Killzone 2

[theignoramus]

I've beaten the game twice. Playing through levels like Salamun District, Suljeva Village, The Cruiser, and Visari Hammer makes me question some of the gameplay criticism levelled at this game in the previous Idlehands podcasts.

Firstly,the turret complaints were over exaggerated. There are five situations in the entire campaign that force you to use a turret. Two in the intro level Corinth River, one on Salamun Bridge, one in Tharsis Refinery,

and the big AA section in The Cruiser. (On Elite difficulty, it's actually advantageous to avoid turrets as you need to stay mobile and move from place to place quite often in order to deal with the AI. Man a turret on that difficulty and you die very fucking fast.)

The rest of the time, turrets are completely and 100% optional.

Which leads me to my other point. The levels are typically laid out in a manner that gives you a lot of options.

There are almost always multiple entry and exit points in any given space and verticality is reinforced in just about every area.

The game constantly allows you to tackle a firefight from flat ground or higher ground. That's one of the reasons the firefights are so fun.

Not only is the AI very dynamic, just about all of the levels give you at least half dozen ways to approach the combat. Complaints

about the level layouts don't resonate with me at all. The map designs in the campaign allow you more freedom of movement than most linear shooters, certainly moreso than COD and Half Life.

The complaints about the storytelling and narrative and unambitious game design (blow up this pillar, turn this crank, defend this area,etc) are perfectly legit, but all the talk which implied that the game was putting the player in a straitjacket of total linearity (hey,COD style!) was fairly misleading. This game has dynamism in spades. Although I understand that somebody could miss out on some of it if they played the campaign on the default difficulty and allowed a directional pointer to herd them through the levels.

I'm blown away by anyone choosing to rely on object marker to find their way around a level.

Seriously? I played this game on veteran and Elite with no Hud whatsoever (not even a fucking crosshair), and I was able to find my way around most maps with little difficulty.

Lastly, I rarely felt burdened by the two weapon limit. It forced me to experiment with different weapons in different scenarios. You simply have to learn when to use the combat knife and when to fall back and rely on your pistol in tight situations. The two weapon limit encourages experimentation.

[OssK]

Well, I'm not saying the level suck, I'm just saying I played the bad ass way and went for the elite first hand, and I found that in elite at least, there is only one possible way... Yeah sure you could try another one but the functional path is really limited. And about the AI, I still don't get how you found it dynamic but might as well be that they just all did the same thing a dozen times the exact same way randomly...

CoD wasn't really a super cool game to me (too fucking short and not so sweet multi) but there were a few missions that allowed you a real lot of freedom in the way you interact with your foes that can harldy be denied.

And the point about Half Life is that for the whole adventure, you don't feel like you must go that way, you just feel compeled to move that way because Alyx knows the way or because you have to go in that direction... Maybe again it's just me but I never fell trapped in HL2

And Killzone really made me feel like I had no choice of weapon because the rifle is in 80% of the case the weapon of choice...

[DanJW]

Seriously? this is what all that fuss what about? I'm playing this now and it sucks badly. The controls feel clumsy and sluggish. It's like interacting with the world while drunk and cocooned in bubble wrap. Whether I live or die feels mostly down to chance a lot of the time. The story is instantly forgettable and I don't give the tiny-est shit about it. Same with the locations and the characters. The character models are cartoonish rather than badass. All the coolest action happens in cut-scenes rather than when I'm playing.

I've not had so little fun playing an FPS in a long time. I'm going to finish it now out of spite.

[Lu]

But, but... It looks really good!

[DanJW]

I'm actually offended by how shit it is.

[mikemariano]

Ha! I can't believe we revived this thread.

Since I don't have a PS3, my only choice is to believe the hype and say that Killzone 2 is the best 2D game ever released.

Killzone 3 will, naturally, be the best 3D game ever released.

[Korax]

Seriously? this is what all that fuss what about? I'm playing this now and it sucks badly. The controls feel clumsy and sluggish. It's like interacting with the world while drunk and cocooned in bubble wrap. Whether I live or die feels mostly down to chance a lot of the time. The story is instantly forgettable and I don't give the tiny-est shit about it. Same with the locations and the characters. The character models are cartoonish rather than badass. All the coolest action happens in cut-scenes rather than when I'm playing.

I've not had so little fun playing an FPS in a long time. I'm going to finish it now out of spite.

I had a similar experience when I picked it up last year. I couldn't play it for more than an hour or so before I gave up and put it on my shelf to languish until I was bored enough to try again. Then I tried multiplayer, and sunk about 20 hours over one weekend. I would suggest trying multiplayer, but wouldn't fault you at all for declaring the entire thing a waste of time.

[elmuerte]

So I picked up this game again after it has been collecting dust for quite a bunch of months. And I managed to drag myself along up to the final battle. It took me quite some agony to get to the palace. At one point I reached a checkpoint when I was respawned in the line of fire of 4 enemies, not fun at all. This game is really about pushing forward as fast as possible to reach checkpoints, otherwise you'll just waste ammo shooting down an infinite supply of enemies.

So, now I'm at the final battle. And boy is it a terrible creation. First of all, you approach the palace with like 20 team mates. And then continue with only 1 team mate (why on earth would you do that). In the final battle you have to fight a couple of waves of enemies, some enemies even spawn behind you (so I guess those idiots that would defend the palace died). I managed to beat the first segment after quite a bunch of tries. But I can't manage to get beyond the second segment, keep getting killed. My team mate is more or less useless, barely kills anyone and appears to prefer getting in my way.

[Gwardinen]

Yeah, the whole assault on the palace, and the wave based fight and the boss fight within are all kind of dodgy in my opinion. They don't really fit on the rest of the game's difficulty curve, and while they are dramatic the first few times, eventually just become frustrating.

For my part, I'm trying to work up the motivation to continue playing my rented copy of Killzone 3.

[elmuerte]

I finally managed to push through the last part of the final battle (I hope). At least, I now have to fight that main guy. It took me a shitload of tries to even get to that part because for some stupid reason when I killed the last RPG guy I was instantly killed by the final boss, so I had to redo the battle before that again, and again, and again. But now I only have to fight the boss. And jfc it's even worse than the parts before. His knife attack is pretty much an instant death. Of course my team mate doesn't do anything else by die within a couple of seconds. It also doesn't help that in my checkpoint I start with a semi dead team mate, and a sniper rifle. This final battle is worse than Meat Circus, and worse than Trine's final level. It's simply no longer fun. And survival pretty much depends on chance, the chance to get enough bullets in this guy's body for him to back off.