I’m still playing Planetside at the moment, which manages to retain a great deal of appeal for me as a kind of ‘drop-in’ MMO, of sorts, and gave it a good run around the block last night. However, not being a ‘regular’ there anymore, in that I don’t spend fifteen hours a week in there, I find my sessions are quite different these days.

Loyalty was perhaps the first thing to go, and thanks to their relaxing of the rules regarding how many empires you can have characters on, on any given server, from only two, to all three, I’ve become something of a mercenary. Upon logging it to the character select screen, I’ll check the current empire population percentages, and then pick the team with the lowest numbers, which is often synonymous with the ‘losing team’. I like to help, and anyway, this also means more targets per player!

That’s not to say I’m any less committed to the particular battles, and still try to help out whatever team I find myself on, in good faith, but I suppose yes, I am a member of the much-hated 'Fourth Empire' now. Last night it was the New Conglomerate (The blue/yellow team), and I discovered that my current NC Reservist character was mostly certified in Infiltration stuff, which made a nice change from my usual roving repair truck or gentleman-sniper styles.

The Infiltration Suit is basically a suit of ‘armour’ that can turn invisible, making it ideal for by-passing the main gun-battles and getting to the target objectives unhampered. It’s also superb for Predator style hijinks, and Thief type assassinations, and unlike many gaming ‘cloaks’, does not consume power, running invisible indefinitely, and does not ‘uncloak’ when you fire, although most weapons still shoot tracers, so your position can be fairly accurately guessed at if you keep firing for long.

However, as one would imagine, running around totally invisible is a bit overpowered, - "zOMG HAX!1" - so the suit has several weaknesses built into it – most notably a complete lack of protection, with 0 Armour Points, compared to a regular foot-trooper’s 150, heavy foot-trooper’s 200, and MAX's 650, effectively meaning that if you are spotted, you’re dead in most cases. The suit also has a very small back-pack, and only room for pistol-sized weapons or smaller, preventing the use of the majority of the common infantry weapons, which is just as well – an invisible sniper would be something of a nightmare.

The suit also ‘ghosts’, in a manner not dissimilar to Thief’s light-gem. Standing perfectly still, with your pistol holstered will make you totally invisible – the enemy sees nothing at all. Drawing a weapon or crouch-walking marks you out with a very faint transparent outline – very easy to miss in a hectic gun-battle, but spottable if someone is actively searching for you. Running along with the gun drawn makes you into a reasonably noticeable pale shimmering outline, and fairly easy to casually spot. Of course, unburdened by protection or big guns, a running cloaker can move at a hell of a lick though, and stealth gives way to speed and agility as a means of survival at this point. So cloaking in Planetside is a game of patience and nerves, often requiring you to simply crouch there in a busy enemy corridor, hoping no-one bumps into you.

There are a number of counters to the Invisible Ninja Assassin. The Darklight implant gives soldiers the ability to see cloaked people in a radius of about 20m, at the expense of long-range vision, an implant slot, and stamina, making it a temporary buff, in effect, rather than permanent ability. Motion Sensors, Audio Amp Implants, Mosquito Aircraft Radar and the effects of an Interlink Facility Base can all mark you out on the mini-map as a red dot if you move, and require the cloaker to be using a Sensor Shield implant of their own to negate. And of course, just because one is invisible, does not mean to say that one is also fireproof, and the ever-popular wide-spread saturation of Plasma Grenades does a wonderful job of target-painting you – just shoot at the pillar of green fire running around wildly and going ‘AAAAAAAAAH!’ We at Van Hemlock do not condone immolation!

Another common mistake that the new cloaker makes, is assuming that because you are invisible, no-one can hear you, either. Almost every action makes some kind of noise – holstering/unholstering a gun, reloading, changing fire-modes, jumping, hacking things – all these things give out subtle tell-tale noises that the PS veteran can instantly identify and home in on. There are also more subtle tell-tales to be aware of as well – doors opening ‘on their own’, mines and Spitfire turrets suddenly going off with no obvious targets, and seeing pistol or grenade kill messages in the chat window when everyone else carries some kind of rifle.

So a lot to bear in mind as I sallied forth on my trusty Wraith (A high-speed weapon-less quad-bike that cloaks with you if you’re using the Inf Suit) out to cause invisible mayhem for my chosen empire-o-the-night! Infiltration isn’t something I’ve done in a very long time, but was actually the path I chose very early on in my time there, being one of the first cert builds I went with. So poor and atrophied skills, but familiar ones none the less, and the whole creeping thing soon came back to me. Cloaking especially is one of best ways to play Planetside and stay alive while doing so, so makes for great sightseeing, allowing you to get right up to the action, without becoming part of it yourself, until ready. Conversely, with no armour at all, and no access to rifle-sized weapons, cloaking is one of the more difficult ways to actually kill people, which can be disheartening if you just want to shoot stuff.

Cloakers have access to four main types of weapon:

Pistol – The various empire-specific pistols all have their strengths, and the common-pool machine-pistol is quite versatile, but they all share a common weakness – much lower damage over time output than even the basic empire-specific Medium Assault rifle. On the plus side, no cert points need be spent to access these. The pistols are generally best used by shoving it in the back of an enemy who is busy and/or distracted elsewhere, using the cloak to get close enough. Even then, if they’re particularly alert, this can be dicey, as their superior protection can allow them enough time to spin, draw a gun and blow you away if you can’t dance fast enough.

Knife – Quite rarely used, the Infiltration Suit comes with the standard Slot-5 Knife, and if pumped up with a Melee Booster implant, this thing can kill in 2-3 swings, in secondary mode. Secondary mode is noisy though, and will blow your cover easily. Still, primary mode is silent, and if you can time the hits right (While an enemy sniper pulls the trigger, for example), they may not realise they’re being attacked at all. The knife also needs no ammo – a real concern with an Infiltrator’s limited backpack space. Still, if you can pull it off, you gain much Hitman Kudos – the closer you have to get, the better you are, and all that…

Boomer – One for the Wily E. Coyote in all of us, this is a lot like the knife approach, except you creep up to the (again distracted) foe, and place a shaped charge under their bottom. This makes a quite distinctive noise, so the next moments are frantic as you try to get far enough away not to get caught in the blast, and still mash the trigger button before the victim can work out what the strange green sparkles are, and dive out of the way before the device goes off. Quite an art, and great for Mutley-Style sniggering. More extreme versions of this involve dispensing with stealth altogether, relying on the sheer speed of a running cloaker, and the enemies confusion, to sprint into enemy spawn rooms, deploy the device, and hopefully, mash the trigger before anyone can take you down. If all goes well, you’ll catch anywhere up to 10-15 newly spawned enemies in the blast. Surviving yourself is a bonus, but not always the point. The Spitfire and Landmine modes of the ACE are also helpful for the determined deep-cover booby-trappist as well, but the down side is the extra five cert points you need to spend to get access to ACE in the first place, a bit of a push for the Reservist.

Grenades - These turned out to be my best tool of the night in the end. Available to all, small inventory size, and three different types, frag (standard burst splash damage), plasma (fire burn burst, with persistent damage over time – good for enemy cloakers and flushing out campers) and EMP (jams vehicle weapons, destroys landmines and shuts down enemy implants). Stuffing a backpack full of these different types proved to be a great way to deal with most situations, although the ‘throwing’ still needs more practice, and in an Infiltration Suit, being caught in the blast radius of a bungled, too-short throw is often enough to almost kill you outright, and the subsequent cry of pain, with optional green fire, tends to bring unwanted attention quite quickly. Plus, have you any idea how embarrassing it is when you’ve been stalking the prey for over ten minutes, waiting to strike, and the first sign they get that you were ever there, is an explosion, cry of pain, and your corpse tumbling into visibility at his feet. Answer: very! More practice needed there I think, but despite this rather lacking technique, I still managed to make the most kills with these.

I lost track of the actual score in the end – something like 18/38 against I think, showing that I really need to finish the BR6 cap on this character so I can have the Sensor Shield implant, and cut down dramatically on my number of detections. I suspect at least 10 of those 38 deaths were me heroically diving on my own grenade to save the enemy from shrapnel and maiming. Grrr! The evening provided a number of very satisfying ‘hits’ though, masterpieces of timing and efficiency. Oh, I agree, stepping out the shadows and shoving a machine-pistol in someone’s back just as they’re ducking behind a rock to heal and recover is cheap, but even I like to be Evil sometimes.

But I was doing my job too, amid the confusion and grenades, managing to make it through the war-torn front lines, back to their bases and in to their Control Consoles and crucially, managing to hack them, and quite of few of those even went through. Of course a great many towers got also got visit from me and my invisible stealth quad bike – planning ahead with where they’re going to spawn next makes or breaks and advance.

Dull, but necessary, as many of these had no enemy troops in at all. I don’t mind though - see, fun as the invisible ninja assassin thing is, the best kind of cloaker, is one that no-one knows was there at all…