Broken_Pixel's Reviews : SOCOM Confrontation Beta

The people behind SOCOM Confrontation had better be glad that this is a beta. Because they certainly haven’t impressed with it. A beta is to test the servers and to demo the game to people. To impress them. To convince them to purchase their game. Which they just haven’t done. It is a glitchy mess. Even from the menu you can notice this. You press down and you down two options. The first thing you have to do is create a character. You can pick between Commandos and Mercenaries. The character creator has a small range of equipment. There are only about 8 face’s to chose, a few facial hair styles, scars, balaclavas and the like. There are a few guns to pick, just enough. These range from sub machine guns to sniper rifles to handguns. You can carry two guns, a primary weapon (the big guns) and a secondary weapon (handguns). You can also carry two pieces of equipment (grenades, smoke bombs and rocket launchers). But overall, there isn’t much variety and depth in the character creator as in other games, say Soul Caliber or even Metal Gear Online.

So now we actually get into the game. Firstly, you have to find a channel, which is basically a server. After you pick a channel, you have to find a game to play in. Which can be quite hard, seeing as every goddamn game is full or has already started. So you have to mope around, trying to get a game. So, when you get into a game you have to wait for ages for it load up. One time I had to wait 10 minutes, and then I just gave up. So, after tedious waiting, you finally get into a game. The first thing you realise, is that the controls are very sluggish and hard to figure out because they don’t tell you a damn thing about them. I still haven’t figured out half of them. The core game play is just like any other third person shooter. It is pulled off well, but it has done better in games like Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War. But it should be enough to keep you playing for a bit…if it weren’t for the lag/freezing. I wouldn’t mind so much if it wasn’t so frequent. It happens at least once a minute. Which can be so annoying, especially when your in combat.

I’m worried about how this going to turn out for the full release. If it is like this when it is released, it will bomb. But at the end of the day , they can patch it and fix the bugs, Which could make most of my argument completely redundant. As it is at the moment, you should stick with Metal Gear Online. But we’ll see, it could be the best thing since sliced bread, or the second coming of Jesus.