Hey guys, I know about 90% of you, no make it almost 95% of you have most likely not seen this review so I will post it for you. This is from a long time buddy named "Nevada" who I used to work with on the Mod/Admin staff at a site called www.QJ.net. He gives out bits of information every once in a while and happens to also share the same views as many of the Killzone 2 fans here. Since I was working at Qj.net (around 2002) he has regularly received review copies of games so even though you do not need to take my word for it I personally trust his opinions for the most part. Well, I should considering how long I have known him.

Anyways you can find it here at his site as well as the VGChartz reference.

http://www.nyleveia.com/

Review : Killzone 2 (PS3)

Platform : PS3
Developer : Guerrilla Games
Publisher : SCEE
Release date : Feb 25th (eu) Feb 27th (uk /us)

Just a few days ago the Killzone 2 demo hit the European Playstation store with a relatively small splash for the scope of the title. However, by the time the demo had hit the US store, the sheer volume of downloads caused heavy traffic on the network, and people updating or downloading applications/games experienced notable reductions in transfer speed.

Network effects aside, this review will compare my experiences with and impressions of both the demo and the review copy of the game.

Menus
The menu system you’re presented with at first is somewhat of a mix between Fallout 3’s ‘TV screen’ menu and the original killzone menu, but is presented overall in a more standard layout. This is accented with a viewing angle shift while navigating the menu, giving a somewhat 3-D holographic effect which can at first be distracting, but isn’t enough to cause the player too much of a problem.

To ease the transition between this holographic menu and the actual gameplay, the same holographic effect is cleverly used on the loading screen - allowing the user to rotate and tilt the sixaxis to change the angle manually. The loading screens themselves do a decent job of marking out exactly which level and portion of the level is being loaded, as they’re almost always of a key location of the map, or representitive of the location as a whole.

The loadtimes for levels tends to vary slightly depending on if the map a complex built up area, open, or indoors. Most levels contain a relatively even mix of each, which is a nice change from the pace of other games which tend to have entire levels underground followed by entire levels outside, or vice versa. In-game menus are relatively easy to navigate, and control within the menu is straight forward.

Multiplayer and Maps
At this time, the multiplayer component of the game is a little hard to comment on in terms of vs. player(s), as at the time of writing the servers were down. I was, however, able to run through various multiplayer modes using bots whose interactions with me ranged from downright pathetic to really impressive. I say this mainly because, at certain points, I could sneak up behind a bot and stand there completely ignored. I’m told this has been since fixed, but is also present in the demo for scripted events: for example, it is possible to run into the warehouse during the demo and shoot the Helghast soldier on the right while one to the left will watch the person he is talking to die and not react at all.  This seems even more frequent if you kill the first guy cleanly.
I’m glad to say that as a whole, the bots are relatively intelligent and will go about their business, work to flank you, or find a sniping location in a very human way.

There is the occasional event which makes you think, “Damn stupid bot!” But then, if we consider that a lot of the time we might say the same about a novice human player, it seems a little less important.
The range of maps present in multiplayer are very varied: ranging from mutliple level shanty towns to large open industrial complexes, each shows high detail and well calculated placement, and gives a very strong sense of scale and purpose.
Often in games it’s all too easy to throw up some buildings and run around slapping random props in them which can at times make absolutely no sense. Killzone 2, however, has a very natural feel to the structures and layouts of those structures. The content of rooms, or lack thereof, does well to highlight the maps’ tone.

My only gripe with Killzone 2’s layout of maps was that in most cases, standard rooms such as showers, washrooms, bathrooms and toilets seemed few and far between.
As a general rule each multiplayer map is about 1/8th to 2/8th’s of the size of single player maps, but have roughly the same load times if not a little shorter. From what I can tell, this is because a fair amount of loading occurs during actual gameplay - this can, at times, freeze the screen from a few frames to two seconds.
Thankfully though, the locations at which this loading occurs usually matches a relatively quiet area of the map, so you don’t really have to put up with drops in frame rate or freezing when trying to surgically remove a Helghast sniper’s head from 200 yards.
Every single map in the game is beautifully laid out and executed, with an average texture detail much higher than the initial in-game screenshots released last year.  It was recently rumoured that they have actually updated a large portion of the textures to be sharper and more detailed. Again, between the November 2006 review build and the final build on its way to your local game store shelves, even if that rumour turns out to be false the general detail of the game and its maps far outclasses anything seen before on the Playstation 3.
When reviewers talk about Killzone 2, the thing I hear most is the very real sense of weight and mass in the game. In surrounding objects and your own player, there’s a meaningful ‘thud’ to your character’s presence in the world that is lost in most games of this genre, and something I welcome with open arms as it adds a depth to the game which makes it all the more immersing.

Who’s got the flow?
I’ve seen recently comments from people who have played through the demo and complained a little about the flow of the game, with regards to the pace at which things happen and how difficult certain things are. I can see where they’re coming from, but at the same time I must stress that the demo is extremely short, so much so infact that it can easily be completed in under five minutes or possibly even under one minute if you were really going for it. It’s not an accurate indication of what is to come in the full game, or at the very least isn’t very representitive of what you’ll be seeing when you put your shiny new retail copy in your machine. I consider the demo to be the same as smelling a glass of flavored tea: while you can gauge a lot by smell, you really have to taste it for the full effect, and just like with Killzone 2, you have to experience the full game to really get a feel for it.
For the most part, if you play on the easiest setting you’ll notice that the game is a walk in the park for seasoned FPS players; it’s only when you turn up the difficulty that the game becomes more about strategical movements than sheer firepower.
On the hardest setting, use of cover is not only a nice feature, it’s a requirement! It makes the fluidity of Killzone 2’s cover system all the better. Helghast who head for and shoot blindly over, around or under cover, sometimes expose just enough of their head to allow you to fire off a few shots and see their helment spin off in to the distance.
It’s worth noting that when in such situations, you can actually shoot them in the hand, but I’ve found that doing so results in a brief period of calm followed by a grenade.

Controls
I’ve seen this talked about a lot since the demo’s release. Many people find them somewhat strange and it’s easy to see why, the controls are different and have an odd sort of feel to them, even compared to the multiplayer beta.
I’ve found it best to slide the sensitivity up one notch at a time and play on each setting for a few minutes before trying the next one, until you find one you’re comfortable with. I ended up sticking with the default configuration up until the 5th level, at which point the controls had grown on me and I found I actually preferred them to that of the beta.
This isn’t to say everyone will, however, and I’m certain at some point there will be plenty of complaints about it which might spark the developers to release a patch or adjust how the settings work (which I slefishly won’t hope for as I’m now used to the new system!)

Sound
It’s somewhat of a no brainer really: this game is a heavy hitter with full surround support and you’ll appreciate every single penny spent on your AV setup when the shuffles of Helghast feet behind you alerts you to their presence. The sound effects are crisp and each weapon carries its own distinct tone of destruction. The music is mixed well and seems to blend flawlessly with the ambiance of each map’s feel, ruined only slightly by the occasional repetitive sound as anyone who has played the demo (and took their time to reach the first gun battle) can attest to with, “Sev this way, yo dude this way, Sev this way.”
Another element of the sound which personally I found to be a love/hate thing was the dialog. There are  times when what’s being said gets you pumped to kick some Helghast ass, but there are times when you just wish they’d quit effing and blinding every other word. I’ve heard more swear words in five minutes of play around the mid-point of the game than I’ve heard in the entire time while playing both Gears 1 and 2, and it’s this excess of verbal diarrhea that can end up really getting on your nerves.

Visuals
The sheer overwhelming force of the visuals and effects present in Killzone 2 will catch even the most hardened of anti-Sony fanboy off guard as they’ll struggled to find fault in the presentation, so allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment. In both the review code and the demo, anti-aliasing doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job and at times sprite placement can be somewhat moronic: this can be seen even by demo users if they walk over to the beach - where the second batch of dropships land - and scour the pebbly sand, as they’ll come across beach debris sprites that are floating an in-game foot or so above the ground in a fixed position. Theres quite a few instances here and there throughout the game where this occurs, too, but it’s not enough to detract too much from the overall presentation.
Ever since the PS3’s launch in November 2006, and the subsequent release of Gears of War, the Playstation 3 has been in desperate need of a truly graphically impressive title and a title that doesn’t involve cars, racing tracks, and steering wheels.
Killzone 2 knocks all other graphically impressive games off the proverbial shelf in this regard, bringing the Playstation something it has needed for a very, very long time and finally giving the Playstation 3 owners something to shout about. I’m sure, though, that the extremists from other camps will single out any negatives they can find and criticize them out of proportion.

Conclusion
All in all, I can safely say that I haven’t had this much fun with a game since my first run-through of Gears of War, and it’s the first time I’ve had anywhere near as much fun and enjoyment out of a game that’s exlusive to the Playstation 3 - which comes as a shock to me, as when I originally played Killzone several years ago, I honestly felt cheated out of the $30 I paid, but Killzone 2 licks those wounds and makes up for the original disappointment in a big way.
Die hard Xbox fans, it’s time to pay your PS3-owning friends a visit to see what all the fuss is about.

And now for his VGChartz reference.

Console wars?, My $0.02

First of all i would like to thank vgchartz.com for their graph generator as it’s used extensively in this post, hats off to them.
Currently there is a constant flood of news articles claiming that Sony is failing with the PS3, NDP figures floating around getting people on edge, arguing the point to the bitter end that the Xbox 360 is doing better than the PS3, And you know what, PS3 fanboys?, It <strong>is</strong> doing better!, now to piss off the xbox fanboys, It’s only doing better because it’s had an extra year on the market, and as the original ‘next gen’ console which was uncontested for an entire year it had amazing initial sales and continues to have thriving sales due to the various SKU’s all being MUCH cheaper than it’s competition, the PS3, however despite being much cheaper, and sporting a much wider variety of games to play, and we’re not talking exclusives here, we’re talking the entire games collection in general..

Sony is still on track to outsell the Xbox 360 in the same market-presence time frame, Despite the following factors :

• PS3 has always been much more expensive than the Xbox 360
• A large majority of cross platform games run and look better on the Xbox 360
• Economical breakdown began in the second year of the console being in the market
• The games generally cost more than their 360 counterparts
• Much more exclusives available for the Xbox 360

So lets analyze the facts presented in hardware sales on vgchartz, based on sales performance from release, rather than ‘current’, so we have an accurate representation of how well each console is actually doing.
Before someone jumps in and says, ‘well that isn’t right now! and now is what counts!’, you’re mistaken, that’s like saying the Wii is doing badly because the PS2 is ahead in sales, it’s just wrong.

USA

The xbox 36o launched in the US uncontested on the market and experienced initial launch sales which were actually in excess of the PS2 launch sales, within the same release timeframe initial sales of the PS3 started slower but picked up to match the 360, which eventually dipped by spring leading to the 360 leading in first year initital sales.
If you shift the PS3 first year, to the 360 second year you’ll see that the 360 also gained more sales while the PS3 sales slumped, these roughly coincide with the Microsoft SKU price drops, but were mainly due to the poor initial year of PS3 game releases.
As it stands within the US the Xbox continues to have a substantial lead, even if we draw a line from launch to current sales and beyond to roughly estimate final sales figures in it’s third year, the PS3 would STILL be behind the 360’s current sales figures, which will obviously have increased by that time, too.
I do not honestly believe the PS3 will ‘win’ in terms of sales in the US while the xbox 360 is still on the market, though only time will tell if the final sales figures for both systems will tip in either’s favor when the consoles lifespan ends.

Europe

This is an intresting arena, really, while currently behind in overall sales figures, the PS3 has consecutively sold over twice as many units per year on the market as the xbox 360, it really doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the PS3 is actually doing a whole lot better on the european market than the Xbox 360, in terms of sales figures on a level with the Xbox 360, it’s pretty much set to outsell the competition by a large margin within it’s lifetime, i suspect that by the end of 2009, PS3 sales within europe will already exceed the Xbox’s, even with it’s year advantage.

Japan

This is a no brainer really, adoption of the Xbox 360 has always been very poor within Japan, while the Xbox 360 sales are slowly picking up there, the install base of the PS3 far exceeds that of the 360, If we compare this to the success of the Xbox 360 within the US one could be forgiven for chalking this up to prefering the console manufacured within it’s own country, which would mean for slightly less biased sales figures we should look to europe and the rest of the world, so lets do that.

Rest of the world

Xbox 360 is ahead here, but only compared to current sales figures, the PS3 in the same timeframe experience a relatively similar end of year sales as the xbox in it’s initial year, which climbed dramatically within the second, selling four times as many units as it did in it’s initial year, compared to the Xbox’s twice as many, if we project an average line here, we see that within the third year on the market, overall sales for the PS3 will exceed that of the Xbox 360, however if the PS3 follows the current trend of climbs in sales, which may happen globally should Sony introduce a price drop, or probably even without one, the Ps3 will be almost level if not slightly ahead of Xbox 360 sales, regardless of having a year less on the market.

Given this information, is it really right to claim the PS3 is doing badly? when the Xbox which most sites and news blogs claim is doing so much better, is in actual fact, behind in sales figures within the release time frame for everywhere on earth except for the US?
If you factor in the releases for the console over the next 12 months, the PS3’s sales are only set to keep at their current pace, or rise.
That said, it’s only obvious that within this economic climate, a country is more likely to embrace it’s own product than that of another countries, even still though as a gamer i can’t help but feel like Xbox users and PS3 users alike, have all been sucked in to a retarded war of which console is better..  This does nothing for gamers, there is nothign stopping anyone from owning more than one console and enjoying the games and exclusives on both machines.
Think back to the late 80s, do you think people argued over Jet set willy?, ‘My commodore 64 has better graphics!’ ‘Well my spectrum version has extra maps!’, NO, because back then people were too busy enjoying the games to think about how many Commdore’s or Specrums had been sold worldwide, or anything like that, all a gamer cared about was the games.

To all Xbox fanboys, all PS3 Fanboys, all Wii fanboys, grow up and enjoy games, the whole point of a game is to have fun, not to give you something to brag about to others.

he made a mistake. In "The rest of the world" he is looking at Europe + all the other locations, not just "all the other locations", hence why the graphs look very similar (in terms of total units)

since you know him, you may want to let him know.

Will do. Either way I thought you guys might want to know.

I edited my post for more clarity.

Thanks nordlead, I sent him a couple of PMs to let him know.

Nice of him to refer to the great work taking place on this site

colonelstubbs said: Nice of him to refer to the great work taking place on this site

I will look, but seeing as how he has referenced it means there is a very good chance it is referenced on QJ.net as well.

He is very thankful nordlead for pointing that out. He acknowledged you as well in an update on the article!

Cool, nice to see people using the tools!