Killzone 2: Singleplayer Hands-On Preview

Guerrilla has first-person shooting stardom in its sights, but is there enough ammo in the clip? Kikizo hangs tough with a new single-player build.

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By Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, December 9, 2008

Killzone 2 Coverage Center
•   Killzone 2: Exclusive Guerrilla Interview 1: Steven Ter Heide (Producer) & Mathijs De Jonge (Director)
(Sep 7, 2007)
•   Killzone 2: Multiplayer Beta Hands-On Preview: Extensive playtest of the latest multiplayer build (13 Nov, 2008)
•   Killzone 2: Singleplayer Hands-On (Dec 9, 2008)
•   Exclusive Guerilla Interview 2: Eric Boltjes and Angie Smets (Online Multiplayer Producers) (Dec 22, 2008)
•   10 Ways to Not Get Owned in Killzone 2 (Jan 23, 2009)
•   Discussion: Killzone 2 Surpasses Target Renders (Jan, 2009)
•   Killzone 2: The $545 Press Kit Exposed! (Jan 23, 2009)
•   Killzone 2: The Review (Feb 2, 2009)
•   Feature: Killzone 2 Successor (Feb 27, 2009)

On the ravaged imperial planet of Helgan, lightning strikes upwards. Not a meteorological quirk we're inclined to marvel at as our flat-top Predator drop-ship careens wildly out of the lower atmosphere, passengers wedging their arms and legs under the guard-rails, cursing each other and their superiors while livid bolts rake the heavens on either hand. The bellowed conversation between our squad leader Rico and the troops atop a neighbouring Predator is explosively interrupted by the AA guns below; bodies fountain from the ruptured craft, crashing against our own, and it peels off in a fat molten arc of smoke and petrol, drawing our gaze downward to the hellhole that awaits us: hunched utilitarian buildings packed around concrete fissures, stitched together by skeletal iron gangways; the flapping of innumerable banners adorned with the triple-pointed Helghast heraldry.

For all its mud-brown palette and omnipresent bad weather, Helgan is capable of diversity. Even the five levels allotted us in our Killzone 2 preview build cover a lot of ground: having scrambled clear of a violent landing, our squad fights its way along a toxic riverside murderously overlooked by machine gun emplacements, into the corrugated warehouses and claustrophobic stairwells of the docklands. From there we enter the city proper, a warren of intermittently-lit alleys, corridors and residential blocks which gives out onto processional boulevards and squares, the architectural paraphernalia of a propaganda-driven culture.

We dish out and receive the pain on sprawling bridges and in dripping sewage pipes, from trench to trench and rooftop to rooftop. The city taken (for the moment), Alpha squad is dispatched to recon a remote wasteland outpost. There's sunlight here, at least, but conditions are as unforgiving as ever. The wind whips sand into our eyes, confusing distant shapes, and the facility's lower reaches are crawling with monstrous insects born of Helgan's mysterious energy resources. And needless to say there are the Helghast themselves, dug in with rocket launchers and sniper rifles at the far end of mesh walkways, or stalking between tank barriers. It's not a great place for a picnic, in short.

But it is a great place for a shooter. Indeed, it might be more apt to say that it has been a great place for a shooter. While Guerrilla's last bastion of interstellar fascism calls to mind a number of real-world and Hollywood parallels - Cold War Berlin, the storm-lashed colony of Aliens, Blade Runner's retro-futuristic Los Angeles - the more appropriate comparison is surely Gears of War's Sera, alike rust-coloured, hazardous and haphazard in layout. The military-industrial vibe is still Guerrilla's - as a franchise Killzone predates Epic Games' much-aped blockbuster by a good few years - but the organic, awe-inspiring disorder of that backdrop owes much to this rival experiment in "hard" science fiction. As in Gears, it's possible to linger for minutes over each lovingly recreated component of the Helghast war machine - a set of barrels beneath a flapping tarpaulin, or brackish water lapping against crumpled bodies beneath rickety wooden bridges. Possible, but not advisable.

We could linger over the technical brawn which keeps everything in motion, too. Killzone 2 is a heavily processed graphical treat, distributing its specular lighting, film noise, motion blur and texture buffers across the PS3's six SPUs. Put together, these deferred layers give every object in the game a corroded, hand-worked look, from the gas which bursts out when you blast a radiator system to the cheekbones and thick padded gloves of your squadmates. There are no clean edges or unstained surfaces on Helgan: the corners of buildings have been chipped away by the elements, and even the metal of your weapons lacks sheen.

As in the jungles of Far Cry 2, the tattered picture Killzone 2 paints hides the logic of the level design. That logic is pretty straightforward: if you aren't in cover, you're dead. Again, the developer's inspirations are obvious but the end result is very much Guerrilla's own: while the business of hugging walls, inching your head out and training your sights on a sliver of exposed Helghast scalp again recalls Gears, it's far harder to sit tight and pick 'em off. Expect to be squirreled out within seconds of going to ground: enemies come from all angles and elevations, and your turning and movement speed is at times fatally sluggish.

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