It's a massive online sci-fi themed FPS, where battles take place on multiple 64 square mile continents with thousands of players fighting for territory control at once.
The cash shop system they use is also one of the best I've seen in a F2P FPS game. You gain "certs" through in-game XP and you get XP for almost everything, except standing around and scratching your ass. You can use certs to unlock abilities, item upgrades, scopes, new weapons, etc. You can buy SOE's "station cash" to instantly unlock new weapons or cosmetic items but you cannot straight out buy certs, i.e. to pay for weapon/player/vehicle upgrades. Those must all be earned in-game. The weapons are referred to as sidegrades. So if one weapon has high damage and low rate of fire, it's sidegrade might have lower damage and a higher rate of fire so it balances out. Also, you can trial weapons for half an hour every 2 hours or so.
You start out with access to a set of default weapons for every class and access to all the vehicles in the game.
Anyway, if you're interested check out:
http://www.planetside2.com
Also, I'll break down the Factions for you so you don't jump in there with a head full of rocks.
New Conglomerate: Freedom Fighters, Backed by shadowy Corporations, Makeshift weapons/vehicles
Infantry: High damage, low ROF, high recoil, high reload time (i.e. slow)
Vehicles: High armor, high dmg, low rof, high reload time, low maneuver/speed
Vanu Sovereignty: Lasers, Aliens, Religious zealots
Infantry: Mid-dmg, mid-ROF, mid-reload time, mid-recoil, no bullet drop (except bolt action rifles), damage degradation over distance (i.e. the further the bullet travels the less damage it does)
Vehicles: Mid-dmg, mid-rof, increased hover ability, high manuever, mid-speed, mid armor, mid-reload time
Terran Republic: Military, Dictators, Restoring the rule
Infantry: Low-dmg, high-ROF, low-recoil, low reload time
Vehicles: Low-dmg, high-ROF, high speed, high reload, mid-manuever, low armor, low reload time
I advise giving before you decide to devote any real time to your player, make a player on a random server, try out all the classes/weapons/vehicles for that faction and do the same for each faction.
Then after you've tried them out and have decided on a faction to play, pick a good server. Some of the servers really suck and are kind of one or two-sided. It's usually the NC that are the underdog on the lower-pop servers since they require a bit more skill to play than the TR or Vanu but they're terrors on servers where they have dedicated outfits (clans) rolling large.
Oh yeah, if anyone is interested I'm Ninjacalypse, New Conglomerate, 666th Devil Dogs Outfit on the Connery Server, which is the most popular American West Coast server.
If anyone decides after reading this and checking it out to get serious about PS2, SOE is having a triple-cash deal on Dec. 21st, meaning if you buy Station Cash from the website or if you redeem a SOE Station Cash card, you'll get triple the Station Cash. They have double and triple cash deals on various holidays so it's usually a good idea to hold off on buying SC or redeeming SC cards until those times.
