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PlanetSide 2 may well be the greatest war game ever. Not because it has slick mechanics, memorable technology or even innovative ideas, but because it understands and portrays war in a way that few other games have managed.A free to play first-person shooter, set on an open and persistent online sandbox world, it plunges you into an ongoing conflict between three rival factions in a way that truly makes you understand what it means to be a single soldier in a vast war. This is the first-person shooter as a sausage machine, and you're the meat.
As detailed in last week's first impressions piece, PlanetSide 2 is also a game that makes very little effort to explain itself to new players. It is very different to most shooters in important ways, but it's up to you to work these differences out for yourself through brutal, punishing experience. It's a failure of game design that becomes, in a weird way, the game's stroke of genius. You feel the confusion and terror of a raw recruit, frozen by the sheer scale of the war around you, in a way that simply wouldn't happen if the game gave you a hand-holding tutorial and eased you in.
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