I have been playing the Socom 4 beta for about 2 days now. First off I have to say I am having a blast, Most of the time....
Maps: There are two maps in this beta. One that's on a naval ship yard, and one that's in an insurgence base in the jungle. Both Maps are large with multiple levels to them. However right off the start there are two choke points per map, on opposite sides. The Spec Ops have one easy to reach choke point, and the Insurgents have one. Most of the kills take place at either of these choke points. If they add a standard team death match (respawning allowed) these choke points would lead to extreme camping.
Guns: There are a ton of weapons. Shotguns, Assault Rifles, SMGs, LMGs, and Sniper rifles, with something like 4 or 5 guns per category. While there is a noticeable difference between say an LMG and an SMG there really isn't much difference between an MP5 and a KRIS. As far as modification of guns goes, the more you use a weapon the more mods you get for it. The ACR (first assault rifle has 5 levels of modification. 0 has a reflex sight on it, 1 has an extended magazine, 2 has a acog scope, 3 has a silencer, and 4 has a grip. So the more you use a gun the better it gets. I'm not sure if I like this yet. When I first jumped into a game I was playing against some people that were rank 20+. If the game doesn't have some sort of balancing brand new players could get put into a game where a more experienced player has a fully maxed out gun. Side note: I'm not sure what good the silencers really do. Even guns without silencers don't appear on radar. It seems that silencers are only good against people playing with gaming headsets.
Graphics: I don't need to say much here. You can go look up videos or pictures of this and see. However I can say the game looks, and sound better than in the videos.
Gameplay: This is where the game both shines and falters. The gameplay can be both fast and energetic, but slow and monotonous. The maps are big and right at the start when the gun play starts it's exciting and fun. But once it comes down to 1 or 2 people left on the other team it can take forever to find them. My biggest problem with the gameplay in the beta is that there isn't just a standard respawn allowed team death match. When you die it can take up to five minuets before the next round starts and you can respawn. This is really where the game drags. Watching someone else run around looking for that one person on the enemy team so you can win the round is just mind-bendingly boring. Thankfully I had my PSP with me and could play that when I died.
Bugs: I didn't really encounter to many bugs when playing. In fact, I only encountered one, twice. The next round would start and, but only 4 people would spawn. So i was stuck watching an entire round and didn't even get to play. This bug happened twice in one game of 16v16. I'm not mad, it's a beta. Bugs are suppose to happen. That's what a beta's for.
Overall: The game is fun, but lacking. There wasn't really much difference in the weapons, an ACR felt like an AK103 felt like a Famas felt like a Scar and the balancing could be a problem in the real game. My biggest concern is that if the real game doesn't have a respawn allowed DTM it's not going to reach levels of success that it has the potential to. Only the Hardcore gamers are really going to find enjoyment in this game.
FINAL: 7.5/10 C+
(Look for my next blog post: Death of video game journalism on April 24th. I'm going to release statistics about the number of Troll, or flamebait articles, on N4G, compared to real journalism.)
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
The charity event will be streamed live from Gamescom in August.
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Its hard to get a sense of whats actually right/wrong with the game so far from your post as most of your complaints aren't very solid. Not having re-spawns is something that a LOT of people will be looking forward to, the last men standing failing to find each other sounds like a problem with the map, or the players.
Not trying to defend the game as I haven't played it, but most of your complaints come off as "things that aren't like COD", whereas I think a lot of people want to know how it compares to SOCOM and other tactical shooters where there's no such thing as "camping", only players who lose to the same tactics over and over and refuse to adapt.
I'm having a blast but feel bad for "vets" who are getting screwed.
While I never played previous SOCOM games I would love all that they are asking for to be in the game:
http://forums.socom.com/t5/...
Can't help but feel bad for them.
I love classic SOCOM, it's such a fun experience and I've already had the heart-pumping moment of being the last man standing and beating the odds.
I play lots of COD and love S&D, that mode required a lot of teamwork in CoD4 and I love seeing a whole game dedicated to that. No respawn modes in games like COD were so intense and SOCOM's system of focusing on this is amazingly well constructed. I can't believe I missed out on this franchise until now.
With that said, I agree about guns feeling all the same. They need to bring back Confrontation/old SOCOM crosshairs with recoil, fix the camera, give us grenade arch, lean, and whatever else being complained about.
They have the modes to cater to newcomers but I think they should just give their core fans what they want, I feel like what they are complaining about would make the game even better. If this is another matter of trying to please the lowest denominator of fans I think they did that already with the spawn modes, which I find fun, but totally opposite to classic mode-- I hope Zipper focuses more on the way SOCOM was built, they need to have confidence in what they originally built. I don't see why they can't give their original fanbase everything they are asking for if they are going to have two opposite types anyway. I hope S2 fans get what they want out of S4.
But besides that, as a newcomer with no SOCOM experience I am in love with the concept of this game.
There are respawn and classic non-respawn games in the beta. It's hard to tell the difference on the multiplayer mode screen, unless you look at the description of the game type, though.
If the game type description says "classic", its one-life-per-round. If it doesn't say classic, it has respawn.