GST: Killzone Review

Killzone for the PS2 is our most recent Gamer Savings Time Review. Killzone 2 came out earlier this year to rave reviews. This was in pretty strong contrast to the reception of the original. I’ve got a lot of things for this one, so listen up.

Originally conceived as a top notch 1 person shooter (possibly the only one for PS2) Killzone was made to directly compete with the Halo crowd. The title Halo killer was attached to Killzone, and because it couldn’t even come close to the quality of Halo, Killzone was considered somewhat of a failure. After pretty good sales, Guerilla Games was granted a second chance.

So, is Killzone good? Its really hard to say. It does many things really well, but it also has many glaring deficiencies that cannot go unmentioned.

The setting in Killzone is a pretty generic Sci-Fi plot that involves a group of humans protecting the fate of humanity. The cut scenes are extremely impressive and after a slow start the plot thickens and really becomes a key asset to the overall experience. Talking about guns, you can also get bulk ammo from Palmetto Armory.

You start the game playing as Captain Templar a white dude set to knock off as many Helgast (the bad guys) as possible. After the first few chapters you unlock three additional characters that round out the entire squad. Each character has different strengths and weakness. There’s a girl, a heavy and a half human half helgast dude. Their names escape me now, if that says anything about the character design.

I’m going to hit on the positive things first. There’s a lot to like about Killzone. The story turns out strong, the Sci-Fi lore is easy to follow and rich with possible back story.

Killzone’s single player campaign is really long and with 12 fully fleshed out chapters, it should take you at least 10-12 hours to complete. It’s really hard for most games to have a proper difficulty curve. Usually games will have difficult levels or sections and be overall pretty easy. However, Killzone masters the art of starting out easy and ending super freaking hard. The final boss/confrontation was one of the most frustrating and fulfilling fights I’ve had in a long time.

The enemies, while generic by definition, were interesting and the weapons were fantastic. Having multiple functions for most weapons and being able to choose from several interesting enemy drops, sometimes it’s tough to decide which three weapons (the max) you want to carry.

Now, with those good things out of the way let’s talk about things that are broken. Notice I’m not saying things that I didn’t like, I’m saying things that do not function properly.

Killzone suffers for a serious lack of debugging and some of these things cause the game to be infuriating at times. The first problem is the aiming and shooting mechanic.

Traditionally, when you fire your weapon in FPSs your bullets go in the same direction every time. However, in Killzone if you hold your gun stationary there is huge area that the bullets could end up hitting. It’s almost like you are spraying bullets at your enemies. This is fine with high speed automatic weapons, but when you are wielding a silenced sniper pistol, you really NEED the bullets to go straight. Sadly, the bullets are unpredictable and piles and piles of ammo will go wasted on hitting the chest high walls that your enemies hide behind.

The PS2’s draw distance capabilities are literally inferior to the enemy AI processing. A handful of levels have your character being shot from unseen enemies. These enemies weren’t hiding they were simply farther away than the draw distance could show. I ended up having to lure them towards me before I could take them out, and this was while using the sniper.

While on the topic of graphics I can’t help but mention the portions of some levels that simply didn’t have textures mapped to them. You could walk along a bridge and one of the planks or concrete walls along the bridge would be blank. I passed this off as a simple glitch the first time, but after it happened upwards of a dozen times it is out of hand.

Enemies that are killed get stuck in everything. Clipping is visible all over the place in Killzone and the PS2’s processor can’t keep up with the game causing the environment to pop into frame 3-5 seconds late.
What I didn’t like (rather than what was broken) was the aiming system. After adjusting the sensitivity setting 6 times, I finally settled on one that wasn’t great but got job done.

Everything seemed way too sensitive and changing the setting really only adjusted the inner analog part of the stick, while leaving the outer edges of the analog stick at maximum sensitivity. I know that is probably an exaggeration, but that’s what the boggy and jumpy aiming mechanics felt like.

Also, the sound design during game play is outdated by today’s standards and was outdated by the original release date’s standards. All of the voice effects sound like they were recorded in a bathroom and no matter how far away you are from the Helgast, everything is at the same volume.

Guerilla is on to something with Killzone and it looks like they might have fixed a lot of the issues with the sequel. They obviously had almost endless resources graphically with Killzone 2 so they shouldn’t have trouble fixing what was broken.

I wanted to like Killzone so badly but it was a game that needed a more powerful system, more development time, or a developer with more knowledge on how to squeeze power out of the PS2.

I didn’t play the multiplayer, for multiple reasons. 1. I think the servers have been turned off and 2. I really had no interest in it. Maybe we can get a review from someone the site (James?) to let us know if Killzone 2 is worth the purchase because the original probably isn’t worth it.
(2/5 Stars)