"Go kill that guy!" KillZone 2 Impressions
By vidiot 6 Comments
Everyone is dropping their own early opinions of Killzone 2, so I thought I might add my own two cents over this insane game.
Jeez where do I begin. I guess I should start out by being critical, this game is getting heaps of praise, which it most certainly deserves, but I've had a few moments of head scratching.
The Hellghast are bad. I know this because they have British accents and have red eyes.
I'm a good guy. People call me Sev. I'm with some other people. They tell me what to do. They also swear.
I'm on the Hellghan planet. The Hellghast don't like that.
I looked in the game's manual in order to catch myself up to what's going on. There's not a single page in it that says anything about the context of the game.
They were kind enough to stick a giant piece of paper advertising PSP games though.
I'm not asking for Killzone 2 to have deep psychological undertones ala Bioshock. But in comparison, so far I've found more affinity for the storyline in the first Gears game. I don't care about any of the characters I'm with so far. They seem entirely interchangeable, at least Gears gave their characters personality...shallow personality, but personality nonetheless. At least I remember them. To be fair I'm only in the early portion of the game, who knows perhaps things will eventually get better. Not counting on it.
Aside from that, Killzone 2 is straight up amazing. Easily trumping every game on the market in terms of graphical fidelity this game is something else to just look at. I haven't stopped to just take in the scenery of a game in a long time, everything from back alleys to beaches are just gorgeous.
Even though the plot takes a back seat, the amount of trigger happy events so far have been so consistent that I have yet to really care too much. When your on a beach and thirty red-eyed Hellghan marines are sprinting toward you, the tendency to think of the game's context is thrown out the window. In the last few hours I've easily experienced some of the best FPS moments I've ever had in years. The weapons are great, the set pieces...my god...
I think Killzone finally found it's place in the FPS community. It's able to exist on it's own, it has a good cover system that surprising works in first person, and a great variety of weapons.
Killzone 2 is a graphical benchmark game. Similar to Doom 3, for better or worse, one of the major aspects associated with it with be it's visuals. It's one of those games you look at and remind yourself: "One day, most games will hit this quality." And for that alone this game is worth checking out.