t’s taken its sweet time getting here, having already been released in the US since last October, but now we can play Slant Six Games’ third-person online multiplayer shooter, do we really want to? We found that while it certainly has its merits, SOCOM Confrontation falls a bit short of a truly great tactical shooter.
The SOCOM series has been a solid performer for the PlayStation since way back in the heady days of the PS2. Countless hours have been spent stalking, sniping, sneaking and fighting through jungle, swamps and mountainous terrain; the joy of making your way across a map to take out specific objectives along the way is hard to describe.
SOCOM has mostly always offered a nice mix of offline and online action but now, with SOCOM Confrontation, the action has moved completely online, taking away all option of a single player mode. We can’t say it was a terrible idea, mostly because it’s not a terrible idea, but somehow SOCOM Confrontation just doesn’t work as well as an online tactical multiplayer shooter should.
Naturally, since you can no longer use a squad of fake soldiers to do your bidding, you need to use actuall “teamwork” to get the job done. SOCOM Confrontation pits Mercenaries against Special Forces in a wide variety of game modes. Just to keep things fair you take turns playing each side.
The modes available to date are Extraction, Escort, Suppression Elimination, Breach, Control and Demolition. They’re all pretty self explanatory; Escort for example has your squad shifting someone important from one location to another while you get pelted from above by explosives and Demolition is almost like CounterStrike: plant bombs all around the map while you work feverishly at disarming your opponents’.
There are only seven maps available for now (apparently more will be offered for download soon, hopefully) and while they’re particularly impressive in both their size and their prettiness, we thought only offering seven maps for a game only playable online was a bit stingy.
Before you start each game, as is the SOCOM way you’re able to choose a weapons configuration; you can take a primary and a secondary weapon in with you along with various other specialised pieces of kit. Your character can also be modified; you can change their looks and increase or decrease their body armour, but believe us when we tell you that beefing your armour up to maximum makes you slow as hell — all the kids will tease you for being a complete fatty.
Unfortunately, we found more things that annoyed us about SOCOM Confrontation than things we wanted to come back for, and ultimately that made the experience pretty short-lived. While we were playing the game was plagued with network issues; for every game we played there were several we were kicked from. There were also more than the odd freezing problem, the only solution for which is total restartage.
It’s not a complete loss however; the game looks completely amazing and if the promised content updates and bug fixing patches can solve some of the issues we faced, then we’d start to see some real action happening.
Summary: Beautifully presented tactical multiplayer action, marred by a long install process, long loading times, annoying bugs and a lack of content, SOCOM could be great but without a decent patch or two you’re better off spending your money on Rainbow Six.
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