PlanetSide 2 captures the drama of war better than any Call of Duty or Battlefield ever has — a feat accomplished with brute force and big numbers. Soldiers storm sci-fi encampments instead of the beaches of Normandy, but the song’s the same: Bullets and rockets fly inches overhead as foot soldiers and a convoy of assault vehicles crash against an enemy base, all to an imagined movement of “Ride of the Valkyries.”
PlanetSide 2 review: tipping the scale
Though it struggles with scale, Planetside 2 provides a unique, fascinating view of war
This is PlanetSide 2’s iconic, advertised gameplay cross-section, and when it actually happens, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever played.
It’s also unlike anything you’ve ever played when you’re searching for your place in the war effort. PlanetSide 2 is most rewarding when the player is part of something bigger than themselves — in fact, that’s the only scenario in which PlanetSide 2 is rewarding. A shooter has never made a single player feel so impotent.
PlanetSide 2 is a celebration of expansionist conflict. Three factions are tasked with conquering vital facilities strewn across three continents. Each facility has a control point that must be captured and held for a predetermined amount of time, and armies can only capture facilities touching regions they already control. A faction’s influence over a continent can really only move in waves — and, as a result, so do its armies.
The good news is that getting involved with one of these continent-wide efforts is a fairly painless process. There are a few options for joining a 12-solder squad, which may also be part of a four-squad platoon. The simplest way is tapping "Insert" to auto-join a suitable group, but you might have to hoof it to the part of the battle where your team is located. You can also automatically deploy near your squad leader (or to any active battle on the world map), though this function is on a cooldown of 15 minutes or more.
Being a part of one of these platoons is genuinely thrilling, and not always for the reasons you might expect.
Bigger armies mean bigger battles, which is where PlanetSide 2 handily excels. The fights aren't just huge, they're incredibly dynamic. There is a lot you could be doing in any given skirmish: reviving teammates, repairing tanks, dogfighting with light aircraft, piloting a troop transport, spearheading the charge on an ATV and so on. In a large enough battle, all of those things can happen simultaneously.
it's a depiction of war like you'd see in a blockbuster film, and you're a part of it every step of the way
PlanetSide 2's conflicts are so emergent that even the refrains between them are electrifying. Watching as your entire platoon leaves its HQ to start a new and glorious campaign, with tanks and airships and troops marching in a phalanx — it's a depiction of war like you'd see in a blockbuster film, and you're a part of it every step of the way. As a single soldier in the effort, you can only oscillate between assurance and dread, never quite sure of how the next battle will pan out. Sometimes, that uncertainty is more exciting than the battles themselves.
But PlanetSide 2 suffers from the same problem that hamstrung its predecessor and other large-scale shooters like MAG: Being part of the losing team not only lacks a sense of reward or satisfaction — it feels unfair.
Maybe it's because your squad leader hasn't updated the waypoint for a half hour, leaving members of your team to respawn agonizingly far away. Maybe it's because your 12-person defense force can't fend off the unchecked, 100-strong battalion beating down your door. Maybe it's because sometimes, when there are tanks posted outside of your respawn rooms harvesting your organs for XP, retreat is the only conceivable option.
It might be impossible to balance a shooter of PlanetSide 2's size with restrictions and checks to limit more punitive scenarios. Regardless, one-sided fights are nearly as common to PlanetSide 2 as tense two-or-three-sided battles. I spent just as much time trying to find a battle where I stood any chance of success as I did enjoying those rare balanced conflicts.
It might be impossible to balance a shooter of PlanetSide 2's size
PlanetSide 2’s free-to-play model is relatively elegant, not doing much to punish folks who don’t cough up real-life dough. Most class upgrades cannot be purchased with Station Cash, the game’s real-money currency. Real money is only used for weapons, vanity items and experience or resource boosts.
Nearly all the upgrades, including weapons, attachments and class perks, can be unlocked by playing the game normally, though their prices escalate quickly. Having to play for a dozen hours or so to earn enough to unlock one weapon for one class for one faction seems excessive, designed more around player retention than game balance. That kind of design choice isn’t even necessary, as there’s already way too much to do in PlanetSide 2 without the grind.
PlanetSide 2’s systems aren’t its carrot on a stick. Its joys are entirely emergent. I found myself returning to it every night, not because I was grinding for a new perk for the Combat Medic class, but because I knew that the battles I’d participate in (the evenly-matched ones, anyway) would never be alike. The forces would be different, the tactics fresh, the last stands and the heroic charges all completely unforeseen.
Though it struggles with scale, PlanetSide 2 provides a unique, fascinating view of war
PlanetSide 2 is free, but that isn’t why you should play it. You should play it because of the chaos of its big, beautiful wars. You should play it because its most exciting moments don’t occur when you turn the corner and paint a target in your sights. They occur when you’re sitting in a troop transport, rolling towards an opposing force, and wondering how the battle will unfold — even if those battles aren’t always perfect.PlanetSide 2 was reviewed using final PC code provided by Sony Online Entertainment. You can find information about Polygon’s ethics policy here, and see an explanation of Polygon’s review process and scoring rubric here.
Update: 08/21/2015
PlanetSide 2 review update 1: PlayStation 4
PlanetSide 2’s adaptation to PlayStation 4 has fared better than other free-to-play online games that have attempted to cross the console divide. Not much has been lost in translation — certainly not the scale of PlanetSide 2’s occasionally massive battles, which are as exciting today as they were when the game first launched nearly three years ago. Unfortunately, a few technical shortcomings and unaddressed issues that have always plagued PlanetSide 2 keep it from reaching its full potential on PS4.
For better and worse, PlanetSide 2 still offers the biggest battles I’ve ever seen in a multiplayer shooter. Between the PS4’s sizable install base and the game’s nonexistent price tag, I haven’t struggled to find squadmates to team up with or enemies to assault. Few shooters offer activities more exciting than joining a platoon that’s charging an enemy base with tanks, ATVs, dogfighters and infantry, ready to take on a deeply entrenched foe.
Unfortunately, it’s still difficult to guarantee a satisfying balance in any given battle. Getting barnstormed by one of the game’s other two factions simply because your team can’t get its shit together still feels like an exercise in futility. The lack of agency you feel as a single player can be suffocating, especially when you’re part of an incompetent squad — one that doesn’t grasp the game’s most important concepts, like how to properly utilize mobile spawn points.
It’s easy to fault PlanetSide 2 for its unskilled contingent of players, because the game does very little to educate them. A few tutorial missions are thrown up on the HUD, but those offer rudimentary lessons at best. Strategic considerations — how to properly deploy and utilize the aforementioned Sunderer spawn points, for example — go unexplored.
The game’s economy doesn’t punish free players, but it desperately needs overhauling nonetheless. It still takes hours of playing to earn enough currency to purchase most of the game’s guns, which cuts the legs out from under the game’s progression hooks completely. You can play for free and still be competitive with the big spenders, but you’re going to need to work a lot harder to add some variety to your arsenal.
Graphics have, understandably, taken a hit in comparison to PlanetSide 2’s PC version, although steadiness hasn’t exactly improved in tow — your frame rate in particularly explosive battles can get really rocky. Other technical offenses are harder to explain. Sometimes your map takes a really long time to load. Sometimes textures don’t process properly on your minimap, making enemy forces look like little squares of static. Sometimes vehicles just disappear, as if by magic.
PlanetSide 2 works on PlayStation 4, but these visual and technical issues make it soundly inferior to the game’s original PC version. It’s still a deeply fascinating game, and one that’s well-served by having virtually no barrier to entry. The harrowing, thrilling experience of being a small cog in the game’s militaristic machine is something unique among modern shooters, and something few other games have accomplished. It’s worth playing, at least once, to try and find that experience; just don’t be surprised if you have to work for it.
Initial Review: 12/14/2012
PlanetSide 2 review: tipping the scale
See More:
