High average scores a case of fanboyism, or is my game broken?
When it comes to FPS games I am the kind of guy who sits down and plays them through in one go. I'd do this with any games I come across, but FPS games have the decency of being short enough for it to actually be doable. I played Killzone 2 on the Veteran difficulty, on my first playthrough, and this is what I have to say about it:
Summed up, Killzone 2 is not remarkable, and certainly not the "Answer to the 360's Gears of War", it is in fact not even good. But it is a decent shooter with at least functionable controls, albeit one that suffers from way too many bugs and other problems along the way.
Before I even got to choose difficulty, I had found something that bugged the hell out of me with this game. The main menu is positively seizure inducing, moving with an erratic flickering and in-out of focus handling that would leave anyone with half a brain with a horrible headache if searched through for too long. Never the less, starting a new campaign solved this issue fairly quickly by taking me away from it.
Now I'm not sure if I was just severely unlucky with my game, but mine suffered from several issues that became all the more obvious during the cutscenes. Music could suddenly drop out, leaving the heroes of the game hurling down on their incredibly ineffective troop-transport pods in complete silence, save for a few exaggerated "WOA" and "HOLY SHIT" from the voice actors. While watching them defy physics while plummeting to almost-certain death without even as much as a sound did make me laugh, it also irked the gamer-side of my being.
Once on the ground, I finally got my first taste of a PS3 FPS, and I must say that the controls were suprisingly good. The cover system, while not generally wanting the same as me many times, -did- work and managed to deliver a compelling "hide - look up for pot shots and hide again" gameplay style which I have always imagined war would be like. In this sense, with the murky brown-grey environments of the generic next-gen shooters, Killzone 2 manages to make its war feel war-like. Naturally it must then also contain a vehicle section, a take-out-the-AA-guns section and some tougher-than-thou enemies to fight, which Killzone 2 does deliver, but not in any way that makes it stand out. I must say that while I had to grin and bear all the way, the game was a decent one up untill the rocket-heavy bullshit ending fight which took me a while to complete.
The actual shooting is competent, the guns carrying a quite nice feel to them, in particular the standard-issue assault rife you get during your first mission. Having said that, most cutscenes usually result in your arsenal getting switched into a pre-set one, making you lose whatever you've picked up on your way there. A rather huge minus for me, as I like bunkering up on enemy guns. Having the scraps you pick up replaced with a full mag and some weapons from back home each time you walk through a bloody doorway kind of removes the feeling of the war being as dire as it tries to be.
Praise being out of the way, I will instead have to bring up the points that hamper this game and keeps it from becoming more than a run-of-the-mill shooter. First off we have face animations, who are on par with Assassin's Creed 2, if not worse. Enemies and friendlies alike can spawn in plan sight, right before your nose, and if you're unlucky they'll put the butt of their rifles to your face while they're at it. The AI when entering a new area, in particular when climbing up, down or over debris makes it look like they stuck the motion sensors to a middle-aged man taking an afternoon stroll. It's done casually, with little regard for anything else except a seemingly desperate attempt to avoid breaking a hip-bone, and while this animation is playing the hitboxes rarely function as they should, bullets aimed at the enemy's abdomed resulting in headshots, headshots resulting in nothing, etc.
Enemies can at times, but in particular your AI partners can be seen sliding across the floor stiffly, as if on an invisible skateboard. During the few pauses one gets in between action, the "Eyes where the enemy is located" function of your AI partners can sometimes get some critical error, resulting in you taking a bit of a distance to your friend as his head starts spinning around The Exorcist-style, his facial expression still unchanging though. This coupled with your friendlies' constant need to shout one-liners and to brainlessly run into heavy machinegun fire doesn't really hamper the game as much as it could, seeing you're doing all the work anyway, but it destroys the immersion with a merciless effectiveness. Environment you have passed earlier on may, if you look back, seem to strangely fade away, and especially if you zoom in you will notice them slowly loading back into view. A clever way to save processing power, no doubt, but still an annoyance.
With the exception of all your team-mates trying to be Cole Train, some invisible walls that doesn't let you jump over debris or small fences, and your Commanding Officer having a god-damned cheese grater as neck protection, the game's overall design is fairly alright. The exception being that the admittedly awesome looking Helghast must be sharing their Tactical Officer with Half-Life 2's Combine, seeing their almost identical need to stack explosive barrels around key-points suchs as bridges, narrow passages and behind heavily fortified machine-gun nests, all for your shooting pleasure.
...Masochists, the entire bunch of them.
Killzone 2 is a stellar example of game-makers having the ambition to create something epic but ending up copying long drafts from other games, and in the end not executing them better than the originals, all the way from the Halo-esque drop sequence in the beginning, to the Gears of War train scene, to the more than annoying boss battle by the end. It is a piece that holds some beauty, and clearly displays the will to make an impact on the player.
Yet Killzone 2, while not a terrible game, cannot honestly be called anything more than mediocre.
- Asrahn
