Killzone 2 demo thoughts
By RyanJW 3 Comments
I don't really empathise with the complaints about the floaty controls I've heard in various places, and I thoroughly enjoyed what little action there was. I think the demo is far too short to call any conclusions either way though, so I'm pretty much as oblivious as I was before of how good the overall game will be.
All I know now is that the combat is solid, the cover system works well, and that it looks superb. In fact, the game is a technical marvel in pretty much every way including the sound.
I never try to put too much weight on single-player demos anyway, because it can be really difficult to gauge the quality of a game based on such a short segment. I mean, pretty much all the criticisms I've heard of Killzone 2 (cliched set-ups, action in a warehouse, etc) could be levelled at games like Half-Life 2 if you were to take an equally short segment of the game out of context.
I seriously doubt the whole game will consist of the demo copy/pasted a thousand times, but I get the impression that's what people are expecting. Maybe I'm being too optimistic.
One thing I did find is that the combat is much better if you use the Call of Duty-style scheme (Alternate 2 and enable hold zoom), which puts zoom on the left shoulder button. I much prefer aiming this way, much like you do in Call of Duty 4 & 5, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Uncharted where you move your aim into position while zoomed out, then zoom in to actually fire once you're in the right region.
The aforementioned games pretty much force you into it though, whereas Killzone 2 gives you the option — I kind of think it'd have been a better design decision to softly force it in Killzone 2 too by taking away the crosshair when not zoomed out.
Annoyingly the only control scheme with this set-up has 'use cover' on L2, which is a serious pain to use at the same time as you typically don't use L1 and L2 at the same time in any game ever and it's a bit awkard on the fingers. I would very much like fully configurable controls.