Can Metal Gear Solid 4, Killzone 2, and FF XIII turn things around?

[eugene]

http://kotaku.com/gaming/notag/killzone-2-hands-on-293495.php


After sitting through a short and familiar presentation of Killzone 2 at the Games Convention last week I was finally given a chance to play the game.

Before handing over the controller, the developers explained that in the game you play as Sef, a legionnaire called in to help quell the resistance on the Helghast home world of Helghan as the regular army fights to topple the Helghast leader.

The pointed out the various filters used in the game to give the world a darker, more realistic look and talked a bit about the game's new first-person lean and peek system which allows you to stick to walls and then pop-out to shoot, without ever leaving the first-person perspective.

Killzone 2 is ever bit as visually stunning while playing it as I remembered it being while watching the E3 demonstration. The lighting is moody and atmospheric, there's a level of detail in the game that is very reminiscent of Resistance: Fall of Man. Effects, plenty of interesting effects, abound. The end of your gun, for instance, is slightly blurred. Lightning, on the level we were shown, constantly rips through the air above and none of it appears pre-canned. And that attention to detail didn't come cheap. The single level shown at the Games Convention, the same shown during E3, sucked up 2GB of space on the Blu-ray disc.

The controls were very tight. I had no trouble targeting head-shots and popping off rounds at enemy troopers and then ducking back behind columns or walls. The movements in the game also felt fairly solid, I never seemed to get stuck anywhere and was able to dance around in fire fights with no trouble at all. The death animations for the bad guys were a bit over the top, but not so bad as to be distracting.

While the game seems to have enormous potential, mostly because of it's over-the-top look and solid mechanics, I was very disappointed in Killzone 2's artificial intelligence system. The team said they knew that AI was a problem in the original Killzone, so they did a lot of work on it. They said they now operate in groups, can recognize destructible environments and respond to fire, but it didn't seem that way to me.

As I watched someone else play the game, I saw bad guys doing things like standing in the middle of an open door exchanging rapid-fire shots with the player, never bothering to move or get out of the way. Then I gave the game a hand and found enemies standing around, standing with their sides to me as I walked up to them. In one case, there were two bad guys standing next to each other. I walked up to them from the side, shot the first guy several times to kill him and then shot the second guy a single time. He didn't respond. I shot him again, nothing. So I killed him.

I asked the team what the game's difficultly was set on and they said medium to hard. After an awkward pause, one of the developers added, "but it's very early and we're still working on the AI."

I'm not saying that the game is deeply flawed, just that the AI is. Fortunately, they've got plenty of time to work on that and I suspect up until now their top priority has been graphics. Now that they've got that pretty polished I suspect they'll move on to AI.