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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Killzone 2 encourages you to experiment with your primary loadout by making your magnum side-arm a useful fall-back, rather than a point of last resort: it packs infinite ammo and a startling punch. The runts of the litter (thus far, at least) are the single-shot rifle, which just feels a bit pointless alongside the automatic mainstays, and the bolt gun, which fires a grenade-tipped harpoon and is, on the whole, suspiciously redolent of Gears of War's Torque bow.

All the weapons in the universe wouldn't be much shop if there weren't challenging opponents to fire them at, of course, and the fleshed-out Killzone AI does its job. Guerrilla strikes a great initial balance between standard, mid-range troops who prefer to fire from cover, and the hardarse shock types who sprint forward (often faster than you can track them) to get medieval with knives and SMGs. Further in you uncover bazooka troops who kneel to take their shots, aggressive, well-armoured shotgun grunts and hooded snipers.

The Helghast are alternately cunning, craven or damn near suicidal. We ran into a huge number of permutations in close quarters, for instance: sometimes the enemy fled to cover, sometimes he tried to out-gun us, and sometimes he resorted to the butt of his rifle. That dynamism is true of your three ISA squad-mates, too, each of whom has combat tactics to match his choice of weapon. Natko keeps his head down till he's close enough to employ his shotgun, while the aforementioned Rico likes to stand tall and roll out curtains of withering fire. All ISA and Helghast troops, generic or otherwise, will take cover, blind-fire when suppressed and throw themselves desperately away from grenades. They communicate well too, calling for support when reloading and shouting out enemy positions. It's a potent mix, though nothing Bungie hasn't entertained us with in the past.

Less impressively, some of the more daunting enemies stray towards the formulaic: Helghast heavies in mechanical armour must be spun with a few headshots to let you target their rear heat-sinks, and the one boss encounter we fought through was a pattern-based affair. These more by-the-numbers elements may be indicative of a wider problem in Killzone 2 single player: the intense personality of the environments doesn't quite extend to the cast. Alpha squad are a stereotypical bunch: there's the gruff African-American sergeant, the irresponsible hot-head, the level-headed bloke and the blank tablet hero, Tomas "Sev" Sevchenko. Gears of War gave us a similarly hard-boiled roster, but it also managed to make each parcel of testosterone and Unreal Engine shine feel like a plausible (if obnoxious) individual, where Sev and co are so many lantern-jawed attitudes floating on a narrative void.

Such qualms could be owing to the unfinished state of the preview build, however, with many of the scene transitions and movies AWOL, the lip-synching approximate and the audio clearly un-optimised. These and a host of minor physics and lighting glitches aside, it's a testament to Guerrilla's perfectionism that the game is this playable months from release. Any enduring concerns that lightning would strike twice on the Killzone franchise can be tidied away under the carpet: the question now is not whether the game will fail as its PS2 predecessor did, but whether it will be the classic we're all hoping for. Kikizo's first few hours of Helghan hospitality suggest Guerrilla has a shot at the prize.

Killzone 2 is due out exclusively for PlayStation 3 on February 27, 2009. Stay tuned for our second massive exclusive interview with Guerilla, coming next week (the first one from last year can be found here, while you can see our thoughts on multiplayer here.).

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