Tom Chick is a noted videogame review who has been around for YEARS. Anyhow, he doesn't have kind words for KZ 2.
http://fidgit.com/archives/2009/02/killzone-2-and-the-five-foot-s.php
Killzone 2 and the five-foot stare
... I will tell you why Killzone 2 probably isn't worth playing....
It's indicative of how there's nothing creative or engaging or even moderately interesting in Killzone 2. Yeah, sure, it's a great looking game with a hefty combat feel, an intuitive cover system, and lots of blood spatters on the lens to show you're hurt (although the effect is less of being wounded and more of needing windshield wipers). This is an impressive engine and the graphics are - I think I'm prepared to go ahead and say this - the most technically impressive I've seen on the Playstation 3.
But it just kills my interest level that the developers haven't done anything interesting with this wonderful engine. Killzone 2 consist of hemmed in shantytowns, sewers, streets, an industrial area, a bridge, a crane, and even a brief Matrix-inspired lobby. In other words, nothing I haven't seen before. It's atmospheric, with swirling wind, clouds overhead, and lots of smoke and dust, but it's otherwise static, soulless, and entirely uninteresting, the setting for prosaic Call of Duty firefight after prosaic Call of Duty firefight. Exploding barrels and out-of-place exploding electro-spiders are as dynamic as these levels get. I go all the way to a whole other planet, and this is what I find? Retreads of the same places I've been fighting on Earth all along?
(My comment here: In my post on "Why would anyone want to invade Helghast?" I commented that, if the environment wasn't diverse, the game would get knocked as being boring. Apparently Tom does this here)
The writing is terrible. Godawful terrible. It's slightly better than Too Human and slightly worse than Gears of War 2, which is saying a lot because Gears of War 2 was laughably bad. The Sixaxis gimmicks are just stupid. Stop, Sony. Just stop. You're making the Sixaxis a joke when I have to use it as a pair of grasping hands turning a valve during a firefight. It's even more of a joke when I have to do it after the firefight's over.
So, there you go. The hype backlash has begun. I wonder how many death threats Tom Chick will receive for writing this.
I need to try it, and likely would take issue with Tom, but apparently the game isn't like universally.
MGS4 FTW!
