The review I wrote in a HardOCP thread:
Now, for a mini-review of the demo/beta, as someone who's never played any of the PSO games:
The basic model is a lot like Guild Wars - the town sections are "massively multiplayer", but the missions are instanced. You can, however, jump into someone else's instance, which is handy. (If you don't want this to happen, password your party.) Maximum party size is six people, which can probably be a little crowded, given the dungeon-like feel of the instanced areas.
Gameplay is much different than what I'm used to (WoW, FF XI, Guild Wars). Instead of a hands-off approach to combat (click on enemy, watch your character swing and swing, use skills when necessary), PSU actually has you controlling your character ala a third-person slasher/shooter. Thus, dodging and accuracy depends on your own personal skill - mostly. You'll still get some "auto-dodges" in when you get hit, and you'll sometimes miss (0 damage) even when you hit. Still, the mixture of randomness and real skill feels pretty good, and keeps combat from getting too tedious and boring, especially when you toss in the "technic skills".
I didn't get to play with armor very much, but the weapons have a nice bit of variety to them. Swords are slow, but hit hard. Blades hit less hard, but recover faster. Guns have varying ranges, damage, and ammo capacities (and I think rates of fire and spread) depending on their type. Again, balance seems reasonable here, and there's a good bit of room to experiment.
The races and classes are a little underwhelming. You've essentially got four races and three classes, plus a few advanced classes. Besides the balanced race (human), each of the three other races seems tailor-made to a particular class, which is a somewhat sad departure from other games - you're going to see lots of Beastman/Hunters, for instance, and probably not many Cast/Hunters. The classes seem to be mostly differentiated in what armor and weapons they can take, but this may be a superficial impression, since I didn't get a chance to play with Forces.
A major part of the game seems to be synthesis. This is not explained terribly well by the tutorial, but you essentially find "boards" that allow you to make a certain number of a particular item. Then, when you've plugged them in your robotic buddy, you gather up the crafting materials, store them in your robotic buddy, and then create the item you want. Sometimes this will take real time, other times it's instantaneous.
I'm not a big fan of synthesis in its current incarnation, because it seems like the drop rate on the materials you actually need to make anything is terrible. I'll have like a hundred materials and twenty different boards in my robotic buddy, and he'll only be able to make a single item. They really need to tweak this a bit, and make lower-powered items easier to make. This is a shame, because actually gathering up those materials makes it feel like you're not just experience/money grinding when doing those missions.
Ah, and that brings us to missions. As I alluded to before, the bulk of the gameplay is on missions. These apparently consist of killing lots of creatures and unlocking doors with keycards you find on the way. Sometimes you'll need to kill a boss at the end, which is more interesting, but actually seemed easier than some of the fights getting there (strafe FTW). A nice feature is that some missions are preceded by others - if you want to do that mission, you'll have to do the other one first each time. Right now, that's annoying (since the only level 5 mission in the demo is after a level 1), but it's an interesting innovation.
Controls are reasonably tight. I think remapping them to flip the triggers into shoulders and vica-versa would be immeasurably helpful, but you'll be able to compensate with a little practice. Shooting can be tricky until you master strafing, and the locking mechanism for the bladed weapons could a slight tweak.
Graphics are so-so, and best described as "PS2-tastic!". At the very least, they should have given us some nicer textures and graphical effects. Sound is OK - not awe-inspiring, but not grating, either.
Interestingly, I didn't have the technical issues that everyone else had. The tutorial completed just fine for me, and after the first few hours after the demo/beta was released, my connection issues largely went away, no DNS workaround needed. Lag spiked a few times, but was otherwise acceptable 95% of the time.
At the end of the day, a lot of the value proposition is going to depend on single-player and how often the game is updated and expanded online. $10 a month for the same online model as Guild Wars is putting out for free is not going to be an easy sell, unless they actually make good on their promises of "constant" new downloadable game content. I think, for Xbox 360 owners, the monthly subscription fee is going to be a bigger deal-breaker, since there's already the sense of "I'm paying for lobbies and match-making with my Gold subscription, what's up with this?" It isn't a bad question, either.
I'll wait for the reviews before I pick this one up, I think. If Sega makes good on their promises of new content at a rapid rate, and the offline mode doesn't suck, $60 + $10 per month might be reasonable. If they just toss out a new weapon once a month, it's not going to be much of a value. I really, really wish they had gone down the "free service, no new downloadable content" route, and given us new content with frequent expansion packs you had to buy, ala Guild Wars.
