Killzone 2 Review

This is the very first game I've played to completion on my PS3 and it was an awesome and trying time.

Liked:

Graphics - Say what you want about the PS3 only playing almost every game in it's library at 720p, but this game is gorgeous. I think that some of the poorer looking games on PS3 were just lazy ports of 360 games, but I truly believe that the 360 couldn't handle this game. There's simply too much info on the discs. If I remember correctly when the game was being shown one of the developers said the first level was 2gb.

Style - Again some people may hate on the browns and grays, but it looks really good and fits the world, Helghan, really well. I LOVED the depth of field of what was in and out of focus. The way your hands and guns would be blurry one moment depending on the action or how close your instruments of death were to your face works really well and is easily the best implementation I've ever seen in a game.

Guns - Holy crap these guns are meaty. All of the weapons have a more primal look and sound to them that only add to the atmosphere.

Movement - While the controls took some getting used to I really enjoyed the "weight" or "heaviness" of the movement. Makes you feel more like a person in a firefight than a Green God of smooth walking and gunning that many other shooters have. Only other games I've seen use weight well in an FPS are "Riddick" and "The Darkness" (I'm gay for Starbreeze Studios btw).

Audio - A good soundtrack that never gets overdone and the sound effects are top notch.

Length - The game was teetering on the edge of overstaying its welcome, but I did enjoy it the whole way through.

Gameplay and Cover - It's pretty run of the mill gamplay, but they do throw in a curveball with letting you "stick" to cover and stay in first person mode. When it works it's awesome, but it's also broken.

Sixaxis - As dumb as it is to admit I really liked arming charges with the sixaxis. Hold R1 to grip and the move the charge accordingly. It was a lot more fun and even immersive than "Hold X" or "Hit X Repeatedly."

Brian Cox - He does the voice acting for the head Helghast and I'd be totally lying if I said his speeches weren't compelling or dare I say....moving?

Dislikes:

Controls - Don't know where to start really. It took me a solid 20 minutes of tinkering with the controls to get something workable (doesn't help that it's my first PS3 shooter game too). You crouch and get into cover with the same button and this creates a HUGE problem. Holding L2 will crouch you down and while you may be working around a corner trying to kill a guy you may get to close to a wall or box and get sucked into it. Then while you're being fired upon the wonky cover system won't let you peak around the corner for some reason, but you're afraid to let go of L2 because you'll get blasted. This is a very common problem in the game.

Bullet sponges!!!! - I played the game on "Hard" difficulty and it definitely ran me through the paces. I really enjoyed the challenges and there were some admittedly very tough parts, but holy crap the Helghast take a ton of damage!!!! (after beating the game I went back just to see the game on "Normal" and they died in what most would consider an acceptable amount of time)

Iron sights - It took me around 4 hours of gameplay to finally realize you're a much more efficient killer not using the iron sights. This is the exact opposite of what it should be. I think it has to do with the chunkiness of the shooting, but I found it much more effective to stay crouched and shoot in short bursts.

Sixaxis - I got a great 3rd party controller recommended to me by Lead Salad that has a joystick layout similar to the 360 controller and it's awesome. The downside is that it doesn't have the Sixaxis support so I HAD to use the Dualshock to be able to play the game fully.

Characters - Very very cookie cutter with plenty of bad dialogue and cheesey voice acting.

Final Thoughts:

The game was a total blast that was hard to play at times due to some control issues and poor iron sights.

Get the game if you like shooters and be sure to play it on Hard if you're in the market for a new controller because I almost broke mine more than once.