KillZone

[dhau]

It's a fresh take on FPS genre for PS2, however the lack of jumping and invisible walls in most unexpected places make me feel nauseatic... I don't regret buying it, but if I would tried it first, I wouldn't buy it. To put it in simple terms - fun factor from lowest to highest:

Doom3 < KillZone < Halo 2 < Metroid Prime 2: Echoes < Half-Life

[Chuplayer]

I like the atmospheric qualities of this game. It looks really interesting. As for the jumping, if the game and its environments don't call for it, why bother having it? Invisible walls always tick me off, though.

Maybe I'll pick it up next year.

[Guest]

Actually it's a pretty good war game. It is very easy to die if you're not careful, and not so hard even if you are. I'm playing on Normal but thinking of switching to sissy mode, since Normal is very hard on my controller skills...

[corpsicle]

I tried this briefly on a demo pod.
Ever seens i saw the first screenshots of this game i thought it looked awesome.
And seeing it in motion prooves that it actually works, the designers has made a fantastic job.
However, the dualshock does not apply to FPS games, this is fact.
And also, i get the feeling that it is just what "Guest" above just said, its a war game.
Its more like medal of honor than halo or halflife, and this is not what i expected.
This makes it bland and just as dull as any old WWII FPS.
Sorry, but it seems to blow =( ...
( ive only played two levels though )

[atom]

Yes, the FPS genre has been beat to death, and the sub genres are also tired out. For years all you saw were blood and gore games like doom, where you run mindlessly through levels blowing aliens and demons to pieces. Halo probably fits best in that category. Then there came games like half-life, it wasnt the first in the genre but its the game that defines the sci-fi fps. Medal of Honor was a good game, but the war games have been beat to death more then any other. Go into your wal-mart or EB and you will see a whole shelf of these games.

[dhau]

I must take my earlier comment (that I wouldn't buy this game) back. After playing through about four missions, I'm totally hooked. It's a great looking, great playing, addictive and challenging game!

Highly recommended for purchase and play.

[dhau]

I finished the game! It took me 142 hours and some minutes with all the frequent dying (game keeps stats). Killzone is responsible for my first and only (so far) joypad rage accident. After dying near the end of a 1/2 hour mission due to sheer stupidity on my side, I smashed poor innocent DualShock to bits and pieces. And bought a new one few hours later to keep on going

[Endymion]

I've been playing this game for a while now and reserved most of my judgement.

It looks great and has a fair amount of excitement that makes you want to jump in. You will do this, and promptly be disappointed in at least as many ways as you are psyched.

The AI is severely limited. That's being nice about it. Dumber than rocks is approaching accurate. Fill in your best insult regarding an intelligence quotient and you should be good to go here. With so little sophistication to your opponents, the game relies heavily on scripted events. This is what puts it in MOHAA territory rather than Halo's ground, more than anything else. The battles all fail to serve up the kind of excitement and urgency that you consistently have in the modern, actually-thinking shooting games. For a war that has only started, at the very beginning of the game I wondered where all of the civilians that I was supposed to be fighting for were. Why the heck am I protecting a vast empty city?

So the adrenaline factor isn't there. But the visuals still inspire, curiously you will probably laugh when you realise that the graphics really go a long way to making up for the blas� gameplay. The events are uninspiring but the locales are really beautiful to see, and carry a very real-world weight with them. The music is excellent and will pick you up enough to pull the trigger, but you won't remember it as well or as fondly as Halo.

Then you start to see the severe technical limitations of this Dreamcast competitor before you. Mip-mapping and poly-count tricks were called into play in order to make this game function on a PS2, and the cobbling becomes apparent when you see low-res textures up close, or low-poly count characters standing right next to you. The game becomes one morphing canvas of shapes and pixels til you aren't sure if the Helghast coming at you is a person or a claymation piece of play-dough. My guess here is that the PS2 is struggling with its "super high-speed RAMBUS RAM" to overcome its paltry 4MB, which is why you might turn your head and see a completely "blank" hillside or corridor. The level of detail changes way too often to be a simple glitch, it's effectively broken. Animation suffers the same way here, even when the game is not slowing to a crawl. To crown this circus of mediocrities, the multiplayer game falls victim to the same wounds as the single-player campaign, so the nonexistent-AI is not the overhead that is killing the software engine here.

The single player game it would seem is the better experience between the two, but neither is going to unseat Halo from its throne nor position Killzone as the gate of entry into first person shooterdom. It's a good game, but it's also common. Its flaws are glaring, and the thought has crossed my mind that I'm as forgiving for them as I have been simply because I've never seen a game screw up like this before, some novel shit that's good for a laugh.