Killzone 2 review

The best Playstation 3 exclusive first person shooter has arrived in shops and it has gaming enthusiasts worldwide wondering if it has lived up to the hype. In short, it hasn’t but I feel that isn’t something we could hold against it. For a game to live up to the hype which surrounded Killzone 2 it would have to massage the players back while he played a pirate who shoots zombies with a lightning gun and is voiced by Alan Rickman. But since no such perfect FPS exists (yet), it’ll be a while before anything is as good as Sony made Killzone 2 out to be.

      But that said the sequel to the average Killzone is more than a competent shooter. I mentioned this in my first impressions piece last week but I’ll say it again, it looks ridiculously good. The detail, the effects, the style, it is incredible. I thought Call of Duty 4 would be as good as FPS visuals got for a few years but I’m quite happy to be wrong in this instance. The sceptic will say; “Byron you devilish rogue, the grey/brown style is a horrible part of the current generation of games”, so I will address this issue once and for all here. A few years ago the gaming community (myself included) believed that almost every game would strive for realism and this would mean a sea of murky grey visuals in every genre. Then, to our pleasant surprise we received games like Crysis, Mirrors Edge, LittleBigPlanet and Prince of Persia, all of which had distinctive styles and were extremely colourful. This is something I am extremely thankful for. However, if it so takes my fancy, I will play a violent shoot ’em up with vivid explosions contrasting a grey barren wasteland setting. And this is exactly what Killzone 2 is. 

      The dark grey which surrounds the protagonist at all times makes the assault on Helghan an incredibly deep, thematic event and succeeds in drawing the player in. The red eyes of the enemy are often the only part of them you can see and while this does make shooting them considerably more difficult it is certainly something different, a quality which I look for in modern shooters and often find lacking. The difficulty is another thing which sets this game apart. The curve is in what I would call the traditional 1:1 slope, as opposed to many other examples where the game starts at “Not too difficult” and stays there for the duration of the game. The demo of Killzone 2 had me sceptical that the protagonist was near invincible, and he can take a fair amount of punishment but as I found as I progressed to the game he also is dealt a large amount of punishment as enemy AI characters assume you are more of a threat to them from a mile away than your friendly characters are just slightly two feet to their left and I have to admit, they’re not far wrong. Interestingly despite this the Helghast are smarter than AI in most games, this is probably the first example of a CPU player who can use a rocket launcher successfully. And I mean really, really successfully. They take cover and will throw strategic grenades to get you out of yours, making for quite a challenge.

      The controls feel a little clunky at first but eventually the player will adjust to this and there is an intuitive cover system. It doesn’t make you invincible a la Gears of War but it adds a more strategic element to the game unlike the first instalment where you hold the shoot button until everything dies. Something which annoyed me about the game similarly as it did about the first one is the glitches the player encounters while playing it. In its defence Killzone 2 doesn’t require saving to the hard drive but every time the game auto saves it stalls for a moment and once even crashed. The Playstation 3 is estimated to be at least twice as powerful as God, there’s no way it should be crashing even if it is playing a high spec game, that is what it was designed to do. So, not every flaw in the original game has been ironed out.

      Another aspect which this game suffers is the weapon selection. In general the gun you start the game with should see you through 90% of the game and there aren’t that many alternatives anyway. The Helghast guns are either so inaccurate as to be completely useless even at close range or so slow you’ll be dead before you take your third shot. There is one gun which stands out however, and it’s something mentioned above in my perfect FPS checklist, a lightning gun! You don’t have long to play with it and you’re shooting Helghast, not pirates but it’s still an overpowered, indefensible weapon.

      So Killzone 2 doesn’t live up to the hype, but it’s certainly a worthwhile experience. The campaign won’t give you more than eight hours but the multiplayer has hundreds on offer and if you let it take you in you won’t be found wanting.