kupomogli said:
So I finally played the Killzone Mercenary beta. It's only a single map, but here's my opinion on that map and the gameplay based on four hours of play time. In short, it's a piece of shit, but read on if you want because I go into detail why.

First off, I'll mention the good things about it. You have four different sets of items, primary weapon, secondary, a grenade type, and a arc whatever the hell it's called and have a lot of options to choose what you want to use, as long as you have the money. Getting money off of every action, killing someone, picking up their valor card, picking up their ammo, etc, allows you to work your way towards getting those many pieces of equipment.

Now the bad things about it, which first and foremost is load times. Whenever joining a game it takes a good 30 seconds or more to load just getting into the game, then atleast a minute to load the stage. Once you finish a game, you can't exit the room in order to join another, send an invite, literally nothing for about a minute atleast, 30 seconds reconnecting to the people you were already playing with, then another 30 seconds to a minute loading the stage to go back to the deployment screen. If you choose to play the same stage again it's another 30 seconds to a minute of loading after the 60 second deployment wait time. So there's atleast three to four minutes of time in between each match.

Now onto the gameplay. Killzone has always been Call of Duty like since the second game, but it's atleast had its differences. This is just Call of Duty with the Killzone license and nothing more, a few tweaks to the system, is all. Kill streaks are replaced by the arc items which can be collected from capsules that drop from the sky or when the one you're equipped with fills up after a certain amount of money making actions have been done. The problem with this is that many of these are just poorly done.

Um what? Kill streaks mean getting kills in a row without dieing. The van-guard kill counter does not reset upon death. Also van-guards are an integral part of the gameplay, not just bonuses you get once or twice a match.

The Vulture allows you to see enemies for a period of time through all surfaces, but the problem with this one is there's a sort of filter over the screen at first making a poor experience even more so, and the other problem is the red tint the enemies have, a lot of the time you can't tell if through an object or not when they're a closer distance. I would have rather had them on my radar only.

I never had this problem. Which map is this?

The AC130 or whatever the knock off name of it is. The only problem with this one is that you're forced to use the touch screen and when I press a spot, it always has ever so slightly left of where I pressed. Sometimes because the map is spinning around if I press where an enemy is at but say a tower is in the way, the game assumes I'm clicking on the tower and will attack there, not even close to where I meant it to attack.

I feel the same way about this van-guard.

The Porcupine is by far the worst one in the game unless you're a camper. After activating it, you still play normally, but when an enemy appears, you hit the red lock on target surrounding them to shoot a homing rocket. Let me just say one thing. Unless camping how the fuck am I supposed to move around and press the lock on before dying? Did the developers expect the enemy to just not fire while I'm moving my finger from the right stick to press on them?

What, how? The porcupine is actually really great unless you are in really close combat. Just tap them and boom, insta kill.

The radar jammer. Here's how to jam the enemies radar. Don't run as much, don't fire blindly. Completely waste.

Really? Don't use it if you don't like it then. Also doesn't it block van-guards from being used?

The touch screen melee bullshit is also a problem. One time it even recognized that I got the counter and I still got stabbed in the face.

No, just no. When doing melee from the front the enemy also gets an arrow. If they do the motion faster than you, they "win" the melee.

Now camping is a big part of the problem, but it's even worse in this game. When the arc capsules drop, you'll want to clear people out around it before you attempt to hack it, but here's what A LOT of people do. They don't even attempt to open the capsules. They camp the capsules themselves at a safe distance and kill anyone who goes near them. They purposefully lose the game just to keep a high kill death ratio.

I mostly played pvp instead of teams so I didn't have this problem. Killing the campers watching the drops was pretty easy. In teams though that is a problem, but not with camping. Most people ignore the objective and still go for kills.

The game has a poor respawn system. I've once respawned at the exact same location five times in a row. There's many times that I respawned in front of people getting killed immediately. There have been times I've spawned right behind an enemy, times when the same has happened to me.

The respawns are 50/50. They are being worked on but yeah they are a problem.

Matchmaking is also poor. When connecting to a friends party, you're shown in his game within seconds, while it takes 30 seconds or more before the game recognizes you on his/her Vita. When joining a match that's already started and there's not enough room for both of you on the same team, it's common sense that you'll be on separate teams, but it's very often that you'll be placed on separate teams. Teams don't restructure at the end of every match, so if you got into the room on separate teams and you stay in the room, you won't ever be on the same team, so you have to keep entering and leaving rooms until you're finally on teams.

Teams don't restructure after each match as I said above, so if everyone on your team quits and no one joins or if they all quit when in the deployment screen, the game will start regardless how many people are still on the other team. So it could be four versus one from the very start.

All the issues this game has, the graphics even though they look fairly good don't help make matters better. They make them much worse, especially if you're fighting against the ISA. The color tone of the game is bland and sometimes if enemies are in the distatnce, they'll blend in the background due to the color tones. The Helghast are actually easier to see because the glowling red portions of their mask, really makes them stand out, but the ISA are practically invisible at times it seems, and I'm not talking about when they're actually invisible(the Ghost perk.)

I also never had this problem. Again which map are you playing on?

The level design itself is also pretty bad. There are certain locations that you can hold for a huge advantage and no disadvantage. There are a couple locations that two people could camp together and rake in the kills without having to worry about your back because no one can get behind you and the places are heavy foot traffic areas.

In my opinion the level design is some of the best I've ever seen. The "camping" spots are all pretty easy to clean out. Can you give me some specific areas?

1.  Okay Vanguardss.  Didn't remember the name.  I never said the vanguard reset after death.  Just that it was the same as Call of Duty with a few tweaks here and there.  Such as being able to pick up random ones as they dropped.

2.  The porcupine does lock on, but it's no instant kill.  It has missed people even when they weren't next to or behind something.  Plus even if they're long range, you still have to move your hand from the right stick and click on the player themselves.  Sure you can move forward backward or strafe left right, but it's quicker to just aim at the enemy and shoot for the kill(since the rocket has to get to them as well, than use the porcupuine.

3.  I'm well aware t hat the counter is who gets the melee done quicker.  However, when winning, the arrow will turn from the outline of the arrow to the outline of an arrow to  a white/grey arrow inside the outline.  One time that which designates you've did the counter still got me stabbed in the  face instead of kicking them in the stomach.

4.  The only area in the open beta is that one with the caves and walkways outside.  The one with the large fan at one part.  One of the places that t wo people could easily camp, even one person, is the cave area that has a large opening that leads above the fan with a pipe you can walk along.  Since no one can actually get through the opposite direction with the opening to shoot you in the back, you're covered.  It's also going to be difficult to get the correct trajectory with a grenade reaching all the way where one person would be camping.   If it's just one person you could easily just camp behind the rock that juts out near the walkway up to that cave, Two people the second could check the open area near the pipe to take out any people around there and then come back to the entrance of it.  Yes you can throw a grenade up there, fire bomb, or whatever, but if you throw it further away, it probably isn't going to reach up there because it'll either bounce of the ceiling to the ground or it has to be thrown perfectly to land in front of person who has to do nothing but just back up a bit, throw a grenade just in case the person tries to come up or use the grenade launcher will keep the person at bay.  You basically have two heavy foot traffic areas there.  The people near the fan and  the people in the main hallway of the cave.  I don't camp so I don't do this, but doesn't mean it couldn't be done.

I also hate the.  "Oh you don't like the game?  You must suck" defenses that people throw out in attempts to try and disprove anothers complaints about it.  I'm not the best FPS player in the world, not even close.  I don't even consider myself a good player, and while k/d doesn't mean anything to me, rarely do a finish a match on this game less than a 1:1 ratio, and my joker rating after getting on later was a King, which according to the game itself when starting up, gives you a better card the better you do.