Killzone 2

Well it's time again for a review. Today I've picked a game that had a lot of hype when it came out, Killzone 2 for the PS3. I mentioned it in some of my previous entries and after getting sidetracked by Borderlands beat it a couple of days ago so now I suppose I should give my impression of it. It was supposed to be a big game that was gonna boost the PS3 and I know it caused its fair share of console war debates. Actually the original Killzone was sorta supposed to be the PS2's response to Halo but never managed to live up to that, apparently it did stir up enough debate that it got a sequel though and a second chance to prove itself.

Killzone 2

Overall:

You play the role of an ISA (Interplanetary Strategic Alliance) soldier named Sev who is with "Alpha Team" as they invade the planet of Helghan in response to the events of the first game where the Helghast invaded one of the ISA planets. As Alpha Team apparently has more experience and is battle hardened they (and thus you) tend to get sent behind enemy lines and to do the more difficult missions though generic ISA guys do appear fairly often to lend a hand. Your goal is to capture the Helghast leader Visari and assist in the capture of their capital city. The game plays as a FPS with a regenerating health and cover system and was made by Guerrilla Games (and published by Sony). It also incorporates the Six-Axis motion control thing in a handful of situations, but it was a pretty minor thing and I didn't consider it a positive or negative.

Pros:

The game looks good, really good. The graphics are definitely top notch and the explosions are frequent and well done(+0.50). While you do see a lot of destroyed city landscapes they do manage to give you a few different areas to fight in such as a moving train, a desert, and inside a spaceship so it's not all brown gritty city-scapes(+0.50). While there are only a few cut scenes they're really good, the opening propaganda piece done with Visari's speech in the background as you see the first wave of the ISA prior to the start of the game (you're in the second wave) get gunned down and totally dominated was really great and added a lot to the atmosphere of the game(+0.25). The ending one was also good but not quite as good as the opening one.

As far as in-game moments go you get a mixed bag. There are some moments that were really cool like holding a position near an enemy arc-tower early in the game and at the end when you're pressing forward with the last remaining ISA forces to reach your objective, that was really intense with gunfire everywhere and instilled a good frantic sense(+0.50). They're also good about keeping the ISA from doing too well and just being an overwhelming force because you're there as the super awesome human controlled player. You see a lot of cases where the ISA gets their asses kicked and it keeps the Helghast as a formidable enemy (if you just slaughtered them all the time they wouldn't be as dangerous)(+0.50). But as you'll see in the Cons section it isn't all sunshine on the gameplay front.



The game did have a good variety of guns to pick from and I liked the electricity gun enough to mention it as a small plus in its own right(+0.25). The enemies were cool, I like the look of the Helghast and they came in a couple of slightly different varieties so that was nice too(+0.25). The heavies served as cool mid-bosses and though it's not too hard to figure out how to kill them, they still look cool kicking your guys' ass(+0.25).

+3.00

Cons:

There are a number of gameplay issues that detracted from the Killzone 2 experience, some minor, others having a significant impact. One problem was that your character seemed so damn short, or at least where the camera was made it look that way, I always thought I was crouched and kept trying to uncrouch myself(-0.25). I came up to most of the other character's shoulders at best for some reason. Another issue I had was that they put in a bunch of "secret intel" to find and Helghan symbols to destroy but to find most of them you'd have to search but you nearly always have some guy yelling at you to keep moving so it was a pain in the ass if you wanted to look for them(-0.25). Also if you wanted to see what the intel said you had to go to some Killzone 2 website apparently and that's just lazy, the reason I halfway cared about the findable items in Gears of War 2 was cause it gave you a little more background info about characters and places, here where the story is better they could have taken even greater advantage of that but dropped the ball. The cover system was also slightly flawed in that you weren't completely covered and I died several times while in seemingly great cover(-0.25).

Another set of gameplay issues I had involved the weapons. There are plenty of weapons to be sure but besides the main ISA rifle, the generic Helghast rifle, and the heavy Helghast machine gun you would see most of the others maybe once or twice(-0.50). The sniper rifle has one level mid-game where they introduce it and it's common, and you see it during the last fight and that's about it. The best gun in the game, the electricity gun (I can't remember what it was actually called) was basically a Tesla Coil you carried around and kicked all sorts of ass with but you only get it for part of one level. Making this worse was the fact that you could only carry two weapons and one of them had to be your crappy pistol so you really could only carry one "real" gun(-0.50). This made it pretty hard to try out the decent variety of guns available as sometimes you basically had to drop a cool gun cause they had a section that was made for you to use a certain different gun.

Something else that bothered me were the difficulty spikes. The game itself was normally fairly average in difficulty with a few notable exceptions that made you want to rip your hair out(-0.50). The tank on the train and the infantry battle right before the final boss come to mind as the two worst. Questionable ally AI in these situations didn't help (Your teammate runs straight into literally 7 or 8 enemies and surprisingly enough goes down almost instantly)(-0.25).

-2.50

Overall Rating: 7.5/10

Yeah yeah, I know you guys bitch that I give too many games a rating in the 7 or 8s, bite me.