Early Killzone 2 Impressions

I've now played about an hour and a half of Guerrilla Games' new offering, including the Single Player campaign, a little taste of online multiplayer and a fair bit of what's called "Skirmish", which is offline multiplayer with and against AI bots.

Right off the top: the graphics are truly first-rate. It reminds me of some of the most recent PC games that I've seen others playing with state of the art graphics cards in their machines. Even dust, blowing in the wind as you run across a beautifully-displayed terrain, catches your attention when you see it for the first time. As is always the case with me, though, I lost the "Wow!" factor on how good everything looks way too quickly, because I got caught up in the game. That failure on my part notwithstanding, the environment is much more realistically and impressively rendered than what I got used to in Resistance 2 (and it was no slouch in that department, either).

Just as many of the reviewers had warned, the "feel" of the game takes some getting used to. I've heard some say that it's a weightier dynamic, and that probably sums it up as well as anything. When you jump, for example, you may be put off at first when you experience a little of the crouching or bracing action that physically precedes a leap in real life... in a video game! Or, if you jump from a higher location to a lower one, even if it's only a difference of a few feet, you'll notice that there's a cost to the impact, both in terms of taking a proportional hit on your health (I haven't tried it yet, but I imagine if the distance is too great, you probably die) and requiring a second or so to recover from it. I'd encountered at least some of that style of play in Third Person Shooters like Gears of War and Lost Planet, but running into it in an FPS is something different for me.

Also, the movement away from an Aim Assist model (as Resistance 2 has) to being on your own with regard to the crosshairs is still somewhat jarring, in these early stages. I think the trick will be getting the horizontal and vertical sensitivity bars to just the right setting, as right now I'm often veering madly around my target without actually landing on him. In the five minutes or so of online play that I endured, it quickly became apparent that others weren't suffering from that disability in the least, though, as I was getting killed with one or two shots before even spotting my opponent, most of the time. Part of the problem may be that it's more of a "cover" game, in that you need to find and stay behind walls and other barriers at times, rather than charging in, guns blazing. That's tough for a run-and-gunner like me to adjust to.

Fortunately, there's a "critically wounded" feature in the game that puts you down on the ground if you're almost out of health but allows a teammate to come and revive you in the first several seconds after that happens. That saved me the ignominy of yet another pointless death once or twice, when I was lucky enough to have a friend nearby.

Despite that helpful feature, I fear that the online arena is going to be a brutally brief destination for the average-at-best players like me. The style of this game, unlike so many others that I play, intentionally or otherwise makes the gap between us and the really good combatants too great to be much fun. There may be a ranking system in place that's just not working its magic yet (as the game only came out today); if not, though, I think too many players will be turned off by the pointlessness of getting whacked without having even fired off a round.

Overall, though, I'm quite pleased with the game. I'm not yet convinced that it's going to live up to all the hype... nor that it has to, in order to warrant spending $60. I don't think many people will feel cheated by their Killzone 2 experience.