Killzone 2

Killzone 2 : Stop me when you’ve heard this pitch before. Imagine a first person shooter where you play as bulky space marines battling evil invaders. The kids will totally eat it up.

Story : You play as “Sev”, part of a troop of marines on a mission to invade the enemy homeworld and capture their leader. The enemy is the “Helghast”, a literal army of British Darth Vaders with machine guns. It’s as if someone asked the designers to come up with the most evil concept design for armoured enemy soldiers possible. Their leader, “Scolar Visari”, is some kind of hybrid of Adolf Hitler and Dr Robotnik, yet comes across as the most appealing personality in the entire game, in part because he’s the only character with a personality. Your squadmates are the most vague and stubborn archetypes for video game space marines one can come up with, and the script feels like it was written by the whitest freshmen on campus whose only experience with military personnel comes from their tour of duty on Halo. The story is entirely inconsequential, up to an admittedly solid ending sequence.

While “kill zone” is an actual military term that refers to dangerous territory (according to Urban Dictionary), I still have a hard time believing that someone named their new first person shooter franchise as such without snickering, let alone a franchise that appears to be very important to a company like Sony. “Killzone”, to me, is the equivalent of “BoneStorm” or the name of any given parody mocking violent video games on The Simpsons or such breed of television. Then again, I have a hard time imagining that much thought was put into the game as a whole aside from “the kids like Halo, so lets make Halo but prettier”, but lets not jump to conclusions yet and try to analyze Killzone 2 on its individual merits.

It’s a first person shooter to the Nth degree. The general gameplay consists of going from Point A to Point B, with a lot of things dying along the way. Despite the futuristic theme, almost all of your enemies are the bald yet humanoid Helghast troopers. All of your weapons comprise of the traditional machine guns/shotgun/sniper rifle/flamethrower toys that most shooters carry, except for an effective “lightning gun” that smokes all enemies from close or long range and has infinite ammo, yet only appears in one level (call it the Killzone Kuribo’s Shoe.) There are no alien targets or gimmick weapons aside from the occasional leaping mini-spider or flying gun turret thing, so the gameplay may be better compared to a Call of Duty but with the tense warzone ambiance replaced with the same future apocalyptic soullessness and overdone orchestral score you’ve seen many times over.

The AI is strong, though I feel that almost every first person shooter these days should have strong AI after years of AI being bragged about in every first person shooter press release. Even on Normal, the AI will chuck grenades and flank your backside if you turtle in one spot for too long. I get the impression that this game is akin to Halo in that it’s meant to be played by FPS elitists on the hardest difficulty settings, where the ability to strategize, conserve ammo and still rank headshots while running is critical. But even those faithful will have a hard time adapting to the odd control scheme; Sev is a bit slower than most shooter icons, it seems, and with all of the important commands assigned to the shoulder buttons and analog stick buttons, I often found myself mistaking melee attacks for grenade throws or ducking or fire or running or having an emotional connection to the plot.

The Campaign is strongest when you’re simply pressing onward and shooting Helghast as you go, but the game hugs to certain conventions with great passion. Within the span of the game’s 10 missions, I counted there to be 9 gun turret sequences. I can tolerate one or two gun turret sections in a game, and in particular a heavily scripted, cinematic experience ala Metal Gear Solid 4, but this strikes me as a bit of overkill. There’s your fair share of explosive barrels, one interesting vehicle sequence near the end, one lame duck vehicle sequence near the beginning, and the worst of all, the mission sequences where you have to stand still and fight off wave after wave of enemies. This game strikes the opposite effect of Resistance 2, a game that threw all of its alien adversaries at you simultaneously in a virtual frontline and thus felt like a believable battlefield. Here, the enemies come at about 5 or 6 at a time, sporadically, and these frequent-occurring sequences come across as feeling very drawn out. They also have checkpoints that are rather spread out. One battle at the end of the game can go on for 15 minutes without any checkpoint, and force you to restart the whole blooming battle all over again because of one stray rocket hit you while you were looking for a weapon with the range needed to pick off an enemy halfway across the room. As a whole, the campaign is decent, if occasionally dull or frustrating, but it lacks any memorable moments that make me look back at my time with the game fondly.

Your multiplayer deathmatch options are fairly solid. You get all of the deathmatch/capture the flag variants that you normally expect in a shooter, but with an odd matchmaking system where online games seem to rotate match types instead of stay consistent. It’s a great system if you plan to play for an hour or two, but if I just want to get in a quickie free-for-all deathmatch before going to work, you’re going to have to roll the dice. Likewise, Killzone 2 follows the ever popular new trend of “perks”, or giving benefits to individuals that play and succeed often enough, even going so far as to open up character classes for repeated play. I know that multiplayer shooter fiends seem to eat up these grind-based systems with all-nighter gameplay sessions like they’re playing some kind of MMORPG, but for someone like me that only plays online deathmatches when the odd chance comes up, I can’t help but despise the notion that people who play the game a lot more than me, and are already much better than me, are getting even more of an advantage than me.

Killzone 2 redefines “flavor of the month shooter.” If anything, it makes me feel bad for labeling Resistance 2, Call of Duty: World at War and Far Cry 2 as flavor of the month shooters because those games at least had a stray fresh idea here and there. The Campaign is decent but forgettable, and the multiplayer is sufficient but brings nothing new to the table that we haven’t seen before. Killzone 2 is just another shooter with no identity, other than having the most cutting edge graphics on the market as of this writing.

I made a conscious decision to not discuss the graphics in this review for two reasons. I wanted to assess the game on its practical merits, and because every other big budget shooter is striving to have the best graphics on the market anyways. Unless the game brings some unique visual aesthetics to the dance (look at Call of Duty 4’s campaign for a practical example), a game striving for realism will be forgotten in two months when the next big shooter is released, or the next game trailer is posted on the internet.

But back to the game, the only circumstances that I would suggest Killzone 2 to someone is that either you have a disgusting passion for grind-based multiplayer and have grinded your way past every other shooter on the market, or for some benign reason you must play the best-looking game available at all times. Otherwise, I couldn’t in good conscience recommend this game over Resistance 2 or the last two Call of Duty installments.

Pros : But that said, this is a really, really gorgeous-looking game.

Cons : Needless Sixaxis control sequences. The game will periodically ask you to turn a valve or rotate the handle on some kind of bomb, and doing so involves moving the controller around with a great amount of effort.

3 stars

I hope the praise for Resistance 2 redeems me a bit in the eyes of the Playstation faithful after I branded said game as uninspired. In retrospect, it’s a good deal more inspired than Killzone 2.