HBK619
Brownlow Medallist
- Dec 5, 2006
- 21,762
- 5,034
- AFL Club
- Richmond
- Other Teams
- Melbourne Victory, Storm and United
So after downloading the ridiculous 1.5GB 'patch/file' whatever it is for SOCOM for a solid 2 hours, I got to test my hand at the beta.
First things first, the graphics look relatively solid. The environment seemed fairly cliche (the first map I played on was a shipping dock), but the lighting is nice and bright unlike a lot of games nowadays where you can't really tell the enemy from the environment.
First thing noticing with the gameplay, the camera feels a little too close to the man, he takes up a fair amount of the screen while running and even when just looking around your guy is just right up there.
I'm not sure if there's something specific to the modes I was selecting, but as far as I could tell there's no real respawn mechanic, so naturally I was dying fairly fast not knowing anything of the maps or the game. Very hard to get a feel for the game when this is happening!
When I finally got a feel for what I was doing, I managed to nab a couple of kills before being taken down for really being way too far in the open.
From first thoughts, this game is VERY MAG like. The UI and even maps seem extremely similar to what I played of MAG (only the beta mind you).
The sound is pretty good, I didn't have my headsets on this time around, but I have a feeling that the sound will be pretty spot on in trying to pick directions and stuff. And from what I can also tell they have a fairly good range of voice actors in this (there's even Aussie voice work in there).
At one point I was given the job of bomb defuser, no idea how exactly this happened but it was damn fun. I had a n00btube as well as some other quite powerful M16 like gun. I had to run around to 3 objectives and defuse each bomb, managed to get 2 while nabbing 3 kills including a fantastic headshot. But on the 3rd there must've been someone waiting at the bomb and he blew me up from behind (on 2nd looks it seems it was a claymore type of thing). It was very tense and fun playing as the defuser.
Playing some more rounds of this mode (basically S&D) was quite fun, fairly tactical too. As the bomb defuser you're given a fair amount of power, but to balance it out you can't take cover and per n00btube kill you get 15xp (which the norm is about 50xp for a kill).
Overall from 13 rounds I went 16 kills, 10 deaths.
The biggest problem with these modes is at the moment if you die early you basically have to wait a whole 6 minutes for the next round to start and can't scroll any camera's (I assume the option will come later on since there are prompts there, but greyed out), which is a bitch. It's pretty annoying dying early on from potentially someone you couldn't really even see and then having to wait 5 minutes for the next round to start, when you can do nothing else but look at your dead corpse lying on the ground for that 5 minutes...
Overall I'm not really sure where I sit. The camera for mine is just WAY to close and restricts the field of view too much to get a solid view of the battlefield too often, your flanks are REALLY cut off. But everything else felt rather solid. The shooting is pretty good, the weapon variation is quite nice, the S&D mode (there are more modes but this one was the best...there is a domination like mode, but again it's a 1 life thing, so far less fun) was tactical and fun. Probably only going to be a purchase if the campaign is really given the big thumbs up (since it's got full co-op for a bunch of players online), otherwise I might wait longer for the price to drop. It does definitely feel like a 3rd Person MAG though, so I'd say if you took a liking to that, this would almost be a sure thing.
First things first, the graphics look relatively solid. The environment seemed fairly cliche (the first map I played on was a shipping dock), but the lighting is nice and bright unlike a lot of games nowadays where you can't really tell the enemy from the environment.
First thing noticing with the gameplay, the camera feels a little too close to the man, he takes up a fair amount of the screen while running and even when just looking around your guy is just right up there.
I'm not sure if there's something specific to the modes I was selecting, but as far as I could tell there's no real respawn mechanic, so naturally I was dying fairly fast not knowing anything of the maps or the game. Very hard to get a feel for the game when this is happening!
When I finally got a feel for what I was doing, I managed to nab a couple of kills before being taken down for really being way too far in the open.
From first thoughts, this game is VERY MAG like. The UI and even maps seem extremely similar to what I played of MAG (only the beta mind you).
The sound is pretty good, I didn't have my headsets on this time around, but I have a feeling that the sound will be pretty spot on in trying to pick directions and stuff. And from what I can also tell they have a fairly good range of voice actors in this (there's even Aussie voice work in there).
At one point I was given the job of bomb defuser, no idea how exactly this happened but it was damn fun. I had a n00btube as well as some other quite powerful M16 like gun. I had to run around to 3 objectives and defuse each bomb, managed to get 2 while nabbing 3 kills including a fantastic headshot. But on the 3rd there must've been someone waiting at the bomb and he blew me up from behind (on 2nd looks it seems it was a claymore type of thing). It was very tense and fun playing as the defuser.
Playing some more rounds of this mode (basically S&D) was quite fun, fairly tactical too. As the bomb defuser you're given a fair amount of power, but to balance it out you can't take cover and per n00btube kill you get 15xp (which the norm is about 50xp for a kill).
Overall from 13 rounds I went 16 kills, 10 deaths.
The biggest problem with these modes is at the moment if you die early you basically have to wait a whole 6 minutes for the next round to start and can't scroll any camera's (I assume the option will come later on since there are prompts there, but greyed out), which is a bitch. It's pretty annoying dying early on from potentially someone you couldn't really even see and then having to wait 5 minutes for the next round to start, when you can do nothing else but look at your dead corpse lying on the ground for that 5 minutes...
Overall I'm not really sure where I sit. The camera for mine is just WAY to close and restricts the field of view too much to get a solid view of the battlefield too often, your flanks are REALLY cut off. But everything else felt rather solid. The shooting is pretty good, the weapon variation is quite nice, the S&D mode (there are more modes but this one was the best...there is a domination like mode, but again it's a 1 life thing, so far less fun) was tactical and fun. Probably only going to be a purchase if the campaign is really given the big thumbs up (since it's got full co-op for a bunch of players online), otherwise I might wait longer for the price to drop. It does definitely feel like a 3rd Person MAG though, so I'd say if you took a liking to that, this would almost be a sure thing.
