I used to own my former roommate in online shooters when we were in college. The 6 hour Shadow Warrior frag fests were competitive, but I usually came out on top with a good combination of stealth and well-placed sticky bombs. When we moved to Half Life, he got much better, especially sniping me with the crossbow. Alas, I got the better of him most of the time. This all changed after we graduated and he picked up a
PS2. It started with Socom II, sniping me in the head with a scoped rifle the first time we played. That's ok, the game was fun. We played a lot of respawn games online, sometimes turning a ranked respawn game into a free for all by randomly turning against our teammates in online play. It was fun and we had a lot of good times. The past few years though, he moved on from Socom to get married and my wife had another kid. But then Socom 3 came out, and it was on.
Gameplay
Socom is a military shooter. You can switch between either third or first person perspectives. The goal of Socom 3, like the previous Socom games, is realism. You have real weapons that range from sniper rifles to assault rifles, to multipurpose rifles, to shotguns and handguns. In addition you have realistic attachments like grenade launchers, airbursts, thermal and regular scopes, and rifle lasers. This isn't your typical shooter in that you gravitate towards the grenade launcher and heavy weapons. Unlike previous Socom games, you can customize the attachments to your weapon, thus making the different types of assault rifles more deadly for given situations. In Socom 3, an improper loadout really hinders you when it comes to accomplishing your goals. On maps with wide open spaces, picking a shotgun is like committing suicide. The idea is not necessarily to frag anything that moves, but rather to be stealthy and conserve ammo.
Socom 3 also introduces a new element to the series which is vehicles. You can now drive hummers, tanks, and boats all with an array of mounted guns and weapons. Unlike your own personal weapons, vehicle mounted weapons have unlimited ammo, but firing them off wildly gives away your position, which is a big no-no in Socom games. The vehicles are exactly what you'd expect from a game which stresses realism. While they provide a great means of transportation and can double as a way to eliminate your enemies by running over them, they are easy identifiable targets of your adversaries in many situations. My opinion is that this is an incredible addition to the series. It adds a certain element of strategy and opens maps up without adding an overpowered element to the battlefield. When manning a turret, you are easy pickings for a sniper. I've even sniped the driver right out of his seat from 100 yards away while traveling at full speed, which was immensely satisfying.
The overall premise of Socom is adaptability. Certain situations call for running and gunning. Other situations call for stealth and secrecy. Sometimes you'll be forced to snipe your opponent from a distance. Other times you might be devising a way to avoid sniper fire by throwing smoke grenades. Storming a structure might call for flashbangs, or grenades, while neutralizing vehicles require mines. Keep in mind you also have a limited load you can carry. The end result is the balance of Socom 3 is fantastic.
Single Player
The single player campaign relies more on sneaking while moving from point A to point B. Your enemies typically aren't actively seeking you. Instead you can take them out one by one. The amount of enemies playing guard duty is amazing. The enemy AI is pretty good the higher the difficulty. Unfortunately, you'll get a lot of headshots and can sneak up on them very easily regardless of the difficulty level.
The single player missions involve campaigns in certain areas of the world, North Africa, South Asia, and Poland. They only allow you to play as the SEALs fighting against various terrorist organizations, unfortunately none of which is named COBRA. Completing the missions allow you to unlock characters, weapons, and weapon attachments. There are some other unlockables that require you to complete the campaigns on the PSP's Socom game, Fire Team Bravo.
Overall, the single player game is flawed because it's much more limited in terms of strategies and tactics. The AI becomes very predictable at times, especially when you know where certain enemies are and where they come from in certain situations. That doesn't mean that it isn't fun to play at least once through. However, if you're looking to play this game offline, it might not be worth it.
Online
Playing Socom 3 online is the reason to own this game. You can play a variety of game types from large maps to small maps. You can play territories, demolition, extraction, suppression, and escort. Unlike the other Socom games, you can also play with respawns on game types other than just suppression. I think this is a good idea because it takes so long to wait for a game to finish if you get killed early on. While many maps are too big to really camp at the enemy's spawn point. Speaking of spawn camping, it still is a huge problem on smaller maps, but the saving grace is that you can change your spawn point on the larger maps. Speaking of maps, they're pretty well designed as well. They offer many sniper points, but not many where someone can't come up behind you. There aren't a ton of maps, but the sheer size of them allow for many different situations to take place, especially when factoring in vehicles and whatnot.
My biggest gripe of online play is the server system. While I typically like the idea of joining games that you can see and instead of being lumped into a group my some complicated algorithm, there are some big problems with the way Socom 3 (and Socom II for that matter) does it. Each server contains a maximum of 256 people. The maximum number of players for a game is 32. That means that if a game has 32 players, 1/6 of the server is filled. Meaning all of the game types might not have enough players to fit in it. Another problem is the limited space also limits the number of 32 player games. I would think if they could expand the server size to 2048 or even 1024 players, you'd solve these two problems.
To verify or not to verify, that is the question that many online players ask themselves. What I'm referring to is Zipper's way to combat cheating. Because the PS2's online games are for the most part free, you can create several accounts, making it difficult to ban cheaters, hackers and glitchers. The solution for Zipper without charging to play online is to use a credit card to verify your account. The credit card is never charged; instead it's used as a form of online ID. In exchange you can participate in clans, have a friends list, and obtain a rank. It also helps to verify your age (though parents can simply provide their credit card number for verification). What this means is if you are banned, they ban the name and address associated with the credit card. So even though you can still play online, you can't be in a clan, have a friends list, or a rank. You can also be exiled from certain games as well. It's good system, not foolproof, but still a good system in my opinion. Yes I don't like giving out my credit card, but I trust that it won't be charged. If it is, I think I have sufficient proof to dispute the charge from my credit card company. Besides, Zipper also has downloadable patches, though they can often take up much of your memory card, which really stinks.
Controls
The controls of Socom 3 really make good use of the Playstation 2 controller. It has the typical controls of a shooter in that the left analog stick moves your character, while the right analog stick allows you to look in different directions. You can invert the axis of the right analog stick. The right trigger fires your currently equipped weapon while the left trigger switches to your secondary weapon. The second right trigger can switch what your primary and secondary weapons are. The X button does specific actions, while the square button jumps, and the triangle button toggles your posture between upright and prone. You can also customize the controls to your liking.
The USB Headset is also a vital part of both the online and single player game. You control your teammates in single player mode by pressing the circle button and speaking simple commands to your teammates like "hold your fire" and "fire at will". In the online game, you still press the circle button to talk, but instead you can instruct people with whatever commands you can think of. However, they'll likely come up with some sort of profanity or racist response. Still, if you're going to play this game pick up a
USB Headset.
Graphics
The graphics in Socom 3 are a mixed bag. In one sense, the sizes of the maps push the graphical power of the PS2 to its max. Maps are large and often you can still see movement in the distance as well as many landmarks. Still other trivial objects like backgrounds change very slowly and some other objects draw in and short distances. Still, it makes scopes and binoculars that much more effective and crucial to the gameplay, which seems pretty realistic. Vehicles also have a reasonable top speed such that objects aren't appearing right in front of you before you can react. This is especially surprising given the trouble with this balance in
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Characters and object detail is kept pretty low. It's about on par with many Playstation 2 games. For those of you expecting the same object and model detail as
Halo 2 or other Xbox games, you'll be very disappointed. Still the animations are very good especially considering the economy of movement required to be accurately stealthy with a 60 to 100 lbs. of equipment on your body. Similarly, hit detection is also spot on. In previous Socom games, some shots don't register as hits despite graphics indicating indeed the opposite. I've played hundreds of games and have yet to see any hit recognition issues.
Sound
The sound effects are pretty realistic and accurate. During heavy firefights you really seem immersed in the battle. Also, this is one of those games where you really don't ever want to mute the sound. Picking up on subtle sounds really gives away the enemy's position on many instances. It's a use of the sound that many games don't utilize enough.
The voice acting is about as bland as it gets. I'd actually rather read the subtitles to avoid the military cliches and overall cheesiness.
The music of Socom 3 is better than in previous Socom games, but that's not saying much. It's good and it makes sense, but it still seems like military-themed elevator music to me. Other people might disagree, but that's what I feel. I'm not a big fan of the music, but at least it blends into the background of the menu screens pretty easily. Supposedly there are unlockable music tracks by completing the game on different skill levels, but I never figured out how to play the music. It's no big loss for me though.
Replay Value
The replay value of Socom 3 is mixed. While there's a ton of replay value online, the replay value for the single player missions is somewhat limited. Online supports clans, a friends list, and countless competitive match types on a wide variety of maps. The only incentive to play single player is to unlock the various weapons, attachments, and characters. While that's incentive to take the game online with a wider variety of weaponry and options, the single player campaign is very repetitive after you beat it once. Yes it's tougher on higher difficulty settings, but it's also still roughly the same missions. You can try for better ratings for stealth, teamwork, etc., but it's a much different game with the same AI patterns. Online is the place to go to really get your money's worth. The game is fantastic online and brings me back for more time and time again.
