players) is entirely non-existent. Chuck in the lack of any sort of sense of victory and defeat beyond one's own deaths and the overall feeling that comes along with PS2 is one of "why am I doing this?". So, why give it 5/10 and not a lower mark? Well, it's got potential, and in terms of development SOE have done the "hard bit", so with a bit of effort on SOE's part PS2 could turn into something decidedly compelling and unique over time.… Expand

This game is a fun Free 2 Play game and will cost you nothing to experience battles that range across a huge continents. At first this game was really addicting, but on the second day of playing it dawned on me to stop.... I will explain why later. The game is like the Battlefield series, but on a grander scale. Which immediately stood out for me. The game is free and will cost you nothing to get into. Also the range of weapons and modifications and upgrades are huge. But, after about 8 hours of game-play is became apparent to me that this game is the pinnacle of Pay-2-Win concept games. In order to progress and upgrade your character (Which at starting your weapons and abilities are so crappy.) You need to earn what is called cert points. This is fine and okay. But, what SOE decided to do with these cert points is beyond me besides an attempt to push you to buy Cash Points. After 8+ Hours of play time I only accumulated about.. 80 Cert points. ALL upgrades require cert points... so there are NO weapons that can be gained otherwise. So in 8 hours I get 80 cert points... 10 points per hour and each item/gun costs about 500-1000+ cert points... do the math. You will find yourself constantly being killed by high level players who payed to win to get the best weapons and upgrades. Progression is horribly slow and such a grind if you intend on playing without paying. The game is playable and fun, the graphics are 'Meh' at most and still suck up a lot of GPU juice. But, I can't have fun in a game no matter how fun it is in a Pay-2-Win environment. I also wont spent 2-3 weeks of playing nothing but Planetside 2 like a job just to buy 2-3 weapons or upgrades. Making you eager to pay money to buy cash points just to speed things up.… Expand

I love the concept of the game but the implementation is sorely lacking. First and most important for any online game. LAG. The game is just lag ridden. I understand there is always going to be some lag in games but when I can play Battlefield 3 on ultra with no lag, I should at least be able to play PlanetSide 2 on low with no lag. NOPE. It is a great concept, an ongoing war between 3 factions. It is like a futuristic ARMA without going overboard on the realism. If not for the lag I would rate the game much higher. As it is, it is almost unplayable if you are interested in actually aiming.… 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.

approach with caution.
Not a bad fps, but its got faults. Its very zergtastic, you wont often get into big battles, people just endlessly zerg undefended bases. And whilst there is supposedly pop control, there is no population balance on continents, meaning that each continent tends to eb dominated by one faction.
Air is stupidly overpowered, and ground based AA is pathetic. And cert prices for weapons is very very steep. It is bordering on P2W.

However, if you can get a decent infantry battle going on in a Tech/amp/biolab or such, then this game shines. but endemic hacks is ruining it right now, speed hacks, wall hacks, aimbots....and no anti-hack program to stop it.

Couldbe a great game, but SOE need to get a handle on balance and hacks asap.… Expand

The first few hours you play this game, you'll most likely be very frustrated. Once you figure out where things are, and how the world works. You'll have a great time, and It's unbelievable how well this game handles mass scale battles (300+ people in a small area).

Getting is a squad/platoon of people who actually communicates, and work together, can make for some insanely fun online times.

I've paid 60 dollars for games that were less polished, less graphically pretty, less entertaining, less technically brilliant, and balanced worse than this totally free game. Under normal circumstances I might resent the cash shop, but given that the majority of what actually makes you a superior player needs to be unlocked via play and cannot be purchased, and given the fact that the cash shop is the only way that the developers are making money, I have absolutely no qualms. The gameplay is deep and the scale truly massive. Persistent war with hundreds of people fighting over territory in a never-ending battle across three huge continents using infantry as well as ground and air vehicles. They have create an enormous amount of content and made all of it relevant, available to everyone regardless of how much they paid, and crucial to gameplay. When I saw that this game was absolutely free I had my doubts about how deep the gameplay could be, or how much of it would be locked away behind a cash shop, but they really did go above and beyond, providing an experience that many triple-A premium-priced titles fail to deliver without segregating the paying players away from the free players.

I don't know how they did it. But they have managed something brilliant here, and I wish them great success. Not only for breaking new ground and taking a risk on giving their game away for free, but I would love to see more quality titles that follow in their footsteps.… Expand

I am not quite sure what everyone is talking about with in game bugs as I have not experienced any game breaking ones over the course of my play time thus far, at least nothing worth giving this game a 0.... The only inexcusable bug would be the total lack of optimization for AMD based processors... I am lucky enough to have had a Intel/Nvidia based system so it runs beautifully for me. I did not play Planetside 1 so I have nothing to base this game on but as it stands I have never played a FPS MMO that is this engaging. I can almost RP in this game, patrolling, guarding, attacking, infiltrating, outposts and small bases on my own. And the sheer volume of players in the large skirmishes on the map is mind boggling. If you have never played the first one and have an Intel Based System give it a shot! Its like no other FPS you have played.. If you are familiar with the first Planetside game you might be a tad disappointed in this one. And since it is free what is there to lose? Bandwidth? Try it out either way your not losing anything.... AMD users wait for a patch.… Expand

Long story short: Planetside 2 is a non-story driven MMOFPS which uses large-scale Battlefield gameplay mechanics to control territories in a Tribes-like universe. Is it a new idea? Not really. But is it fun? Yes, very much so.

When you start the game, aside from a few pop-up windows and small descriptive boxes, you really don't know WTF you're doing. Now I know this may discourage new players, but I actually really enjoyed it. Spawning in a room with soldiers frantic running all around me, I just sort of joined the fray and followed the guy in front of me and I was fighting in a couple of minutes.

The guns feel solid and while you don't start out with many weapons, there is enough diversity between the classes' arsenals to last you a while. Every FPS has a learning curve when you're factoring in bullet-time, recoil compensation, and tracking enemy movement past a firing muzzle while sighted in, and Planetside 2 is no different. Learn your weapons early on.

The battlefield feels like a war with no generals, so each player must decide his role on his own. Provide support for a frontline defense, sneak past the enemy to provide sniper support from the rear, or just go out guns blazing, there are tons of options here. The terrain makes for very interesting battles and provides loads of unique cover opportunities. For those of you looking for a real reason to fight, you'll be a bit disappointed. You're signing up for a gigantic turf war that gives you little reason to care about your territory being lost other than the fun in defending it and pushing back. I'm really hoping they add some more story elements to the game, it feels a bit hollow in that department.

Aside from a lack of story, everything about Planetside 2 feels solid. The environments are engrossing and the battles have a way of becoming very believable. SoE didn't re-invent the wheel with this game, but they definitely did a good job of oiling the crap out of it.… Expand

Planetside 2 is the spiritual succsessor to Planetside 1, and it offers a product and experience as unique as the original. 2000 people on a map, 64x64km large, in a never ending battle for supremacy and bragging rights. Planetside offers every facet of war to a player, and at the low cost of free. While other games gouge players with necessary transactions to enjoy the full experience, SOE has decided to leave their experience relatively unsullied by adhering to a very inviting and honest F2P model.

Truly the only game in the market to offer massive battles you're sure to talk about for days, Planetside is not without its faults in early stages. The game still has a few minor bugs and a steep learning curve. If attacked as a MMO, Planetside's learning curve is rather par for the course, but lacks good tutorials in games, mostly because it lacks the grinding mechanics that offer tutorials in other games. If apporached as a shooter, which it can easily be basically seen as.. the lack of a tutorial campaign and simplicity of play can be jarring to some players.

That being said, Planetside 2 is a remarkable game. A remarkable experience, and hopefully just the beginning for an evolution in MMOs from point and click to full interactive awesomness.… Expand

This game is not finished. It feels rushed. I tried playing it but given that there was little to no tutorial I found myself running around and dying repeatedly with no idea what I was doing. My default FPS experience worked fine when I was running and gunning with no real game plan; it was when I tried to play a medic or engineer that the true frustration came in. I'm generally a support character because I feel that the 13 years olds' are simply better shots than me in my twenties. I like to heal people or repair generators.

My short stint in this game as a medic proved an act of futility. My attempt at reviving downed players resulted in bugs. Revive icons were always lateral to the actual downed player leading to much confusion on the battlefield and 90% of the time the game didn't even register that I was reviving someone! Nothing like standing out in the open with the camera pointing down for precious extra seconds hoping the medic gun would actually connect and I would not only do some good on the battlefield but earn my well deserved XP!

My stint as an engineer led to just as much frustration with the announcer stating there was a generator down without stating what generator or where. There was no tutorial for the HUD map so I had no idea if the generator even had a waypoint nor could I find a legend to speak of to figure it out on my own. Obsessively the announcer would inform me of a downed generator and it likewise being repaired but I gave up trying to find it after wandering aimlessly throughout all of the buildings dying over and over in an attempt to repair it! Finally as a standard, assaulting, run and gun player did I find ANY resemblance of a typical MMO shooter. The sheer number of players was both impressive AND chaotic since death literally loomed over every corner. This is more of a personal preference really since the original game was much the same. I personally think this volume is too much chaos but I can see the appeal.

In conclusion, this game DESPERATELY needs a proper tutorial outside of the gaming community to teach the various aspects of the game. Had I had such a tutorial I feel as though I would have been much more forgiving with the other faults as I could have at least participated in the fray instead of simply dying repeatedly in an attempt to bring myself to a mere novice level.… Expand

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.

Promising game by SOE, maps are huge and battles have an epic feel to it (when during peak hrs). Graphics are beautiful but overall the game is marred by the following:
1) poor tutorial - after creating character game throws player into battle immediately without allowing them to even bind keys or figure out what to do.
2) bugs - flickering screen, falling thru the maps.
3) sloppy cheat detection and policing by GMs - well-known aimbot hackers are able to keep playing to ruin the game even after being reported in game and outside of game via support tickets. 4) overpriced cash shop items - 7 USD for a gun that is single class only, single character. 5 USD for a weapon skin. To earn some essential weapons (like anti air missiles or rocket pods) normally in game, need over 50hrs of playtime on average.… Expand

If you have a good gaming PC that can handle the rendering of hundreds of players and like shooters like Battlefield 3 you owe yourself to play this game. I am completely 100% addicted to it and thing this game is a one of a kind experience.

As of now, i have played it for about 6-7 hours. I like the graphics, i like the big maps. What i dont like is the gameplay and the difficulty. I was trown into the game with absolutely NO idea what to do. I ran around trying to find people to shoot, did not find anyone because i did not even know where my teammates where. When i finally found someone to kill, i got some points and immidiatly went to buy and air vehicle, which took me about 10 minutes to find a place to buy it, and then crash into the ground a second later. Overall, i like the idea, but the fact that it is so very hard to know what to do, i found a game that just trew me into the unknown… Expand

Many other reviews will have more detail on the maps (huge), lack of goals (none), mouse sensitivity (need a gamepad or game-mouse, standard mouse will be too sensitive), graphics (high settings for me, looks fine, the grey-blue hue planet is not great, I much prefer the green/desert one, but not bad either way, would prefer forests and lakes myself for a smaller map size). And it has to get a 6 simply because it is free to play, and is fun for an hour or 2 at a time. Although it is free, in actuality you will need to spend money to do well at it, or be prepared to grind for days and days to get upgrades. The question is, I've paid for items in other MMOs, so would I pay for anything here? No, not at this time. If a future version came out that had the following, I would, but for now, it's the lack of these the make the game passive only: 1) Goal setting on a map scale. For example, an omnipresent general says I need 10 teams of 10 players to take this goal now, hit X to join. Once you start, the opposite omnipresent general tells his side, I need all players in sector N to close up and defend this point. This goal quest is every 15 minutes or so per sector. If I want a war feel, that means including generals making and delivering orders. 2) A fixed price that gets me everything, even if I have to build up XP in a reasonable time to unlock it all. 3) Smaller but more beautiful scenery. 4) Better MMO guild and team management, perhaps outside of the battle. 5) Better backstory. Whilst logging in, show the overall faction stats, what can be done next to increase faction reputation, how many are doing it, and how to join. (for example, if we take sector X, we get a 5% bonus to blah). 6) lastly, Item upgrades for XP and for how many specific quests (points 1 & 5) you join. With all these, I think we'd have a great game that I would pay for, but for now, I'll enjoy my f2p hour a day.… Expand

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

Excellent free 2 play game. Factions (and overall gameplay) are extremely well balanced . Skill always wins over $$. Graphics and performance are good. Epic scale. This is my favorite hardcore mp shooter on the market. Well worth learning how to play if you are up for a challenge.

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.

New player? Enjoy a horrible learning curve. No in game tutorials and to kick you in the balls harder they immediately dump all new players right into a battle without even allowing them to change their hotkeys or in game sensitivity/graphical settings. Congratulations your dead. Welcome to Planetside 2. In game store? Enjoy being asked to pay 7$ for an item with no proper in game preview system. Pretty much have to blind buy your cosmetics and hope they don't look like toilet. SOE was even lazy in that half the weapons they are asking $$$$ for don't even have their own models/skins. Gameplay? If you stick around for 5-10 hours to learn the ins-and-outs of the game you'll be rewarded with some fun battles here and there. Sometimes fun little skirmishes other times the big cinematic battles the game promises. You may even begin to think this is a great game, but soon the dark underbelly of this beast will reveal itself. Nobody plays defense. Why? 1) There is no incentive for doing so. 2) The maps are designed to favor attackers. Try to play defense you will be zerged and you will be spawn camped hard. Its a pointless waste of time and everyone knows it. You'll get to defend for 2 minutes or so then time to just respawn elsewhere and surrender the base. This has turned the game into nothing but traveling around the map in your own faction's offensive zerg capping empty base after empty base. Infantry play? Infantry have been neglected and tanks + airplanes rule the day. Bit of a joke to the point this game has earned the monicker Tankside/Vehicleside/Airside etc among people who have played it any decent amount of time. Infantry's main role tends to be getting farmed by vehicles. Sure you can have a few fun fights here and there, but you can always count on a vehicle zerg to ruin that quickly. The developers have even gone out of their way to make it extremely easy for vehicles to farm infantry by giving all vehicles free texture hacks. Yeah, those things that FPS try to ban SOE gives to you for free. Cover, day/night, camo... all irrelevant as vehicles can see you anywhere you go and one-shot/two-shot you with ease. Go ahead. Download it. Play it. Its worth a good 20 hrs or so until you discover the faults I mentioned above then you'll find yourself getting annoyed at its repetitive pointlessness. Not all hope is lost of course. It has only been about a month since release so there is still plenty of time for this to become an amazing game. All the ingredients are there. Interesting weapons, vehicles, and the framework for large scale battles. The developers just have to be willing to modify their horrid map designs to encourage the right mixture of infantry/vehicles and offense/defense on its battlefields. Definitely a game I will keep my eye on over the next few months to see what direction they take it, but as it stands right now, a mediocre 6 is all I can muster.… Expand

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

This is the ultimate FPS, taking it to the next level. Have you ever felt the adrenaline rush when about 50 enemy foot soldiers and three tanks are approaching your location and you are all alone? Didn't think so.

I was lost in the beginning, but what would you expect when you get dropped down into the middle of a war zone without any kind of tutorial. I had chosen the Vanu Sovereignty (also known as the VS) due to their futuristic battery powered laser weapons. I soon got the hang of it though, once I died I switched to Combat Medic due to me being a team player and their long(er) range primary weapon. I spawned at the recommended spawn and just went with the flow. Soon I was out at the front lines again.

This game is nothing for casuals, it has friendly fire and you are not going to be able to take damage like in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 for example. Between five and ten direct hits with the Combat Medic's primary weapon will kill you.

I eventually dragged some friends into it and we all joined an outfit. Soon we were all in-game, sitting in a Sunderer (a 12 person vehicle with dual anti-artillery cannons that can be used by two passengers) moving towards the front lines. Once we were there we deployed it, making it a mobile base. The developers have really thought out the team element and playing in a group makes this whole game a lot better.

I haven't had this fun in a very long time.… Expand

The things Planetside 2 does are astounding, the scale is almost unbelievable. And to think that they have an Ultra graphics setting which isn't even released yet...this game proves by itself that PC gaming isn't dead by a long shot. No console could do what Planetside 2 is doing. The development team is one of the best I have ever seen at worrying about what the players want. I'm saddened by the amount of negative reviews of people that want a totally free game. The game is fun when playing by yourself but if you join an outfit and have a teamspeak or ventrilo server going it suddenly unfolds into one of the best games you've ever played. The sheer amount of strategy and communication needed to dominate the battlefield makes this game more of a military simulation than any other on the market. The room for growth for this game is unimaginable too, SOE isn't even close to done. If you write this free to play game off you are going to regret it. Don't be phased by all the people that just want a free ride and don't want to support the development team at all.… Expand

...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.

Casting aside forgiveable minor bugs and unforgiveable CTD-problems, PS2 is fun for some time. The game ultimately fails due to what makes it special: large scale warfare lacks focus. Don´t expect all-out adrenaline experience such as Tribes:Ascend or Battlefield series offer. If some system which attracts all the three factions to compete for the same battlefied objectives at the same time was applied, the atmosphere would rise greatly. Also, the BOs (buildings, locations etc) lack imagination. They should have taken Halo series as model & inspiration, not Supreme Commander. My fav multiplayer scifi-shooter is BF2142. It has less of everything, but its heart is bigger.… Expand

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.