MMOre than we bargained for
Okay, imagine if you ever actually met King Kong, like, on the way to the shops or something. Without the wide panning shots of a masterly film director to call upon, chances are you’d hardly drink in the grandeur of this magnificent beast so much as get a mushful of gorilla toenail action. Some things are simply too big to absorb with our measly human abilities of perception. This ludicrously large scale, free-to-play sci-fi shooter is one such thing.
With four gigantic, war-scarred maps to shoot your way across – each one capable of housing thousands of combatants – and the average pitched battle practically billowing out of your telly with hundreds of players, tanks, military people carriers and choppers, it’s impossible to jump right in and feel like you have even the barest grasp of just what is going on.
The tutorial mode does a passable job of teaching you the basics of Planetside. This button shoots, it says, almost condescendingly. This one slots your face into iron sights. This one does a melee. “Yes, yes we know all this," you yawn at the telly. But make the most of this tutorial while it lasts, because you’re booted out of the player-capped starter zone forever once you reach Battle Rank 15, and when that happens it’s like the game has balled your preconceptions of what a multiplayer shooter could be into a giant fist and boofed you square in the gut.
And it hurts at first. We’ve all been trained via the medium of COD and Battlefield to run around, possibly thinking of team objectives for the latter, but primarily concerning ourselves with staying alive long enough to string some kills together. In Planetside 2 you are effectively useless on your own. Sure, you can take up a sniper point and get some tasty XP for easy kills. But when you’re up against an army of a hundred or more, there’s only one way that battle is going to end – with you as a spicy blend of future jam and Johnny Plenty-Mates tutting at your corpse and waving his virtual finger.
To be effective in the battle for Auraxis (the world on which you’re waging multiplayer war) you need to function within a group, whether that be a smaller band of players tackling minor outposts, or a vast force flooding across the map with a bevy of tanks flanking you for cover and a rush of blood to the head so powerful it could blow out your scalp.
There are some major caveats, though. First up, the pure number of players we’re talking about here has necessitated that the meat-and-potato shooting on offer can feel sluggish by design. Think the slow, more considered turning circles of Killzone over the neck snapping 360s of its contemporaries. It doesn’t help that there’s a distinct lack of punch to the perfectly functional, though ultimately uninspiring, arsenal of weapons and upgrades to peruse and equip.
The second big ‘hmmmmm’ to expel hits me some ten hours in. I realise that I’ve taken, lost, retaken, defended and then lost again the same fortified outpost. The constant nature of Planetside 2’s war, the very fact that it never truly ends, robs you of any sense of closure.
The only thing which remotely resembles a scorecard is the post-death totting up of your XP. It’s one of the most in-depth stat screens you could want, but somehow can never replace the ‘job done’ satisfaction that comes with an irrefutable victory. It’s an endemic problem which is utterly unique to Planetside in my mind, and that’s partly because the game itself is doing something so standalone.
A signifier of that: it takes me (and my war-hardened team) a good full hour of intense battle to take Mao Station. After it’s all over and the dust settles on our however-temporary victory, we can hear the whoops of shared glee as strangers, in rooms all over Europe, celebrate together through proximity chat. It might not tick all of the boxes, but Planetside 2 has turned up to the PS4 party with an entirely different list of priorities. A list it’s impossible not to be thankful for. Matthew Sakuraoka-Gilman
A totally fresh proposition with admirable, unprecedented scale. Stick with Planetside 2 through the confusing early stages and the fudge-coated shooting and you’ll see what i mean.