SOCOM 3 Review

I played SOCOM 3 years ago and then I recently played SOCOM 2 and other tactical shooters like Rainbow 6 Vegas and some of the Ghost Recon games, now I decided to replay the former since it was the first tactical shooter I ever saw to the end and after my replay how does it hold up? Still pretty good. I still say SOCOM 3 is my favorite game in the series after all these years and for a game and by extension series that is mostly known for being a multiplayer shooters, the campaigns for 2 and especially 3 hold up very well.

SOCOM 2 and by extension 3's campaign feels like the Medal of Honor and Syphon Filter 1 level design of you being dumped into a level, completing objectives while killing enemies along the way. The big addition with SOCOM is that you have a squad helping you out. If you ignore the squad, these games might be the closest thing you will ever get to a Modern Warfare CoD game where it isn't super scripted and the player having geniune agency in the levels. I really did wish the terrible Modern Military shooters campaigns of the 7th gen had this style of structure and level design, maybe then I wouldn't dislike them so much. SOCOM 2 and 3's campaigns feel like geniunely solid and fleshed out single players compared to those games.

Two big points of contention that you could make towards SOCOM 3 are the waypoint markers and the vehicles. The waypoint markers I didn't mind since they accomadate for the environments being much bigger and you still got to search the various areas of interest to progress later in the level, for example a waypoint will lead to a general area but you still need to do some degree of objective identifying. If you have to say kill all enemies within an area, you still have to look around and find them.

The vehicles are a welcome edition to the series in terms of single player since they aren't used way too much and do a decent job at adding variety to the levels. There is enough action going on in these sequences where you have to maneuver areas and avoid enemies attacking that their inclusion didn't feel like a complete afterthought unlike say the vehicle levels in Uncharted 4 and Lost Legacy since in those games the open exploration is hollow since you have no resources to collect, vehicles can't take damage, and there is no combat while riding them. 

With that out of the way, the game also nails many other things, it checkpoints and it's handled well for a 6th gen console shooter as well. I also like how your team and player health will be recovered after each checkpoint, this may sound contentious but I'd rather have this than be in a possibly unwinnable state low on health packs and hoping I can somehow get past it since I don't like sharing medkits with my AI squad plus your squad members have a good chance of biting the farm during a mission even on normal so the game isn't brainlessly easy. Weapons all feel great and head shots feel very meaty and gratifying and I also love how enemies in the game will start limping after shooting them in the torso a good number of times, I don't see "realistic" hitscan shooters after or now have that attention to detail, it makes the guns feel even more powerful.

The leaning feature with the D pad while probably harder to do with other controllers is something that works better than a lot of the cover shooters that would release later on like Gears of War and Uncharted since you can hold the D pad left or right and Spector will peak in that direction, it feels more intuitive than the sticky multi action on a single button that the above mentioned games have since when you hold right or left, you can do it from almost if not every area on the map to peak around and get the drop on enemies as opposed to Gears where you can sprint, have a 50% chance of getting into cover when running or rolling next to a wall or anything up to the waist.

The sheer number of objectives you will be doing in SOCOM 3's campaign is also impressive and gives enough variety to the campaign that it never feels like it heads into the realm of monotony. You be in a vehicle, escourting a VIP, sabatoging missles or various objects, going into occupied areas and clearing rooms, go on the occasional stealth mission, defend an area, setting up ambushes and so on.

Last things I will praise is that the music especially the main menu's fantastic and the feel of feeling like a badass of being Seal team solving conflicts around the world is still kept intact where SOCOM 4 would take the series in a more generic Hollywood action movie direction. There is minimal cutscenes and all the information you want to look up regarding the mission is in the mission briefings adding more to the power fantasy of being a badass Seal. 

After all my praise what do I dislike? It's not too many all though one big one is that your squad AI can be pretty dumb and the squad commands and AI isn't as robust as Rainbow 6 Vegas is. The squad AI wasn't as dumb as it was early on but stuff like R6V did refine it more.

The lack of a stealth meter in the game can still be annoying when the game awards you for being stealthy and encourages optional stealth, I would engage in them but the stealth system is too underdeveloped to make this approach work and I play it as a game where I thin the herd with my silent weapons and then fight from long range.

Melee actions can be too contextual for my tastes and a later level with Serwat can expose how poorly defined they can be since the prompt only appears when you try to capture him after throwing a flashbang. It can feel weird considering the pointless cryptic step to apprehending him.

Overall, I can still see why I enjoy SOCOM 3 five years after me playing even it, there still isn't many modern military shooters that have the feel of this game or series.