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dkirschner's Killzone HD (PS3)

[October 5, 2013 08:56:50 AM]

Very excited to get a PS3 and acquire all the exclusives I'd wanted to play for years. One of those were the Killzone games, which are like futuristic sci-fi FPSes with cool case covers. I was going to skip Killzone 1 because it was on PS2 and it didn't get very good reviews, counter to Killzone 2 and 3. But I found out you could buy a Killzone Trilogy with a remastered HD Killzone. What the hell, I'll try it for narrative continuity.

Oh my god, Killzone sucks. I spent about two hours with it. The environment is gray and drab. Owing from its PS2 days, which I can't really fault it for being hampered by the technology of a decade ago, the draw distance is really close. I kept seeing grass pop up 10 feet in front of me, and buildings fade to gray not far from the character, making it look like you're walking through Silent Hill where you can only see a short distance in front of you and everything is gray ash beyond that. The movement is clunky. I felt like I was driving a tank, not controlling a human. The weapons take forever to reload, feel slow and sluggish and have these weird firing arc animations where they tried to animate bullet paths but it just feels laggy. The aiming is utterly horrendous. The slightest touch of the analog stick send the view scope swinging nausea-inducingly wildly. There is no precision aiming on the sniper rifle. Enemies are hard to hit because the aiming sucks, and then they take like 30 bullets each. Seriously, it was...what's another adjective for really bad...REALLY BAD.

Another dated aspect, checkpoints are too few and far between. It autosaves when you complete an area and if you die, you have to restart whatever area you are on. Since the aiming sucks and the enemies have boss-like hit points sometimes and you move like a damaged tank, you die a lot. This set me back 10 minutes at a time. Really irritating. What else...Oh yes, the sound sucks too. There is no music. No music! Just guns. Actually it makes the game eerily quiet in places, but I didn't like it because it is supposed to be an action game, not a stealth or horror FPS. The voice acting ain't great and the AI is dumb. Your allies are invincible for some reason, but offer very little help killing anything. They also shout things out, like good squadmates should do, but what they shout is really dumb. I can't remember any examples, but I remember just scrunching up my face like "...what?" The enemy shouts weren't very good either. They mostly yelled "Killl themmm" over and over.

Story was intriguing, which was really why I figured to give Killzone a shot before 2 and 3, but the gameplay sucked and I didn't uncover an iota of plot during two hours. That's the same thing I said in my CoD write-up just now. If the story sucks, or is absent, the gameplay must be excellent to keep me going. After quitting the game because I couldn't handle the drabness anymore, I looked up the storyline. Apparently...nothing really happens and can be summed up thusly: The bad guys attack the good guys' planet. The good guys repel them. All major bad guys are still alive.

I switched to Killzone 2 last night and happy to report that the third time's a charm. I finally got a PS3 game that I enjoy! It remedies almost everything from Killzone 1, except (so far) that the enemies all feel very much the same. They are just Helghast with different guns. It makes the game feel less sci-fi that I want. But the environment is amazing and feels very dystopian (though there are out-of-place Soviet-style propaganda posters) and there may be some creatures coming into play as the game comes to seem more and more similar to Gears of War. More on Killzone 2 soon, as I will likely complete it this weekend.