So the other day one of my close friends interrupted my Hitmanning with a message on steam, stating that I should download Planetside 2. I had never heard of it or seen any coverage of the game so when I questioned him on what the game was, he said it's Battlefield but bigger. Sounds interesting. So I go ahead and download it, check GB for any and coverage and there's only a few trailers. Turns out, the game is an free to play MMO where persistent battles take place on multiple servers. On each of these servers are three factions waging war for control of Bio Labs and Research centers that give strategic advantages to the overall faction competition. I thought it actually looked pretty cool.

After downloading I made my dude and was launched from space, pretty much straight into the action. At first I thought this was a cool way to get new players into the action and finding a feel for the game, but slowly descended into frustration as pretty much nothing is explained to you. I'm all for not treating the consumer like an idiot but I really had to rely on my friends to tell me all about the weapon unlocks, attachments and progression. That said there were intro videos on their site I chose not to watch.

I have to say my first hour with the game did not go well. The game looks pretty impressive with all these dudes running around attacking Bio Labs and such but after a while I kept thinking over and over. There's so many dudes! So many DUDES! Not being used to the game and the amount of people shooting at each other, it was pretty common for me to die over and over without really knowing what the hell was going on. I also found that the objectives onscreen where not very clear about what you have to do. Turns out it's quite simple, to capture a place get some dudes and stand inside the main part of the building. To defend, don't let the dudes in.

After playing for a few hours I did start to get the hang of things. I'm still not 100% how the unlocks work but from what I saw you get 1 cert point for every 250xp. You get xp for pretty much everything, 100 for a kill, repairing vehicles, reviving dudes and completing objectives. A new gun for example, would set you back 100 cert points and a new scope on that gun 30. Obviously everything you can unlock you can always buy with real money, and while the free progression feels slower than most shooters, the fact you can unlock any gun at any time is nice. You can also pay for cosmetic stuff which I don't think you can unlock.

As for the gameplay, Battlefield is a pretty good comparison. Taking a control point usually starts with my faction moving from our previously captured control point to the next in as many vehicles as we can. Then once we get a good hold in new territory, someone will drive in a vehicle that we can spawn from. Then all the dudes rush in and take the objectives. The length of time this takes can vary depending on defence. I will probably say that the vehicle sections are the most fun that I had. I have a feeling that it was due to the fact I could get multiple friends in a vehicle and go take out tanks or future helicopters. As infantry you die very quickly and was kinda sucky when playing in my group. Even though we were rolling with a medic and the other classes it was very hard for a group of 5 of us to all stay alive and be tactical. There really are so many dudes in the battle which weirdly made me feel a little isolated. Even though all these people were real people they die so fast it's kinda like COD where everyone around you dies while you soldier on. This might change as everyone starts to work out what to do.

Overall so far it's been one of the better F2P games I've tried. I might even write a review.

Thanks for reading!

Lozz.