Socom Confrontation Demo (Public Beta) Review

[Drunk_Couzens]

As most (if not all) of you know, the public beta started this past Friday.

Right off the bat there was a rough start for it was unclear when users would receive emails from Sony to be able to log in and download the Beta. The beta keys were supposed to be sent out in "waves" starting at 6 am Friday, however, it seemed like a good bunch of people received theirs at like 1pm, and a couple more at about 3 or 4, then nothing further. I, myself, had issues as well for I still have not received my Beta code.
After 20 min of " Does anyone have a spare code" to all my buddies, I was finally able to obtain one and DL the Demo. The download was 1.5 gb , but went by very fast for a file that size. Cable internet seemed to download in about an hour, and DSL i heard was about 3-4 hours.

After the game was installed, it was GO time. The intro was clean and fresh for the Slant 6 Developer Clip, and the THX Surround sound clip made this game feel very professional.

The title screen , although simple, was impressive. Straight and to the point. Simply press start and log in. After doing so however is a whole different story. You attempt to initialize a connection and connect to the servers. However it fails. It may taken up to a dozen times to initially connect. (As of yesterday though, it was getting on in 1 or 2 times which is a great relief) Once connected you have the standard terms and conditions, and then the recent updates screen, which seems to be the same as the socom.com blogs, but we'll see in future updates.

As soon as I logged in the first thing i wanted to check out was the character customization. I was not disappointed. The amount of options is phenomenal. Note: it is not anything like Tiger Woods game face or anything ridiculous like that, but you have some of the following to work with:

About 6 or 7 default faces (that you can customize further like tiger, but i didn't go into it really, just kept a default)
A Dozen or so Hats, headgear & Helmets
3 Mic types
3 types of Ski Masks better known as Balaclavas
6 or so types of eye wear
3 Types Of Body armor (heavy, med, and light)
3 Types Of leg armor (heavy, med, and light)

After which, you can choose your camo of choice for each piece of equipment (clothing wise) you want. There are separate camo options for Chest, legs, shirt, headgear/hat, and 1 or 2 others i cannot remember right now. I thought it was awesome to be able to make a GI Joe Snake Eyes looking , all white commando.

I was unable to see if there was a difference in actual equipment between clans, for they were not working at the time. They later worked but they only let you Use seals or ksk commando type. So now it was time for me to enter a game with my buddies. But wait, how do I find them? I go to my friends list (on socom) and after a few moments, everyone from my PSN friends list is showing up showing them offline, online, in game, or pre/post game lobby. I was not happy about that for 2 reasons. 1. I could care less if a user is offline. 2. WHERE ARE THEY, In game / In lobby, but where? East 1, Clan games 2? I’m hoping this is a temporary Beta thing. So we resorted to changing out PSN comment to say what room we were playing in.
So Now we are in the lobby, Chat was a little rough and broken at times, but I believe this was due to the connection issues they were having. Upon starting the game, it was a 50/50 shot whether you made it in the room or not. If you were lucky to make it in then Hooray, if not, you had to hard reset your ps3, and start over. Once again, this has nothing to do with the game, but the server issues they are having.