PlanetSide 2 Review

Planetside 2's monumental battles are exciting and unforgettable.
Planetside 2’s most expansive firefights might be among the most intense you’ve ever had. The massive first-person battles make you fear every step and celebrate every kill, knowing that one small victory contributes to the greater cause. A number of quality online shooters think big, but none think bigger; you are a small but vital cog in a restless war machine seeking to steamroll the opposition with a few dozen rumbling tanks and a vast swarm of armored soldiers.

There’s no doubting the ambition and scope of this free-to-play massively multiplayer shooter, in which thousands of players vie for dominance across three spacious, persistent continents. Before entering the fray, you choose one of three empires: the authoritarian Terran Republic; the rebellious New Conglomerate; or the techno-cultist Vanu Sovereignty. All three boast faction-specific weaponry but share the same six classes, so whether you prefer playing a supportive role as a turret-repairing engineer or blowing up tanks as a heavy assault soldier, each faction has a place for you. There are no class-based vehicle restrictions: you can drive ground vehicles and pilot aircraft, or hop in the gunner's seat and harass the enemy on the go.

Discovering the ways you can contribute to your faction’s cause isn’t easy at first: Planetside 2 is daunting. There are numerous official videos that describe the game’s ins and outs, but they’re not a proper substitute for an interactive tutorial. When you first emerge from your landing pod, you are both awe-stricken and dumbfounded. Dozens of fellow soldiers rush about your faction’s primary base, armored vehicles ramble across the distant landscape, and the hum of nearby aircraft has you peering into the skies. If you’ve played a shooter before, you know how to aim and shoot; Planetside 2’s structural details, however, are initially elusive.

The learning curve isn’t as steep as first impressions lead you to believe, however. Once you click through the menus and peruse the map, you have a rough idea of what the game expects of you. And then you take the plunge and engage the enemy for the first time, and begin to understand what your faction expects of you. Planetside 2 makes it easy to join others: with the press of a button, you can join a squad, and multiple squads may join forces and create a platoon. You may also join an outfit--the game’s version of a guild--if you seek even more camaraderie. Text chat and voice chat both work nicely, and while you’ll encounter a certain amount of trash talk, the community is helpful. Your fellow combatants want you to succeed, and they understand a newcomer’s wide-eyed wonder and confusion.

And so you roll out with a squad, seeking to gain control of hotspots like laboratories and tech plants in order to receive factionwide bonuses like reduced vehicle costs. Such bonuses, in turn, relate to resource generation and management. These resources allow you to spawn vehicles at specific terminals, or purchase sundries like grenades. While there are timers that limit how often you can summon a vehicle, there’s no waiting around for jets to spawn, and there’s no fighting over who gets to fly them: once youpurchase a vehicle, you teleport to the driver's seat.

At the original Planetside’s launch, you could spend more time getting to the action than you could participating in it. That issue was corrected in time, however, and developer Sony Online Entertainment has learned from that game’s initial growing pains. There is downtime in Planetside 2, of course, as you travel across the landscape to a hotspot identified on the minimap. But you can also deploy immediately to a raging battlefield using the instant action button, though this option, too, is on a timer. There are occasional lulls that will have you wishing for a gunfight to keep your energy levels high, but a few minutes of travel generally rewards you with some proper shooting. Thankfully, you can sprint indefinitely if you don’t have a ride, which eases the journey.

Far Cry 3 Review

Far Cry 3's intelligent and elegant open-world structure balances exciting action with the joys of free-form adventuring, making it one of the best shooters of the year.

Far Cry 3 is a delightful and harsh tropical wonderland, crawling with wildlife and threatened by the pirates and drug runners that disrupt its peace. The troubled paradise you explore is colorful and wild, enticing you to investigate its ravines and discover new ways to enjoy the open-world playground sprawling in front of you. This is a game that ignites the desire to complete every last challenge and check out every last icon on your map. You gradually journey across the entirety of two sunny and sinful islands, hunting for rare game, speeding medicine to needy communities, and skinning sharks so that you might craft new wallets with their hides. Far Cry 3 is an excellent game, marred mainly by some irritating design elements and an inconsistent story that often defaults to generic "tribal" cliches to make an impact.

When the story leaves those cliches behind for deeper territory, however, it does manage to communicate ideas of substance. It takes many hours for its themes to come together in a coherent way--yet in certain aspects, the incoherence makes sense. As protagonist Jason Brody, your initial quest to rescue your friends from a chaotic and truly frightful pirate named Vaas turns into a personal journey blurred by drugs, and fueled by the desire to follow a new and exciting spiritual path. Those friends are too shallow for you to care much about them, which keeps the story at arm's length for a good half of the game. But his friends' shallowness ultimately allows Jason to take a guilt-free look inward, as he grows further mesmerized by the customs of the local Rakyat tribe that takes him under its wing. You might see the narrative curveballs coming after a while, but the trippy manner in which certain events unfold effectively blurs the lines between reality and Jason's occasionally drug-addled imagination.

Nonetheless, narrative oddities stand out. Some of Jason's friends are strangely unaffected by the horrors inflicted upon them. The game quickly glosses over an event that would make most of us emotional wrecks, making Jason's proclamations that the issue was harder to deal with than he expected ring hollow. Some moments seem made to be shocking for the sake of shock alone--not because they develop the world or its characters--but Far Cry 3 isn't so much about story as it is about its world, and the ways you exploit it for your own personal enjoyment. Story missions have you navigating caves and holding off enemies in modern shooter fashion, but out in the wild, you have an entire paradise to tame.

And it's that lush and menacing world that makes Far Cry 3 utterly enthralling. The game is big, certainly, but where Far Cry 2 could feel aimless, its sequel feels more focused without ever losing its sandbox appeal. One core activity may sound familiar to returning fans: you shoot up enemy outposts so that you may liberate them, turning them into safe zones where you can load up on ammo and other supplies. These camps also serve as quick-travel points, lessening the tedium of driving from one objective to the next. Early on, freeing an outpost can be remarkably easy: you shoot down a handful of pirates, and the flag is raised declaring the camp as the Rakyat's. Further in, however, you must put Far Cry 3's diverse possibilities to intelligent use.

One consideration: you must be aware of an outpost's alarm. Should a pirate trigger it, reinforcements arrive in a matter of seconds, so you might want to sneak in and deactivate the alarm system. Or, you could snipe the individual alarms, though shooting one does not deactivate others. Caged leopards and bears can be freed with a single shot, granting you a temporary ally in your quest for vengeance. Consider using a C4 charge and luring a small group of pirates to an explosive demise, or using a flamethrower to char evil henchmen to a crisp. That same flamethrower can lay waste to vegetation and effectively create moats of fire that can keep combatants at bay. (Well, some combatants, anyway.) Near the end of the game, your foes can put up quite a fight, and be great in number, so Far Cry 3 doesn't just give you the tools to be creative; it ultimately demands you use them to survive.

You don't have to conduct your business so loudly and dramatically, however: Far Cry 3 gives you ample opportunity to be stealthy and sometimes outright requires it. Forced stealth, such as that seen in a later-game mission that fails you the moment you are discovered, isn't that enjoyable. Fortunately, sneaking about is usually a blast, because it pays off in a brutal takedown of your unsuspecting target. Such moments are even greater once you have earned certain powerful abilities, such as the one that allows you to assassinate a pirate and toss a blade into another's skull in a single, effortless move.

Liberating outposts is only one of many activities to pursue in Far Cry 3. To reveal more of the map and gain access to free weapons, you climb radio towers and hack their transmitters. The entire concept is clearly inspired by the Assassin's Creed series, and no wonder, considering both games were created by the same development studio. First-person platforming is a frequent frustration in shooters--but Far Cry 3 makes it a delight. The tower creaks and groans as you climb ladders, make a few well-timed leaps, grasp some ledges, and ultimately arrive at the pinnacle. After you make a few hardware adjustments to the transmitter, the camera zooms to several points of interest, and you can make a breathless descent to the ground via zip line.