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Game Review: ‘SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation’

The new “SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs: Confrontation” is a fun, fast-paced shooter that could become the second title this year to vie for the kingship of squad-based video games. When it works.

The designers of the new installment of “SOCOM” deserve enormous credit for the risk they’ve taken. For the first of the franchise’s titles on PlayStation 3, “SOCOM” is an online-only multiplayer that dispenses with a campaign mode and focuses exclusively on large-group deathmatch and team games. The benefits of this strategy are clear: It spends all the electronic firepower of a modern gaming system on graphics and physics in the online realm, acknowledging where most of the fun happens in conventional games.

The downside is also clear: The online-only approach immediately locks out players with no Internet connection and, just as dicey, relies on Sony’s PlayStation network, which is powered by a gerbil running on a wheel. There’s endless chat-room speculation about why Sony’s console network is so wretched — maybe because you don’t have to pay for it, as with Microsoft’s Xbox Live.

The fact remains that you’ll get better connectivity by plugging a kite string into your system and running it to a soup can. Military Times received a copy of “Confrontation” the day it launched, but after spending the obligatory two hours downloading the PS3 updates needed to run the game, I couldn’t actually play a match for another three days. Even then, the game still wasn’t tracking my kills or achievements. By the time it became somewhat reliable, “Confrontation” still froze and suffered from occasionally surreal bugs, as when I’d enter a game with no weapons or was killed by players who weren’t there.

When the network is being kind, “Confrontation” is an easy-to-play, extremely enjoyable game; so far, it’s the only title after “Rainbow Six: Vegas 2,” that could unseat “Call of Duty 4” as the alpha dog of multiplayer violence.

The designers have squeezed all the power out of the PlayStation 3 to create excellent graphics, used well in big, detailed maps. The game takes place in North Africa, but because it’s multiplayer only, there’s no plot — just a set of gunfight venues for SEALs and terrorists. They are, by turns, apocalyptic, as in the bombed-out city, or gorgeous, as in the walled market town, and you can have day or night battles in each.

The sound design for “SOCOM” is superlative and will reward players who have good stereos hooked up to the TV. The ambient audio in each map is so detailed that if there’s a lull in the action, you can find bad guys by listening for their voices or even their footsteps.

If you’re close enough to other players in “Confrontation,” you can hear whatever they’re saying, even if they haven’t keyed their radio or aren’t on your team. This means that players who are listening to music bleed tell-tale noise through their headsets, which can make them easy to track if the map is quiet.

Like its predecessors, one version of the new game comes with a headset for talking live with your teammates — this time, it’s a Bluetooth earpiece you can also use with your cell phone, if you’re down with the Starfleet look.

In another nod to aggressive gamers, you can taunt guys you’ve just killed by doing a little jig over their bodies.

A few quibbles: There are no vehicles or emplaced weapons; there’s no full first-person view, only different over-the-shoulder, third-person perspectives; and even though you can access different models of each type of weapon — assault rifles, shotguns, etc. — there seems to be no difference in the way the M4 and the G36, for example, handle in combat.

But overall, if Sony and developer Slant Six Games can work out the network problems, “Confrontation” could become a very dangerous thief of leisure time.

SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs: Confrontation

$59.99 (Bundled with Bluetooth earpiece); $39.99 (Game only). PlayStation 3. Rated M for “Mature.”

Buy? Rent? Skip?

Our verdict: Buy