So you saw my comments about the Killzone 2 demo and at the time I wasn’t all that impressed. The demo was too short to actually tell whether the game was worth a purchase. As you will have guessed from the title my view hasn’t changed much either. While the fanboys are still running about screaming this is a death blow to the 360, the graphics look amazing blah blah blah. As someone who has probably played more games than any of those fanboys, I want to put a few things to rest on the whole Killzone 2 issue.Killzone 2 is one of the least innovative games I have ever played. Two of the things that the fanboys like to say a lot is they hate Gears of War 2 and Call of Duty, but they love Killzone 2. If that statement were truthful, it would mean you actually love Call of Duty and Gears because Killzone 2 steals the mechanics from both those games and slams them together into one game engine. It takes the cover system from Gears along with the overall basic controls of Call of Duty and its multiplayer.
What it does different is change that Gears covering system into an awkward clunky multi-button-sequence. Instead of a quick single button press, you have to hold down L2, then to shoot you have to lean and fire using the left stick, to which the end result will be a miss. So instead once you lean you have to press the L3 button to get the sight view on your gun to achieve any level of accuracy. The controls are extremely similar to Call of Duty and you’ll realise this within three seconds of playing. Except, someone decided that your controls should become unresponsive, with a nice little dead zone on the sticks when trying to aim and unruly stick acceleration. Some die hard defendants call this weighted or realistic, I see it as it is, clunky. Kudos to the guy whose forum post said "it's like trying to play an FPS while drunk". It doesn’t need to be there, it doesn’t benefit the game in any way and it just presents yet another awkward hindrance to the fundamental core mechanics of the game.
A lot of people have made a big deal about the graphics, saying it looks better than anything else you have ever seen on a console. People are screaming about the cut-scenes that look amazing, but they are pre-rendered. In layman’s terms this means you are watching a video, not real-time graphics and there are some very smooth transitions to keep people believing the illusion these are in-game. You are watching a video and nothing processor heavy is happening inside your console. The actual in game graphics are nice, but the textures are blurry and the only thing that rescues the game from this is the heavy post-processing. Overall the game graphics look nice, but far from the superiority that we are being led to believe by the hype. The environments are drab, devoid of colour and overall especially boxy. Boxy structures like buildings, corridors, lift shafts and anything else that can be rendered as a box which will save processing power. The graphics are good, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t surpass Gears of War 2, Resident Evil 5, Far Cry 2 or most of the recent FPS games I have seen, especially when you discredit the bits people think are amazing are not in-game graphics.
This leaves you with one boring as hell campaign that throws very little variety at you. You’ll spend the 8 hours it takes to complete on normal difficulty shooting the same drones, over and over and over again. These little buggers are annoyingly resistant too, you will at times empty a whole clip of ammo into one of them, only to see them run off like an Olympic sprinter with no ill-effects, only to put one more bullet into them to see them keel over, where is the realism there? Occasionally it will throw a Heavy at you, who are easy to kill once you get the knack, shoot in head, he turns his back on you, then you shoot him in the glowing red gas canisters on his back, repeat until dead. Boring, easy and unrewarding and they only appear around 5-6 times in total. Eventually you’ll get to kill some flying things too, but they are few and far between also. Guerrilla made a big deal about having something like 200 death animations, maybe a bit more variety should have been the focus. The end of game boss, is quite tricky because he has the ability to make himself invisible and instantly appear behind you, which is the most challenging sequence in the game. It’s totally uninspiring as all it amounts to is you spinning in a circle before he spawns behind you and instantly kills you with one knife stab. Yet a whole series of bullets from his gun barely scratch you. The campaign is also totally single player, no co-op and that is a big blow. The reason games like Gears of War 2 hold a place in my heart is the number of times I have played through on co-op and enjoy it more than playing on my own. This could have been the same case with Killzone 2.
The multiplayer is ok, I will have to play some more before I pass any conclusive judgements. Here though I can see problems already as it’s difficult to get all your mates on one team and is essentially a straight rip of COD4 and WaW’s multiplayer modes complete with experience point ranking system. This has the same control problems that you’ll face in the single player campaign, everything is pretty much identical with the exception of bomb planting which removes the SixAxis controls and the covering system is no more (why the hell is the covering system gone?). We’ll see how this pans out as I play it a little more online, but the only consoling thing as far as controls go is that everyone else has to put up with the same crappy system.
All this brings me back to my original title point. When you consider how most of the really impressive graphics are not in-game graphics, the completely stolen ideas from two of the most popular game series this generation and overall mundane short campaign are the most this has to offer, I think Edge were justified in giving it a 7/10 review score. At most this should be scoring 8/10. The 9/10 are completely unrealistic as this is not a great game, it’s an average game cleverly disguised in post-processing clothing. Now all you fanboys get your wallets out and get the real game you should have purchased on your Playstation 3, Little Big Planet. It’s far more innovative, has a co-op mode and ultimately has a control system that actually responds to the players input.
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