I just played my first few games here, and I'm just bewildered. My friends recommended this game (and am playing as an alt on my brother's account), and seeing this beta forum shows it has a pretty decent cult following, but from the games I've played it is the worst thing I've ever seen in my life.

Joined my first game after playing around with the "SP" I was given and promptly ran out of money. Joined a game with a shotgun (for obvious reasons) and found that 90% of the map was open areas, which forced me to either camp or run with my pistol sidearm, I chose the latter, and found the pistol killed enemies faster at medium range than my shotgun did at close range. To add to the uselessness of my shotgun, the second I fired it, the sound crapped out and stuttered for the rest of the game. Every time I tried to fire my shotgun, the muzzle flash made my frame-rate have a seizure. The reloading sequence for my shotgun was bugged, because whenever I sat and watched as my character pushed six shells into the clip, when I went into battle I only fired once before I ran out of ammo.

Second game was no different, instead of crapping out after I shot my shotgun, the sound started out already stuttering. I met some people with black armor that could survive two point-blank shots before turning and depleting my health in nil seconds. For some reason there were two or three team-mates standing in the big spaceship that served as our spawn-point, but they were never kicked for inactivity, just making the already skewed game worse.

In my next couple of games, I found that my shotgun rarely if ever killed enemies in one shot, it usually left them with zero health, requiring an extra shot to finish them off, or, more often a team-mate would shoot him once with a rifle and take my kill points. I was constantly run over by cars, the enemy often called in big tanks that half of my team shot with shoulder-fired rocket launchers to no effect.

Coming back to the issue of frame-rate lag, it got worse with every game, to the point where I had to shut down my system, and here I am now writing this article. For the record, I have played every other popular online game on this PS3 with zero lag or connection issues, up until this point.

So........what? Why do so many people like this game when I find I can't even play it without getting frozen screens that last for five seconds at a time, at which point they unfreeze and I am dead? I never even got to see how well the actual shooting worked, because the only time I killed people was when I snuck up behind them or finished off weak enemies with my pistol.