An unrealized dream, but still a massively multiplayer first person shooter experience that has yet to be matched.
The overall flow of Planetside is simple. Choose one of three factions and join them in battle, overpowering and capturing facilities from other factions in first person shooter combat. The execution is the complicated part. Planetside is a game of combined arms strategy, and only the faction that employs the right mixture of vehicles and infantry will have a chance at success. Of course, numbers also play a major role in deciding victory, as is the case in any unrestricted online PvP environment.
Planetside is fun on the very individual level, as a first person shooter should be. After choosing your certifications, you are given access to a wide variety of weapons and vehicles. Then it's just a matter of suiting up and blasting the bad guys. Each weapon has a varying amount of accuracy, and Planetside uses a Cone of Fire (CoF) system that determines your likelihood that you'll hit what you're aiming at. The CoF has been scaled back a bit from release, so in general the odds of your hitting are more up to you (the player) rather than the cone of fire. Still, I think the CoF makes things interesting. Appropriately certified characters are able to heal themselves between fights, although this renders them vulnerable to an ambush. Lone guns are generally taken down in short order, and those who take the time to organize their attacks are rewarded with greater success.
My main gripe against Planetside is that the rate of change has been abysmal. It has changed, as any massively multiplayer subscription-based game should, but not nearly often enough to justify $15/mo. In the nearly three years the game has been released, there's only been a about half-dozen new vehicles and four new weapons added. There has been some enriching in the gameplay in that capitols (bases that require bases around them be taken in order for them to become vulnerable) and capture the flag-like capturing has been added. Aside from that, however, there's only been hundreds of nearly imperceivable changes. I'm ticked that there hasn't been a single combat-engineer toy added since beta. Medics have been left equally neglected, with only a map indicator for downed faction members. They've even dumbed down the game a bit from its roots, by reducing the size of the Cone of Fire to the point where effective accuracy at comparatively obscene ranges has long been possible and using cover nearly useless compared to the levels back in beta. They've even largely ditched the idea of armor-piercing ammunition to the point where few both to carry it anymore. Bah!
Regardless of this veteran player's complaints, Planetside is a genuinely entertaining experience. Everybody should try it out at least once, and in a little while Sony Online Entertainment is going to give everybody that chance. They're working on a "Fodderside" project where anybody can download a client and play up to Battle Rank 6 for free for a year. Also, they've announced they're going to implement a number of cool changes that may actually include more engineer toys, MAX armor variants, and more. Perhaps it's too early to write Planetside off entirely, it may yet have a future as worthy as the fun it can generate.