System Played: Playstation 3
Year Released: 2009
Year Reviewed: 2011
Killzone 2 continues the story from the original game, with the heroic Earthlings (Americans) taking the fight to Helghan, home planet of intergalactic Nazi’s, the Hellghast for another round of running and gunning. The objective is to capture the Hellghast leader, Brian Cox, and with such a well thought out plan, what could possibly go wrong? Cake walk.
The original Killzone was a PS2 exclusive and touted as a ‘Halo killer’ for the system. While Halo had beautiful vistas, Killzone had brown and lots of it. Everything in Killzone was brown but in its defence it did some good (in a stupid way) character interaction and mixed things up by letting you play as the different and uniquely talented characters. Killzone Liberation on the PSP mixed things up by being a retro inspired Third-Person overhead shooter, and may have been better than the original …but still too was very, very brown.
Starting Killzone 2 with the obligatory difficulty select screen, I decided that after 20+ years of playing games, I should probably be opting for Hard mode at this point, having honed my skills beyond the typical ‘Normal’ players (those losers!) …this may have been a mistake. As it turns out, war is not fun (who knew?), and as a military shooter which attempts to recreate the experience of having an army of oppressive, blood-thirsty ‘baddies’ constantly shooting at you, Killzone 2 does quite well. The result of this being that, like if I was really stuck in a shit-filled trench where my comrades heads were exploding all around me, there isn’t much fun to be had in Killzone 2. Things are just too oppressive, and after an hour of playing the game, I just wanted to turn it off! I play games for fun, but the experience here felt oppressive, tormenting and exhausting. It could have been the Hard difficulty or maybe the game is too successful at recreating the agony of war, but for the majority of the game, I’ll admit I wasn’t having much fun. Obviously this IS a game however, so instead of the quiet peaceful embrace of death, here you’re doomed to infinitely respawn, and forced to replay the same loud, brown sections over and over like your own personal hell. Again, not a lot of ‘enjoyment’ to be had.
KZ2 attempts to combine a First Person Shooter with a cover-based mechanic, typically seen in Third Person Perspective games. This seemed to work well for most of the game until the end where the intensity of the opposition was ramped up. Here I figured out I seemed to be taking less fire being crouched rather than behind cover, so adopted this approach but problems arose when attempting to move around while crouched since the same button also activates the cover. So, every time I attempted to crawl around near something which could be hid behind, I would stick to it, halting my progress, changing my perspective and (for some reason) even making me easier to hit?! This wasn't a massive problem, but did frustrate a few times when being stuck to a wall I hadn’t intended to use, meant fighting the controls instead of the gang of Hellghast emptying their magazines into my soon-to-be-restarting-the-level face.
Variety is the key to keeping things enjoyable, but again there isn’t much to be had here. You’ll fight the same cookie-cutter enemies over and over, with only a couple of varieties tossed in very occasionally. There isn’t even much variety in the tools available to dispatch the waves of ‘generic Hellghast soldier’, with ‘typical machinegun’ or ‘uninspired shotgun’ being about the spectrum of your options. There are a few variations on the weapon theme, but nothing that’s really fun outside of the Lightning gun you get briefly at one point in the game, but never again. This being Killzone, there is also a massive lack of variety in the environment which has again been coloured from a pallet consisting entirely of browns. The only bits outside of the shit smeared city I can remember take place in a desert …and guess what colour the sand is.
The biggest shortcoming of the original Killzone was the hardware which it was running on. The game seemed to be limited by the PS2 (or the programming), with nasty textures and crappy draw distance. Conversely, the graphics in Killzone 2 are probably its biggest strength, with the environments, despite being in massive need of a re-paint, looking very impressive (and yes, brown!)
KZ2 is not a long game, and the few areas where I was having fun were outnumbered by those where I was not. I don’t know if this was intended or a bug, but during the showdown at the end of the game with the uber Nazi guy and after a few too many unsuccessful attempts, I thought it’d be a good idea to try the (thus far) under-utilised flame-thrower, just to see what happened. The result was not expected, as he did indeed go up in flames like net curtains and proceeded to run around the room screaming and cloaking (more like teleporting) around the place for a few minutes before dying …me having been stood around with my finger up my nose watching this bizarrely hypnotic sight the whole time. Surely he wasn’t supposed to be on fire the whole time? Surely this was supposed to be more of a challenge? Either way I was happy for it to just be over, having endured the section leading up to this over and over again (for about 2 hours) while that useless turd Rico did his best the whole time to catch every single enemy bullet shot with his stupid face, just so he could lay there asking for help. More than once he even thought it was a good idea to stand next to the walls that were on fire, burning and eventually falling down from the damage so he could yet again, start complaining for me to run across the hall and resuscitate him while the hordes of Hellghast turn their attention to me. You're an ass hole Rico!
Despite the massive boost in graphics this time around, it isn’t enough to save KZ2 from being the weakest game in the series so far (in my worthless opinion anyway). The length of the game would probably be an issue for anyone who is actually enjoying playing it and if I wasn’t playing on Hard mode and dying every two seconds, it would have been a helluva lot shorter.
Not really relevant but as good a way as any to end the review is the Six-axis support for the game. This literally allows you to change the angle of images on the loading screens in the game …and nothing else. Talk about pointless? That’s Killzone 2.
5/10
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