E3 Hands-On: Socom 4 - Preview
by Karl Koebke , posted on 19 June 2010 / 2,908 Views
Motion and pointer controls on consoles have been touted by fans as the hands down superior way to play the shooter genre ever since the Wiimote was revealed. I got a chance to put that theory to the test today and asked one of the developers behind Socom 4 what they thought as well.
The demo I played put me in control of a commander with two squads underneath him. One squad was made up of two American soldiers while the other squad was made up of Korean soldiers. I didn’t notice any difference between the two for gameplay so this distinction may be solely in the story. Directing the squads to their goal was as easy as pointing to a position on the screen with the Move and pressing left or right on the D-pad of the Navigation controller.
Aiming with the Move controller felt good and worked great for quickly shooting anything on the screen but was a bit slow for turning. I asked the developer if the turning could be adjusted and he said that you could increase or decrease the bounding box that dictated when you started turning and his experience was that people decreased the size of it as they got used to the controller. I also asked if they were allowing players with Move and regular controls to play against each other in the same match and he said that this was being tested internally and although he couldn’t make any promises they hadn’t seen any issues with it so far.
Socom 4 is scheduled to release sometime this Fall and I’m curious to see if it will finally let us put to the test the age old (not really, but it sounds good) argument between pointer and analog stick controls for shooters.
