Friday, October 8, 2010

Killzone 2 . . . I want to like you.

Killzone 2 is killing me. Quite a bit. (Also forgive my tardiness in reviewing this, but I finally got around to playing it.)

It looks great, sounds great and makes me feel like I am in a chaotic war zone. Yet I don't like it. Why the hate bro?
The controls are terrible.

The number one thing a game needs to have, is stellar controls. You then work your way from there on everything else. This game feels so loose, it drives me nuts. If I aim a reticule at a dude's head, I want it to stay there when my thumb stops moving the analog stick. However Killzone 2 has a slight shift in weight for the gun. This leads me to not attain headshots. Which makes me unhappy. Gears of War and Halo have a good solid stop when you pull off of the thumb-stick. The reaction time is (essentially) one to one. Same with Call of Duty. Immediate stops. Yet Killzone 2, perhaps, is going for a more realistic feeling stop. I don't like it, and it has cost me my life multiple times. Also when you are zoomed in and you hit reload it won't reload. STOP BEING AN AHOLE GAME! JUST RELOAD MY WEAPON. Work with me, there are loads of grenades, shotguns and automatic weapons exploding around every corner. Just reload for crap's sake.

Also DROP THE 6 AXIS CRAP. There was no need for the gimmicky bomb planting motion controls. Sony, stop forcing people to use this please. It doesn't sell units. In fact, if it was not in the game at all, I'd wager it would sell the same amount.

The cover system is also a bit finicky. There were multiple times where I would be crouched behind a wall, and yet bad guys would shoot the top of my head. They would apparently shoot enough of my hair off for me to die.

The melee attack is also slow and and hard to predict where it will hit. Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty had a great melee system because of it's responsiveness. "HOLY CRAP ZOMBIE IN FRONT OF MY FACE!" Boom, ready with a shotgun butt to the back of the head. "TERRORIST UP IN MY GRILLE!" Blammo, knife to the junk. With Killzone it's often "Man all this armor is weighing me down in this crazy warzone. HOLY CRAP GLOWY EYED DUDE! ERRRUUNNGHH! Crap. I missed! EERRRUNNGGGHH! HIT HIM! Oh wait I can't. I'm dead from swinging my gun around like a jerk."

The story and characters are also pretty generic/boring. "Vargas! Get me some firepower!" screams a commander with another last name name that is easy to remember. "I gave your mom some fire power last night Diaz!" replies the generic grunt soldier who is someone you should apparently care about because they are your squad mate. I know this is an action movie themed game, but COME ON, give me something with a bit more depth here. I frankly could care less if they got wiped out by the . . . uhhh. . whatever the Space Nazi's are in this game. They look great, but I don't understand what their deal is either. Why can't there be a mission where you have to escort an enemy back to interrogation, and you actually get to know him on the path back to the player's base? Something other than "Dudes with the glowy eyes are bad."

I am not, by the way, one of those people who just craps on a game to be cool. This game got glowing reviews pretty much all around. It is not a terrible game, but it is not a great game either. It's a decent one, at best. I think the visuals and the fact that Sony put out a good multiplayer game, got this game a bit higher reviews. I just found it to be a bit overhyped is all.