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Feb 6 / Ozymandias

Killzone 2 Early Thoughts

Like the rest of the world I downloaded the Killzone 2 demo from the European PSN store last night. (You can easily create a European PSN account if you want to pick it up.) I’ve been curious to see it ever since it was announced years ago as a poster child for the Playstation 3’s graphical prowess. (In fact, I just have to post Penny Arcade’s brilliant strip that captures that thinking. Check out the lighting – think this is one of Gabe’s best efforts yet!)

Rise, Faithful Servant 

Anyway, it’s been fascinating watching the reviews come in. The Metacritic average is 93 as of this morning. And I’m not sure I get it.

First, just to get it out of the way, these are early impressions based on a few hours of demo gameplay. That said, the intent of the demo is to hook you, so there’s some worth to them. Visually the game is very, very impressive – easily the best looking PS3 title I’ve seen. The engine is smooth and fluid, and the amount of detail and immersion is fantastic. I think it’s fair to say Guerrilla Games got very close to that infamous pre-rendered trailer of E3 years ago. That said, the story, writing and dialogue, and overall darker (dare I say “brown?”) palette just bores the living heck out of me.

What concerns me most about the reviews is that they tend to focus on the visual quality of the game and less on the story and gameplay. Reading between the lines you can see a bit of a handwave toward the single player story (which, again, I have not experienced in full), and then they start gushing about the multiplayer. And so far, I just haven’t been as impressed as most of those reviews seem to be – it’s feeling a lot like the Metal Gear Solid 4 inflated review score bubble we saw: raving reviews and then months of review and game regrets (just watch the tenor change over time in the thread).

This morning I saw a link from Penny Arcade to early impressions of Killzone 2 by Tom Chick. I just wanted to point it out to you because Tom had access to a review build and as such has seen a lot more of the game than myself. Yet his in-depth impressions are eerily similar to my shallow ones. You should go read the article if you’re interested, but this quote really resonated with me:

But it just kills my interest level that the developers haven’t done anything interesting with this wonderful engine. Killzone 2 consist of hemmed in shantytowns, sewers, streets, an industrial area, a bridge, a crane, and even a brief Matrix-inspired lobby. In other words, nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s atmospheric, with swirling wind, clouds overhead, and lots of smoke and dust, but it’s otherwise static, soulless, and entirely uninteresting, the setting for prosaic Call of Duty firefight after prosaic Call of Duty firefight. Exploding barrels and out-of-place exploding electro-spiders are as dynamic as these levels get. I go all the way to a whole other planet, and this is what I find? Retreads of the same places I’ve been fighting on Earth all along?

The writing is terrible. Godawful terrible. It’s slightly better than Too Human and slightly worse than Gears of War 2, which is saying a lot because Gears of War 2 was laughably bad. The Sixaxis gimmicks are just stupid. Stop, Sony. Just stop.

I pre-ordered Killzone 2 a long time ago, and I’ll still pick it up. I want to explore the technical prowess the engine exhibits and check out the multiplayer modes. But after my early impressions and reading Tom’s thoughts, I’m just not seeing the game as being anything but a (very) impressive tech demo. I’m guessing Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune will remain my favorite PS3 title for a while yet.

Related posts:

  1. Early Zelda: Twilight Princess Thoughts
  2. Quick thoughts on Crackdown
  3. Saint’s Row Demo Available on Marketplace
  4. PS3 Launch Thoughts (and Humor!)
  5. Bioshock Demo Now on Live Marketplace

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  • http://www.satori.org Mark DeLoura

    Hmmm, clearly you and I are going to have to play some multiplayer to see how you really feel about this game :-)

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    I’m definitely up for that! Need to spend some time with it. :)

  • deftangel

    The demo was a major letdown for me. I played another section of the game in Leipzig which I thought was far better.

    It at least means I can spend some quality time with Halo Wars before picking this up.

  • MrNastyTime UK

    Alot of games are over-rated none more so than Halo.

    H1 was awesome, story, graphics and gameplay. H2 was awful, short and terrible story which brings me to H3 which was alright say 8/10.

    Moving onto Gears, again GOW1 amazing but GOW2 oh dear.. being a avid GOW MP player the failure of GOW2 is very apparent(just look at the LIVE activity, GOW2 4th oh dear). The game feels very different, it runs slower and the waiting room oh sorry MP section is comical. Ive traded in GOW2 it fails so badly in my opinion.

    On the positive the best MP game for me with depth is Left4Dead, try versus mode.. torturing the survivors really does make you bellow a dark chuckle every few minutes haha

  • Roland

    Until Sony drops the price of the PS3 quite a bit (to €300 or less) I will hold off on buying one. It’s tempting, with the game library expanding and the hardware reportedly being more reliable (my 2nd 360 is going back for repairs next week).

    The thing that would get me to buy a PS3 right now, regardless of the games that are available, would be a good sized, decently priced video marketplace.

    As far as I’m aware there’s no such thing in Europe yet, and I’ve given up hope on Microsoft ever getting it going here.

  • http://www.kimpallister.com Kim Pallister

    There’s been a lot of discussion over the past year about the validity of MC scores, and how pubs/devs are learning to game the system; teasing the reviewers and working them up into a lather such that the rush to get first scores up gets people to review the game without… savoring it for a while.

    This was the case for GTA4, for sure. LBP was also interesting, with scores being posted while the servers were still down, and so UGC wasn’t part of the equation. Braid, as much as I love it, seemed to get MC scores that were as much about the fact that it was different as they were about whether it was good. Reviewers were also in love with Braid’s story – not the in-game one, the one about it’s development, one-man indie-dude schools the world, etc.

    Anyhow, seems like KZ2 is another case where that’s occurring.

  • http://citystate.co.uk/ Robin

    Oh, come *on*. I know you are physically incapable of not pouring cold water over any game that’s important for your competitors, but describing Tom Chick’s off-the-cuff piece (and I quote: "So are you ready for a full review? Well, I’m not, so you’ll have to go somewhere else."), by pure coincidence the most negative take on the game published anywhere, as in-depth?

    "I *really* wanted this game to be good IT SAYS HERE NOT SO GOOD Just sayin’! SMILEY FACE"

  • Rafoca

    One thing I don´t understand is why fanboys keep saying Killzone 2 has batter graphics than Gears of War 2. Yes, I agree with that!

    But come on… gears 2 offer split-screen mode and KZ2 don´t.

    And, according to several respected developers, split-screen is hard to do, costs more money and consumes a lot of processor power, which means a game that does not offer split-screen tend to have better graphics overall.

    It is an unfair comparison!

    And I hope MS keep making games with split-screen mode!

  • CGomez

    Killzone might be a great game. I don’t have a PS3, so I make no judgment. However, like GTAIV, the reviews on this are preordained. The gaming rags have been looking for a PS3 game to crown as an example of superiority. GTAIV was a fun game, but not a great game. It was downright frustrating in many respects, and had no real co-op play, which is a must these days.

    The story wasn’t even that good. It offered none of the vaunted moral choices. You merely were choosing which cutscene to play.

    The reviews were prewritten so the 10s were handed out. The same is happening here.

    Hopefully it is a fun game.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    Re: "I know you are physically incapable of not pouring cold water over any game that’s important for your competitors, but describing Tom Chick’s off-the-cuff piece (and I quote: "So are you ready for a full review? Well, I’m not, so you’ll have to go somewhere else."), by pure coincidence the most negative take on the game published anywhere, as in-depth?"

    Actually, the main point I was trying to touch (and Kim does well highlighting) is that I suspect this is another case of inflated reviews on a large, critical title. It’s a problem the industry faces… Killzone 2 just may be the latest. Who knows? Maybe I’m wrong, and this really is a 10/10 game… but it’s interesting to read the forums discussing the demo and see the tenor shifting already. Just my $.02! ;)

  • http://citystate.co.uk/ Robin

    Aye, it’s a valid point. But one that I am sceptical that you would ever raise in the context of a multiplatform or 360-exclusive game.

    Bioshock and GTA IV being two textbook examples, both of which received nearly unanimous 10/10 reviews (many of Killzone 2′s reviews, aside from the Official Playstation mags, are quite guarded by comparison) but perceptions of which have deflated significantly post release.

    Eurogamer had the UK exclusive on review of KZ2 and gave it a 9/10. In fact metacritic lists 27 reviews in the 9/10 bracket versus 20 in the 10/10, so the case for mass reviewer hysteria is a relatively weak one.

    And no, it’s never valid to judge a game from a brief single player demo. The ‘tenor’ will be seen when the game comes out, and I think it will be broadly in line with what the *text* of most of the reviews has said – a solid, technically adept but somewhat generic shooter.

    Oh hey, I just thought of another game that was deified by reviewers but no-one plays any more: Halo 3. ;)