Killzone 2

Disappointed by the original Killzone? Prepare to forget all about it. Guerrilla Games gets things right second time.

	Version PS3	Developer Guerilla	Publisher SCE	Genre FPS

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In honing the nitty-gritty of combat to a chilly sheen, Killzone 2 suffers somewhat when placed in the company of more panoramic shooters. In the milliseconds between the firing of a bullet and its impact, the game has few equals, but once you unstick your nose from that gunsights view you'll find that things go a tad blurry round the edges. Guerrilla's level designers play it very safe: for all the ISA's advanced tech and the Helghast's crazed rodent ingenuity, the war they wage is a familiar tale of escort missions, area defence and claustrophobic urban recon, with only some fleeting on-rails shooting segments and vehicular action to season that finely cooked core. Weather the graphical storm and get your head round the art of keeping your head down, and Killzone 2 comes up short against Halo 3's sprawling, spontaneous synthesis of combat props and AI, or Resistance 2's shallow but playful boss fights.

It's not like there's a shortage of raw materials, but so intent is the developer on getting the shooting just right that it lets a fair few potentially memorable scenarios slip through its fingers. Guerrilla's shameless theft of Gears of War's train level is revealing: where Epic throws down sentient, airborne snotballs ridden by snipers, Berserkers and a Locust general swathed in giant bats, the Helghast express is stocked with identikit grunts. Leave out the tank at the other end, and you might as well be walking down another corridor.

Predictably, the presence of another player with whom to revel in the game's sober combat ethos might have made all the difference. With its well-distinguished weapons and troop types, underhand spawn patterns, and intricate arrangements of nooks, sandbags, sniping spots, emplaced guns and choke points, Killzone 2 is crying out for a co-op mode, on or offline. Capable though it is on the whole, the buddy AI sometimes opts to play the bullet sponge or knuckle down on the wrong side of a wall; even if you disregard these minor glitches, it's hardly bubbling over with tactical awareness.

At one stage a squad-mate and I were ambushed at the base of a long incline overlooked by sand-bleached metal structures. My squad-mate immediately opened fire, and with the Helghast thus distracted I crept up on their left flank. Rather than suppressing the ambushers while I got into position, however, the other chap came jogging after me once I'd moved a certain distance, alerting the enemy to my antics. A restart wasn't long in following.

There's also the woeful plot to account for. Hold it, reader - cancel that email rant on the stupidity of demanding Proustian prose from a hard-boiled military shooter. The trouble with Killzone 2's storyline is that, in defiance of expectation, it could have been superb. At times the friction between the level-headed Sev and his think-later superior, Rico, is worthy of the sparks which fly between Sergeants Elias Grodin and Bob Barnes in Oliver Stone's Platoon. The final cut scene, lent muscle by Brian Cox's apoplectic voice-acting, actually had me hungry for a sequel, despite the thought of another four years' punctuation-free forum posts and anally exacting screenshot comparisons.

But there's too little back-story, too little real character interaction, and too many laboured "so's-your-mother" jokes for the plot to take wing, and ultimately you'll play for the thrill of peeling back the layers of Helghan civilization (while, of course, shooting it to bits) rather than the individual dramas floating on top.

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