Seeing it in person makes a huge difference.  I haven't seen Kingdom Under Fire II but Rage without a doubt looks better than Heavenly Sword and better than most games I've seen today.

Its not Uncharted2, but it is amazing never the less

I'm buying

Simple: art! Something that Killzone 2, unfortunately, doesn't have. And that alone puts almost every technical achievement in Killzone 2 on a second plan. Ohh... and I was going to say "colour" instead of "art", but it would be to harsh.

There are so many games that look better than KZ2... Uncharted, Okami, SotC, TLoZ:WW, so on...

BTW, I own KZ2.

I riginally in this thread said Rage and Brink would be the new console graphics king. But after watching this next trailer about 2 mins ago. It's now Alan Wake. Sorry Carmack, remedy have outdone you.

Actually, the saving grave for Killzone 2 was its style and atmosphere (and this coming from someone who hates Killzone 2).  Yeah, it did realistic but the character style (Helghast at least) was pretty cool with the proportions and the atmosphere was amazing.

And since this is a Rage thread, copied from this thread that I copied from an email I sent earlier this morning:

It actually looked really good and probably the best way I can think to describe it was if id made Fallout 3. The back story is basically the same as Fallout 3 except instead of nuclear bombs it’s an asteroid but you’re still someone from an ark who wanders the wasteland.

The game looked really good from what I saw and much better than any of the Fallout 3 environments (though ground textures outside sucked). Wandering the wasteland looked awesome and the town Well Spring had a lot more life to it than any of the Fallout 3 towns. They had it running on about an average PC, nothing too fancy, and it looked good though I have no idea what it would look like on an Xbox.

The vehicle parts looked like a lot of fun and I usually don’t really like vehicle stuff that much. The above link can probably say more better than I could say but it the guy demo’ing it made it look pretty fun and looked like it controlled well. It had me interested at least.

The shooting part looked like typical id game which was good. He had a stealth weapon (crossbow), shotgun, machine gun, and a boomerang that looked like it could be fun. He also had some other fun stuff like these insane little spider turrets that destroyed everything and some basic turrets. The coolest thing were these RC controlled bomb cars that enemies just tried to run straight at you and you could do the same.

Eventually he came to a large enemy that was armored and as you shot him each piece of armor fell off and it was a pretty cool effect. The game doesn’t do any cover system but he was hiding crouching behind objects and at one point while he was hiding behind a crate he shot out a few planks and shot through the crate.

He later did some racing and mutant bash TV mini games that were so-so. The racing one didn’t look bad and sounds like it will have a lot of variety and the Mutant Bash TV sounded cool, but looks like it would get old real quick. I was already pretty bored of it by the time he finished it.

All in all though, it looks pretty good and better than I expected. It sucks that there’s this, Fallout 3, and Borderlands, but this one looks like it might be pretty good.

That's the trailer I watched before starting this thread. From watching Rage to watching that trailer I realized how much better Rage looked... guess we have different tastes.

My mistake. I got Agent and that game The Agency mixed up. LOL

Based on this preview, visually, Alan Wake doesn't look any more impressive than many console games already in release. Good lighting effects and it looks like it should have excellent dynamic environmental lighting to set the tone of the game. While excellent by any measure, they don't really reset the bar by which all else should be measured.

Of course it's really hard to throw down the "final word" opinion as people like to do on here without actually playing the finished game on a full sized display at native resolution, but as of now it looks like the story behind Alan Wake will be what wins my attention rather than the visuals.

Rage looks a lot like Fallout 3, with improved lighting and particle effects. But then I never played the console version, I only played the PC version at max settings which probably isn't quite an even apples to apple comparison.