SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs-Fireteam Bravo 3-Co-op

[Poundtherock]

Couldn't find a thread on this so........................sorry if there is one somewhere.

SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs-Fireteam Bravo 3; 4-player Co-op!!​

Credit: IGN.com - by Greg Miller
May 28, 2009

May 28, 2009 - Confessional section: a long, long time ago my best friend and I bought SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs for our PlayStation 2s with dreams of playing across the empty space that separated our homes. After popping it in and finding it wasn't the run-and-gun action we were looking for, the PS2 Internet adapters and the SEALs discs began gathering dust that wouldn't get cleaned off until it was trade-in time.

After an afternoon of SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, I can tell you that I'm ready to convert to the Church of Slant Six as well as call my bud and tell him he might want to think about buying a PSP and preordering this game.

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Yes, I got to kick the tires on the E3 build of SOCOM yesterday, and although I was still traipsing through the snowy compound found in the mission titled "Stockpile" -- the same level I put through some single-player action last month -- this time I was doing it with one of the game's developers thanks to SOCOM's brand new co-op mode.

Available in both ad-hoc and infrastructure modes, co-op sets you and up to three additional friends (or random strangers) loose on the game's nine-mission story. If you've polished off the official missions already, you can hop into the options and modify the experience as you see fit by changing the objectives, enemy placement, and more. Whoever is setting up the match will act as the squad commander named Wraith (who is the same leader from the single-player campaign) and choose the mission from the Operations Map that opens every level. Once that's decided and the room is named -- feel free to put a password on it to keep the riffraff out -- players can begin joining and customizing their loadouts with the 70 available weapons, each of which can have five different attachments.

Once you get into the game, things are pretty much the same as the single-player experience -- which speaks to the stability of the engine and the fluidity of gameplay. Of course, instead of playing in silence I was now shouting out enemy locations to my partner and planning attacks. Because I was playing an ad-hoc match, the shouting was the easiest way to keep the team in line, and the same will be said for infrastructure because the game supports voicechat. Now, there were just two of us for this snowy romp -- the AI plays the other half of the team when you don't have a full quartet -- but SOCOM supports drop-in and drop-out gameplay, so if another friend had tried to join, he or she could've popped into our game without a problem.

Aside from the fact that the game was running well -- allowing me and my partner to strafe, automatically duck behind cover when I wasn't locked on to anyone, etc. -- it was actually a lot of fun to play. Sure, I had played through this level during Sony's L.A. event in April, but this time, I could hear the rat-a-tat of my machine gun, listen to my squad commands get shouted as a I chose them on the screen, and man a turret in an attempt to make a whole lot of the enemy's wives widows. You tap Left on the D-Pad to switch weapons, tap Right to change firing modes, tap Up to use your scope and tap Down to go back to your normal view. Everything from using Triangle to go prone and Square to reload felt like it was in the right place and a breeze to get the hang of.

Take them -- dead or alive.​

Never being one for complicated menus, I was happy to get some more time in with SOCOM's squad commands. Tapping circle while targeting an enemy tells the troops to take the target out, aiming at an area and tapping the button tells the guys to move to that point and tapping while targeting a door has the squad turn the handle and clear the area. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty and tell the boys to fire at will, be stealthy, and a whole bunch of other stuff, you can hold circle and navigate an on-screen menu. Swank.

Really, we've only just scratched the surface of SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, but my demo only lasted so long, you know? Although Slant Six isn't ready to talk about it, there is a competitive multiplayer side of the game for two to 16 players and there are online clans. Of course, there are also medals and ribbons to earn, weapons to unlock and intel documents to find. It seems like you're going to have a lot to do in this T-rated title.

Want to know more about SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3? Well, I've already told you about everything Slant Six and Sony will be showing at E3, but you can hit up the two-player tournaments the Official PlayStation Blog is hosting Sunday, May 31, 2009. After that, keep checking out IGN's E3 index for everything coming out of the show.

Bout time! Cut, I know you a big SOCOM fan as well; we all need to get some 4-man teams wrapped around this.