PAX: Hands-on with SOCOM

SOCOM: U.S. Navy Seals Confrontation is the next entry in the popular Playstation franchise SOCOM. It’s set to hit in October, so I figured I’d wait in line to test it out with a few other dudes who looked to be formidable opponents. The booth was set up with four LCD monitors and PS3s for each of us. Having never played SOCOM before, I was genuinely excited to try the game out and see what all the fuss was about.

Considering that the people playing in front of us had their game freeze completely while playing, my hopes were not too high.

We immediately spawned in a room together in a map that seemed to be a small town of some sort. The graphics were good but not great, with some decent HDR but seemingly low-res textures (a bit of a problem on the PS3 in general). In addition, the character animations didn’t seem very smooth, but then again, this is multiplayer, so I thought I’d give it a break. On to the game.

Controls felt mostly clunky at first, with reload being the R3 thumbstick click and jumping left on the square button (wtf?), but I got the hang of it after a bit. Neither L2 or R2 seemed to do anything, which seemed just silly to me given all the things you need a controller to do in an FPS like this.

Once the killing started, things seemed to get a little better, though shooting and killing people was a touch difficult. I understand that’s kind of the mantra of SOCOM, but I’m a good FPS player, and this didn’t feel very accurate to me. I would stand in firefights unloading a clip into a guy with no indicator of whether or not I’m doing any damage to him. I felt like I wasn’t killing anybody the whole time only to find out I came in second place at the end of the game.

If what I saw here at PAX was any indication of the final game, I think I’m just going to skip this one and jump into Resistance 2 instead, whose multiplayer seemed much more refined. Did any of you play the other SOCOM games? Am I misjudging this?