SOCOM has finally made its way to UK for Playstation 3, but after all of this time since its release in North America has it been worth the wait?

 

SOCOM has been a strong mainstay for the Playstation since it came out on the PS2, offering great tactical fighting off and online. The PSP also had a very successful attempt gaining pretty good reviews across the board. Surprisingly this latest PS3 version of the game has completely removed any single player modes and is now solely an online experience, but despite this, I still had pretty high expectations for this, my first SOCOM experience.

 

 

As with most PS3 games at the moment there is the obligatory installation, just over 2 1/2 gigs gets put onto your hard drive which takes some time to install, annoyingly even though the screen says it is installing there is no progress bar so I left it sitting there for about 10 min, still nothing happened so as any sensible gamer would do, I mashed the buttons, only for the screen to update with a progress bar and then finally start the installation. With no on-screen menu to tell you to press buttons I find this a really bad start. So off I go into the game, only to have to download 2 update files, again more waiting, oh dear.

 

SOCOM Confrontation is a team based shooter, with Mercenaries and Commandos battling against each other in set game modes. Before going into each game you are able to set up the weapons you take online with you, you have a primary and secondary choice, the primary weapons are shotguns, sniper rifles and assault rifles whilst the secondary are handguns. Each of the weapons is also upgradable with items like sights and mounted launchers, each weapon handles differently with some impressive recoil and weight effects applied to each one. On the player side you can also alter the look of your character and change their body armor, but increasing the armor will also decrease your accuracy and maneuverability, so bear that in mind before running into battle and finding out you can’t shoot a thing.

 

The game is presented in an over the shoulder view, which helps you see the great scale of the battleground all around you. The SixAxis is used well with the ability to peer over and around walls and the main controls are similar to most other shooters, some of the functions of the controls are a bit fiddly though and a bit sluggish at time, requiring a real hard push down on the button for it to register.

 

The headset that is bundled in with the game is probably worth the price alone, it is very clear to hear your teammates and if you are playing the game properly it is an essential piece of equipment to enable each of you to coordinate your positions for the best possible attack or defence.

 

When playing, SOCOM provides the player with several game modes to select, in each one you will have one round as the Mercenaries and the other as the Commando's. Included on the disc are modes like Breach, Control , Demolition, Suppression Elimination, Escort and Extraction. Most of the modes are similar to any other game on the market with a few exceptions, Escort is my current favorite where you have to move some VIP's to safety whilst getting attacked from all angles and Demolition is another that stands out for me as it has you pick up and plant bombs around the map. These modes are varied and do work well, however there isn’t anything really that original about any of them, outside of the two modes that I mentioned.

 

With healthy 8x8 and 16x16 team games there are always plenty of games to play in online and each map comes in varying sizes to accommodate the amount of players in the game. Unfortunately at the moment there are only 7 maps to choose from and although they are huge and look really impressive with lots of cool lighting and dust effects, it is disappointing that there are not many to choose from considering that this game is only online.

 

 

With the huge maps, customizing and ranking up SOCOM could have been a good online shooter, but unfortunately the game is littered with bugs and annoying problems. On the server select, even though you have only just refreshed the list you will find it hard to connect at times, even more annoying is that on a few occasions the whole game will completely lock up, causing you to restart the whole console. I also find the loading very disappointing, the game install took quite a while so I would expect little or no loading times, but this is not the case, once you have sat through wasting time waiting for everyone to select ready you are then sitting for another min or so before the level will finally decide to load, now this takes a really long time and when compared to Killzone which also looks loads better and surely has a bigger load on the servers, it is embarrassing. The fighting also seems very sporadic, at times the action is very fast and you will take a player down with a few well placed shots, but at other times you can unload a full clip and they still run around like nothing has touched them, also due to the size of the maps if you die you can be waiting for some time to respawn and once you finally do you will have to run around trying to find the action again. With all of the loading and crashing, it seems that half of the time I spend playing this game was wasted, which is obviously very disappointing.

 

With games like Killzone 2 and even Rainbow Six out for the PS3 this game had to be great, however even after the patches which have been released SOCOM still falls way short of a must have purchase. Saying that the game will get better after patches to me seems to be far to pessimistic, if you purchased this game over the past four weeks you would be right to take it back, if the patches make the game better then future news and reviews will reflect this, however at the moment this game out of the box is not worth the time, hence the low score.