MikeB´s Killzone 2 review (sp campaign)

[MikeB]

My review of Killzone 2 single player, I completed the single player campaign on normal and I'm now playing in Elite mode. I killed about 700 Helgast so far and I earned about 35% of trophy score (just single player trophies).

The shiny graphics and the awesome 7.1 surround sound are absolutely top notch!. To put it short it's the best looking shooter I have played so far!

As Guerilla Games pointed out they went for a movie-like analog look and this works very well indeed. Especially the animations are very smooth, varied and very impressive, you'll see Helgast and allies jump over fences and die varied deaths, grabbing shot body parts, drop to the ground firing a last salvo and finally drop dead in a pool of blood. They added a lot of visual effects, lots of smoke, particles and blood splatters as you get hit and thus things will sometimes get hard to see when you get hit by enemy fire, especially as colors fade. Textures are very sharp and the lighting is awesome, although there are some loading slow-downs here and there, partly probably due to the game having no harddrive install (everything is streamed from the Blu-Ray disc). Strangely this seems to be happening significantly less in some of the later bigger maps (some are huge!) where I would run around without a "loading..." message at the upper left corner of the screen.

Acting performances and the story are atmospheric, believable and adequate, but some of the dialogues sound a bit cheesy and rude (however Sev is forgiven, considering all the pressure in this "fucking" war. ) Lip sync is adequate but not perfect. The levels become increasingly more impressive and hectic as you push forward and that's just the way I like them to be! Some of the final battles are just jaw dropping and truly feel like a full scale war, unlike I have ever experienced in a video game so far! 8-)

The controls are excellent, although I changed the defaults. I enabled the L1 button for zoomed shooting, so when pressed it zooms for an over the gun look, hitting R1 to fire the gun and releasing L1 gets you back to normal view (default is pressing the right analog stick I believe and pressing it again for normal view). Running is done by first pressing forward with the left analog stick and then pressing it as you push forward, I think this works remarkably well. By pressing L2 you stick to walls and by pressing forward you are able to get out of cover to shoot at the helgast, after returning the analog stick to the neutral position you get back into cover, you can also walk while in cover and shoot from the side of walls. I like this control method a lot!

It's a Triple A game for me and I hope many future shooters will take example from this arty game!

Comparison with Resistance 2.

Two very different games (thus try both!), but both are IMO most excellent. For starters Resistance 2 looks significantly more cartoony, but you encounter massively huge bosses, also the story is more interesting for me (as like Indepence Day for Resistence vs Battlestar Galactica for Killzone). A big difference with regard to the surroundings, Resistance 2 takes place on Earth with big dense forests, swamps and urban areas in recognizable cities like San Francisco and Chicago, Killzone 2 takes place on a far away dark hostile industrial planet with fierce weather conditions.

Resistance 2 supports 60 player online battles and an 8 player co-op campaign with lots of objectives and modes. Killzone 2 supports 32 player online multiplayer, but I am not yet in the position to adequately compare them.

As much as I love Resistance 2's single player campaign, Killzone 2 tops it for me. The whole atmospheric experience and awesome polish throughout in Killzone 2 is IMO of must-experience-yourself quality! I hope this game will set new standards for the FPS scene!

Bring on Resistance 3 and Killzone 3, I can't wait! 8-)