Killzone 2

After spending just about a month with the Playstation3, I now feel genuinely sorry for the PS3-only console owners who consider this game one of their flagship titles. For all the fanboy rubbish I have had to read about this game, and how it is better than basically every other FPS title out there, I now question the intelligence of PS3-fanboys more than ever.

The core problem with Killzone is that it tries so hard to be everything else, that it has no identity of it's own. Throughout playing the game you get remnants of other games like Halo, Gears of War, Bioshock and even some Half-Life and Unreal thrown in for good measure. And in trying to cover all those bases, it manages not to be epic in the slightest of proportions. The entire sequence is a mediocre, repetitive affair, and my little boy brain is left without anyone notable to put on a pedestal. Unlike most other modern titles where you are left wanting to be Master Chief, Marcus Phoenix or Solid Snake...nobody wants to be Tomas "Sev" Sevchenko.

More than half way through, I was still trying to figure out if I was fighting against Alien Nazi's or Alien Brits, or just Alien Europe in general until I could have sworn I heard an Ozzie in the mix as well. So it seemed much like any other Modern Warfare title, where the Americans fight everyone else, except this time it is supposedly in the future although you could have fooled me, because take the odd looking, vertically flying aircraft carriers out of the picture and this is Call of Duty 4...only that game is better.

Sure let's give some credit, Killzone is pretty. But then by the same token it's almost too pretty, with so much over the top unrealistic lens flare, and motion blurring effects to obscure the dodgy aliasing, that most of the time it feels like you are playing an overly extended techdemo, which if I recall is in fact the case, as Killzone was the original poster-child for pushing the Playstation3 hardware, back in the days when they used fake CG scenes and tried to push them onto us as the real deal. And when Sony fanboys are moaning on and on about Full HD and 1080p, I'll just have to remind them that two of their biggest games, MGS4 and KZ2 are in fact 720p titles.

The sound processing of the game is phenomenal, and interestingly I noted that it uses Yamaha DTS instead of the standard Dolby Digital format. Not sure if that is what makes the difference, but sound positioning is clearly a cut above the rest, with very detailed and very realistic sound effects. Sadly the same can't be said for the music, sure it has your usual orchestral war tunes going on, but again there is nothing that makes this title feel epic. Nothing gets stuck in your head, that makes you want to go to war when you hear it again in the future.

I both loved and hated the very forced bits of motion control. Loved planting bombs with the motion system, because it feels like you are actually planting the bloody thing, but hated it because it simply didn't fit into the rest of the game, and broke the action packed pace by basically stopping time. The concept of having the controller's motion influence your sniping ability is also clever, but at the same time redundant because it's not sensitive enough and nobody jumps around like a kangaroo while playing games, so it has zero effect on the gameplay mechanic.

Gameplay itself is quite slow, and I'm guessing it runs at the usual 30fps. The cover system tries a little too hard, and only works half the time, not to mention that in most cases when you are supposedly in cover you still get shot in the head. Odd that a game with a cover system, has no prone mode, meaning that playing sniper from the hills isn't exactly going to happen. While on the topic of crouching, I felt like a midget throughout the game, especially around other characters which I would view squarely at torso level.

Quite possibly the gameplay would have been much improved, had it not been for the terrible controls. Now I have said many times before that I despise the Dualshock3 controller, especially for FPS games, but in this case the layout make the problem even worse. Usual analog sticks for moving and aiming, L2 for cover, L1 for melee, R2 for grenades and R1 for fire. The tricky ones are L3 for sprint, which you fortunately just need to click once and then it locks, and then R3 for zoom/crosshair aim which unfortunately also locks when clicked.

Now apart from the fact that L3/R3 are the worst "buttons" on the entire controller, the locking of the zoom button is a catch 22. When you are sniping it is awesome, because you click the button once, it stays zoomed in, and you can then adjust zoom level with the D-pad. When you are using medium or short range weapons however, it can be a mighty pain in the ass to manually zoom in and out of crosshair view so that you can actually shoot someone in close proximity. Fortunately, even with the irritation, the less I needed to click those silly buttons the better, because they just don't work.

In a perfect world they would have mapped the aim key to the L2 "trigger" as is the case on most Xbox360 games, but then again those don't work either. The standard controller doesn't even have triggers to speak of, and even with Strifehart's plastic "extensions" the situation isn't much improved. To top it all the analog sticks themselves are the same old slow and floppy imprecise units, and the only time they are really useful is when doing very minor precise adjustments as is the case when taking fully zoomed in sniper shots, and in this regard I would rate it ever so slightly better than the Xbox360 analog sticks because they require somewhat more resistance from dead centre.

I wish I could compare Call of Duty 4, on PS3 and Xbox360 for a more direct FPS comparison. As things are however, my conclusion is that the PS3 is absolutely rubbish if FPS is your genre of choice, mostly because the controller sucks, but also because the games leave a lot to be desired. If there are PC-gamers out there who have discredited consoles as an FPS option, because they've only ever tried it with a Playstation controller, I implore you to give it a go on the Xbox360. Especially considering the recent news that iD can't get Rage to run at 60fps on the Playstation3, as they did on the Xbox360 the latter seems to be the FPS console of choice.

Ultimately Killzone 2 wasn't a terrible experience, and I enjoyed it thoroughly considering I finished it in two days, and I was playing it for free. Had I however spent money on the game, especially if I had bought the Playstation 3 specifically for this exclusive, I would be seriously pissed off right now!