Killzone

"An impressive FPS, but not the "Killer" of much."

Story: There story here is an interesting idea, but ultimately doesn't pull off what it wanted to do overall after the credits roll. Voice acting doesn't help much of the ultimate failure they tried so hardly to accommodate either. They're bad, cheesy, and don't have any emotion. Writing is full of one-liners and cheese ball Conversations. The opening cut scene is very impressive, but don't let it fool you people. It may instantly make the story seem impressive, intact and cool. Thats where it actually starts going down hill.

You play as a soldier who starts off who knows where fighting off seemingly endless waves of enemies with no leaders commanding them that are noticeable. Your team cuts through trenches and pits fighting off the bad guys, and from there you meet up with new team mates, loose a few and the basic war plot un-folds with an incredibly expected twist near the end that tries to give people an ,"oh, cool." feeling about the story but ultimately comes out as a stupid tag to try and make it better. Please guys, don't resort to twists that are too highly expected to try and make it better.

The characters you meet mean absolutely nothing. They hardly show emotions, they don't have conversations about much even though they're stuck with each other, and most of them aren't even cool enough for the all-action fans to like either. A nice try, I'll give them that. If they added more dialogue, a better writer and taken out the "twist" ending it would've been better. Overall a, 5/10

Graphics: Visuals can't be summed up in, "Oh it looks good." or simple things like that, so let me break it down in sections to make it better to understand.

Texture work is very well. Polish is noticeable on guns, metal, and water and is very nice. For those who don't know, textures are basically the coating you all see like how real that guys face looks and such. The higher the value and detail, the better it looks. Anyway, the game does suffer from major high-texture caused load times where you only see the object's single-colored shell until you approach it, then the textures load. This happens a lot, which is annoying. Buildings look fantastic. Texture work is really good on them. You can see dust, and war-caused effects spewed out nicely to make all the walls and floors have nice details like news papers on the floor, shattered glass, splinters of wood and so on-- all of which are expertly textured.

Physics and realism aren't as impressive though, which is a downfall. If you launch a missile at a wall it will only leave a black mark, which looks like a real scorch but isn't what a missile would do obviously. Shooting people in the legs, arms, and other limbs will cause them to have slight reactions but overall won't cause any realism like limping or anything. Dirt, pebbles and ash will fly into the air if a grenade blows up, which is nice. Glass shatters, wood breaks, but thats about it. Physics aren't all that impressive, and interaction levels with the environments are low.

Particle effects are fantastic. Dust kicks up when wind blows over open fields, smoke realistically drifts over the battlefield and hazes your vision, water splashes and droplets of it fall to the ground when a missile or grenade land in a lake and so on. Very nice job, and some of the best explosion and smoke effects for Play station 2.

Everything else like character models and lighting are done at the same levels of expertise as well. All of which suffer from the high-resolution texture loads though. Very impressive visual package here, and for Ps2 the graphics are excellent, but far from the best, 7/10

Sound: Possibly the best part of the game. If you have yourself sub-woofer stereo speakers or a surround sound set up man are you in for a treat. Crank those babies up, its time for booms and carnage. Explosions are richly detailed with room-rumbling base, bullets whizzing by your head will make you jump, missiles impacting with tanks will cause metal to crack, and people to scream with ear-piercing quality. You want to hear war? You got it. This is one of the loudest games made, but if you're not blessed with sub-woofer or surround sound speakers, you're missing out.

Anyway, voice actors-as mentioned- are poor. Bottom of the barrel if you ask me. Dialogue is poor, writing is bad and their small amount of talks will not cause any emotion but disgust. Easily the worst part about this game, the voice actors.

Well if you have stereo sub woofer or surround sound speakers, you'll be in Heaven. With speakers, 9/10, without 6/10 (All explosions, bullets, impact and base are gone causing very bland, basic sounds.)

Game play: A mesh of good and bad really. Let me explain-

The game is slow paced. If you want to charge in super fast and blow everything away, stop reading this review. You're required to use tactics, flank enemies, and handle situations with though. You don't run fast so you have to use cover and peek over and around things. Ambushing, using tactics and so on are needed 100%.

More on the slow paced. Enemies move slowly on a realistic level. Don't expect to cut across the battlefield in five seconds. Its more realistic, but hard to explain. Basically its not Unreal tournament or Halo in terms of speed.

Firefights are pretty exciting. Shooting over a wall, taking cover and blasting your rifle in all directions while trying to stay behind your cover while grenades and such fly overhead is very exciting. Holding out at a bunker while enemies charge at you is great. The game is no anything killer though. I don't have an X-box so I'm no halo fan so rule that theory of me out. Play station 2 has better First person shooters, period.

The game will get boring. Cooking a grenade just right and throwing it at a group of enemies does get boring. Trying to hold out against a siege, though exciting, does get boring. But as do all games like this.

Anyway your weapon selection is high. Expect missile launchers, shotguns, machine guns pistols and a heck of a lot more. There are many, many weapons.

The single player part of the game is very, very short with only about 11 levels-- each of which can be cleared by an expert in ten or twenty minutes. All of them are mostly the same too. Go to objective, get in loads of fire fights, get to objective and a possible tank or two in between. Speaking of them you don't get to drive in any vehicles which stinks. All those tanks and hover craft you see? Those aren't drive-able.

On line is great fun though. Commanding friends over battles and such are great fun. The people are incredibly smart and fun to play against. Its a lot better than single player.

Those were the good, and sorta good parts. The bad are-

The game has bad frame rate. Expect MAJOR slowdown throughout the game. Normally it runs at thirty frames per second, and it gets 2x slower sometimes.

AI are really stupid. They'll run into your line of fire and such.

There are more flaws, but I've said enough. The game is fun, but gets boring and is very short lived. On line is excellent though, seriously. You'll need 3000 bytes of space on your memory card to play it though, so go out and buy another for your other games. 6/10

Replay: If you have on line this game should last you quite a while. If you don't, there's no reason to play the campaign more than twice. I failed to mention split screen which is pretty fun. Its bot mode basically. Two teams fight it out in multiple modes. But that gets very boring. Replay is very poor without on line. 3/10

Final: Give the game a rent if you don't have on line, but if you do I'd buy it regardless of its price tag. Its a decent first person shooter that tried way to hard and ultimately earned in my opinion a six out of ten. Very flawed, but fun package. Well, I hope you all enjoyed my review!

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/10/06