I just got off the phone with the EB Games I pre-ordered it from, and it is confirmed that I will be playing it by tomorrow morning. Anyone else playing it? I'll update with my impressions later. In the mean time, the infamous trailer that convinced me to buy my PS3 60gb:
Recently Spotted:
*crickets*
Me? Not at the moment. I've got a mate who owns it, and once he gets tired of it, I shall get it. Ditto Fiddy Cent.
Is that right?
No, I'm sorry:
And now Phantom_Leo gives a Blow by Blow account of his first hour's experience with Killzone 2!
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**Reprinted from last night from elsewhere for the benefit of people here who may be interested!**
Well, it's certainly purdy!
Kinda like COD with Sci-Fi elements.
The animation is very realistic for a game of this type, but it has an unnatural hiccup every once in a while where it goes from very smooth to robotically stiff, back to smooth again. It's a bit jarring, but you probably won't notice it when you get wrapped up with the game.
There's some kind of graphical filter on the game that almost looks "glassy." Sorry, there's no other way to describe it, but you'll see what I mean when you play it.
Looks incredible for the most part though, but I'm gonna go to bed for now. Maybe I'll play more in the morning and post more then!
**I wasn't immediately floored by it!**
___________________**Went back an hour later!**
Played it some more. (Can't sleep.)
It's funny. Killzone started its life on PS2 as a "Halo Killer." Now as the COD games have gotten to be more popular it seems to be a COD killer.
It has lots of minute details that I know lots of people are going to absolutely love. Bottles break, steel drums roll, buildings collapse... The first time I shot a Helghast's helmet off, I couldn't help but laugh to myself. There's LOTS of ambient lighting effects, smoke, blooms, you name it.
The one thing that keeps on distracting the HELL out of me is the very frequent loading... Right in the middle of you running around a battlefield... for all of the game's smoothness... it is absolutely distracting when it pauses for that split second to load... Yeah. You even see a little "Loading..." in the corner of your screen! I understand to get this level of detail, it's kinda necessary, but it's somewhat annoying. As soon as you start to forget yourself while playing... **zap** ...reality check... "Loading..."
It's hectic, there's lots of stuff going on around you. You hear your allies yelling (with lots of cursing). You hear the Helghast yelling back and dying (with lots of cursing).
It does paint the picture very well though of a battlefield on an alien world, again, COD style.
___________________**Returned to it this morning!**
Let's hear it for superfluous Sixaxis actions! Yay! Not only does the Load Screen between chapters TILT if you tilt your controller. Oooo...!
Got to the Assault on the Arc Tower stage. Very nice so far.
Controlled a Tank. Cool. Shot down other tanks with an RPG. Gave support to other pinned down troops. Very typical FPS action; just presented in an level of detail not yet seen on a console (?).
The cover system works well, and you'll be using it often. Hold L2 to hide behind cover, use the left analog to peek up, over and around your barrier. You can use R3 to zoom. Again, typical FPS action.
Got to my first chain gun wielding Heavy Soldier; also cool.
Like Resistance there's Intel to find, but also Helghast Symbols to seek out and collect or destroy in each stage for bonuses, so there's replayability in there. I find these games sometimes frustratingly hard to follow sometimes, though... The action is exploding around you, you have people shouting orders at you from every direction, forcing you forward --BUT-- there's always some kind of incentive to creep around the stage instead... Make up your mind! Either balls to the wall action or stealthy creep around and look for stuff action! I'm not a HUGE FPS fan so this contradiction confuses me! THANK GOD there's a way point arrow, pointing out your next objective when you press Up on the directional pad. Without that, I would be completely lost!
The game really is good and I know I am nitpicking, but it's the way I have to play it. The countdown timer in the back of my head, counting down the seconds before I eject this game and pop back in SFIV for the NEXT indeterminate amount of time is ever present! I don't want to play this game, not get a good idea about it immediately, then take it out and forget about it, not after I just spent $60.00 and went to a midnight release for it! The game is a great FPS, but SFIV is calling...
**Let's see if it has the staying power to keep an non-FPS fan interested. More later! Ummm... Maybe!**
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**Almost forgot!**
As I said before, It's the little details that impress the most. The way the Helghast die is kinda cool. One time I shot one of them, he spun around and landed up facing the wall, dead. His glowing red eyes were casting a red glow on the wall he was propped up against. Cool!
I noticed the glassy effect. I like the art in this game, its not all about pushing plastic looking shaders at incredible resolutions. You have to press 2 buttons at once and tilt for levers? Sounds annoying.
How does the game compare to the Resistance games?
As of right now (I only played R1 and 2 hours of Killzone 2), I like the more action packed Resistance style. R1 was one of those fun shooters that gave you crazy weapons, tried to mix things up with huge scale fights, then small battles, vehicle combat.
This game so far seems like one thing over and over again, it all looks the same, it all feels the same. Whats good is that the combat does feel good but without any real variety to the guns or so far the type of battles (minus two small parts) I just wonder how far this can go before it gets ultra repetitive. I am hoping for surprises.
Let me give a quick example, in the end of one of the sections, after I killed the usual Helgast dudes, this cutscene comes on and this flying robot things shows up, like a small version of the flying gun machines from Terminator, the design is awesome. So this whole action scene breaks out with you character and the squad running for dear life as this flying thing shoots at them. I am thinking, why in the hell am I not playing this!! Thats the type of variety I want to see. But nope, at the end of the clip you start somewhere else and its back to shooting the same guys. I assume that thing will be a boss fight or something later on, but damn I could have used an exciting chase sequence to change things up at that moment.
From my understanding (this is given my time with the demo compared with the time I spent with R2), Killzone is a much slower paced shooter - more methodical. The game is also much more serious storywise (and grey) than Resistance. Hell, it even has a cover system that neither Resistance game has.
Resistance is much more accessible, colourful, but without much of what KZ has going for it.
Just copying my reply from GG weekly to Dvaders impressions:
Is the Saving Private Ryan thing a good thing or bad? You sound like that gamecentral review I posted a few pages back. It looks through the roof production wise but gameplay was said to be just everything you've done before a few hundred times. Multiplayer is suppossed to be very good though.
How is the AI? I read that the enemy AI is great but ally AI bad?
Oh yeah 1up have a walkthrough if you guys are interested:
http://mycheats.1up.com/view/section/3140596/7051/killzone_2/ps3
Oh right. Are there awesome boss fights in this game? I like inventive boss fights thrown in to mix things up.
So Resistance is like Halo while KZ2 is like COD?
Well like I predicted the flying thing was a boss fight. It turned out to be a simple pattern based boss fight that was more annoying than fun. There are brutes in the games that require a certain strategy to take down but I dont consider them bosses. The final boss was good, basically a teleporting gun and knife carring Helgast dude.
Yeah I would say Resistance is like Halo style while KZ2 is COD style.