Early Killzone 2 Reviews Looking Good 140
Reviews are beginning to appear for Guerrilla Games' upcoming first-person shooter, Killzone 2, a PS3 exclusive that has received a great deal of hype over the past several months. The reviews are mostly complimentary, but not overwhelmingly so; Ars Technica says it has "some of the best graphics yet seen on the PS3," and is a "solid take on the war-gaming genre." They also acknowledge that this is the latest game being held up as a standard for how good PS3 games can be, though the PS3 may not need such validation anymore. Edge Magazine is critical of the story, saying, "you could play the levels in random order to little ill-effect," but found the gameplay redeeming enough to warrant a 7/10. Concerns were raised early about the quality of the controls, but Guerrilla Games has affirmed that no changes will be made. Though the game won't be out for about a week yet, rumors of some fairly typical DLC plans are already cropping up. Giant Bomb recorded some video showcasing Killzone 2's multiplayer a while back.
Re:Early? (Score:3, Interesting)
The first game was not a major title. It can safely be said that most people who buy Killzone 2 will probably have never played the first game. From a writers perspective, this is man from heaven. They don't have to worry about the dreaded continuity.
There is a place for story in a game. But what must be remembered is that it is not a very big place.
Story in a game is like filling between layers in a cake. Sure it's tasty, and you can get pretty creative there(jam!!), but filling and icing is not what a cake is all about. Cake is about cake. And a game is about the game. Sure, put some delicious jam and chocolate icing between those layers, but the cake needs to be there, delicious and moist, as the base on which everything rests. Gameplay has to me the main ingredient in any game.
It is not that shooter games do not need story. It is that they are better served with a bite sized story. Shooter players are not looking for a Stienbeck-esque affair, broad, intricate and layered with meaning. They just want to shoot something. Think about Half-life, and how essentially, over the course of the game, nothing happens. The player, as Freeman, embarks on a journey with no specific goal, overcomes a series of loosely, if at all, related obstacles, and at the end has not reached any real conclusion. This breaks every accepted storytelling rule since Homer drafted the Odyssey. But despite all that, players loved it!
The reality is, that most of the story of games, comes from the playing. Scripted events, while they are appreciated, are not as essential to the immersion of a players as the gameplay, or the level design, or the art design, or the obstacles that they will face. Most people will remember a boss that challenged them before they remember a dramatic cutscene, complete with orchestral score. This goes double for first person games, where the player is literally seeing through the eyes of the protagonist.
Shooters get a lot of flack over their perceived poor storylines and shallow characters. While some of these criticisms are valid, it is invalid to say that shooters, or any game, MUST have Oscar worthy drama at every second turn. The player has enough drama facing down the hordes that are set against them. If you add any more, then that jam is just going to be cloyingly sweet.
Re:Which is it? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Early? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me preface my comment with this: I've owned both a 360 and PS3 and I've never really liked my PS3. I'm getting ready to sell it, in fact. I bought it for Home, blu-ray playback, and exclusives. But Home was delayed for a long time and sucked when it finally did come out, there are much cheaper blu-ray players now that don't require constant updates and actually work with my universal remote, and the few exclusives the PS3 have gotten (with the slight exceptions of Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4) have been mediocre at best. I'm actually getting ready to sell my launch PS3, as it just gathers dust now that I have a regular blu-ray player. My 360 on the other hand, is invaluable to me. Great exclusives, better quality and downloadable content on even multi-platform games, lets me stream movies from my Netflix account, it let me get in on the brief HD-DVD phase on the cheap (I still treasure my Battlestar Galactica Season 1 boxset, which has never been made available in HD on any other format), better controller for my big hands, etc.
But having said all that, there are still 360 exclusives (even popular ones) that I criticize. There are a lot of mediocre or boring shooter's on the 360 that just don't do it for me. I would give Gears of War 1 & 2 both "meh" scores, the same as some people are giving KZ2. And I just couldn't get into Dead Rising, with it's timed missions. So even a 360 fanboy like me doesn't just slobber over every game just because it's a 360 exclusive.
re: Ars and the PS3 (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know... Accusations are constantly flying about the folks over at Ars having a bias towards the PS3. Perhaps they do. But as someone who is, by and large, not even really a "console gamer" - I came to the same conclusion they have.
I bought a PS3 only 2-3 months after they were released. At that time, Resistance and EA's Fight Night boxing title were about the only noteworthy releases I could find for it. Still, I saw the potential the hardware had, and realized it was finally a "console that made sense to own, along-side of whatever high-end computer system I was gaming with".
At the end of the day, a Wii is "doing its own thing" with inferior hardware, but a creative new angle on what a console should do. Great, but I didn't really WANT my gaming to be that physically involved. The XBox 360 is too much like buying another PC with embedded Windows and controllers replacing the mouse and keyboard.
The PS3 earns its space in my living room by serving as a blu-ray disc player and "media center" (as it can display slideshows of my photos from a computer on my LAN, play music from one, and even stream video content from one).
If anything, I think it's really a shame the current PS3s ditched the backwards compatibility with PS2 games. That was yet another big positive with the purchase of the one I got.... I can literally buy PS2 titles for about $1.99 each in discount bins at local game shops, making the whole console gaming proposition much more cost-effective than it might have looked when people first saw that sticker price for the PS3 itself.
Re:The Edge Magazine review is odd... (Score:4, Interesting)
Edge places a high value on innovation, and openly admits to doing so. Even those who rate Killzone highly admit that, while amusing, it brings absolutely nothing to the table not seen before. It takes zero chances, preferring to polish the pre-existing experience. Even Gears 2 made SOME changes to the formula, both technically and in terms of storytelling and gameplay flow.
For many gamers, that's just fine. But as someone who plays most everything that comes out, I'd much rather a score tell me if the game will truly surprise me, as opposed to just being a well-trodden path through the FPS woods. Not everyone looks for the same thing in a review, but then, that's why there are multiple review sources. You can't whine about the over-dependence on metacritic and the generally poor state of numerical reviews, as many do of late, then penalize one source for actually trying something different and using the full 10 scale.