Killzone 2 (PS3)

[RoyalBoyle78]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

can't wait Flaw!!!!

[youvalss]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

Simply amazing!

[Candyman5]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

So when does this game release. I like how everything looks except the blood splatter thing. Just looks out of contex.

[Eton Rifles]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

Gamestop says it ships on Feb. 17.

[Flawless]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

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[Flawless]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

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Gamespot Impressions

Whereas the first Killzone allowed you to play as a number of Interplanetary Strategic Alliance (ISA) members over the course of the game, Killzone 2 drops you into the shoes of a gruff soldier named Sev and keeps you there for its duration. Throughout the campaign, you'll follow Sev and his similarly rough-and-tumble Alpha Squad buddies as they push deeper into the Helghast home planet in an opposite scenario of the invasion that occurred in the first game. Sev isn't the most vocal guy in the world, but you'll hear plenty of quips from teammates like jokester Dante Garza and the perpetually vulgar Rico Velasquez. Most of the story unfolds in the heat of battle via dialogue delivered from these squadmates, though occasional cutscenes give you fleeting glimpses of what's going on deep within the Helghast quarters.

One thing becomes immediately apparent when you begin Killzone 2's campaign: This is not an easy game. The first chapter, Corinth River--an area Sony has shown several times before--drops you right into a heated firefight with no shortage of heavily armed Helghast soldiers trying to take you out from scattered perches. It feels like every balcony, bridge, and window has a pair of glowing red Helghast eyes staring down at you. Starting you off like this seems like Killzone 2's way of saying that running and gunning won't cut it; you're going to learn to be patient and deliberate with your targets, and you're going to learn right away.

To do this, you'll need to become good friends with the game's cover system. It's a sticky cover mechanic where you pull L2 to snap right onto nearby walls or low barriers. From there, you have the standard move set that includes leaning into a doorway or popping up over a barricade, with the ability to look down your gun's iron sights to help you get a bit more precise. What makes this system unique and challenging is that you remain in the first-person perspective at all times, so your vision is partially obscured as you stay out of harm's way. In a third-person shooter you can see almost every target thanks to a wide camera, but here you'll need to poke your head up fast and get to shooting even faster--making that initial moment when you leave cover that much more thrilling.

Fights tend to last a while due to clever AI on the part of the Helghast soldiers. They seem to have attended the same school of cover techniques you have, because they'll be spending just as much time behind crates and walls. What makes things interesting is that their behavior seems to change as the odds of their survival are whittled down. You'll see them get brave in a group and pop up quite often, but when they're in a bad spot they'll stay put and frantically blind fire while defiling your good name.

Finally, with this being Killzone 2, we would be remiss if we didn't mention the graphics--or more specifically, how awesome they are. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say Killzone 2 is the best-looking console game we've seen. The use of lighting is probably the most impressive of the game's technical feats: with so much of the game taking place in demolished urban centers with gray steel, concrete, and asphalt, those moments when you're flushed with color are extremely striking. This might include an orange street lamp, the blue glow of a faulty electrical tower, or the green haze in a sewer tunnel, but the way it all reflects off nearby objects like your gun and character models looks terrific. Add in sharp textures, great smoke and explosion effects, terrific depth of field, and an ominous sky that looks like the world might cave in at any moment and you've got a combination of technical and artistic brilliance that's hard to understate. Best of all: the framerate does a good job of keeping up, with the only noticeable hitches arriving during an autosave between checkpoints.

If you were to nitpick the presentation, most people's attention would probably fall on the audio. While the sound effects and music are both great, the voice acting could give Gears of War's Delta Squad a run for its money in terms of smoldering, manly rage. In fact, it can often be difficult to separate one gruff voice from another when your vision isn't fixed on a squadmate's face. It's not exactly an abrasive fault, but it does stick out when you consider how stellar the rest of the presentation is.

Small gripes aside, we had a thoroughly enjoyable experience with Killzone 2's single-player campaign. The combat is intense, the visual aesthetics are amazing, and the level of difficulty provides a rewarding challenge. It seems that PlayStation 3 owners will have a lot to look forward to when the game is finally released. You can expect that to happen on February 17.

[Flawless]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

Eurogamer Impressions

Looks and physics will only get you so far, however, and when it comes to the core experience, the developers have a simple goal. They want to make Killzone 2 one of the most intense console shooters around, and that means zeroing on the simple business of killing people. The team has identified weak hit-response as one of the key elements that damaged the first game, and they've spent a lot of time working on a blend of physics and animation to improve it. Where previously enemies would scarcely react as you fired endless clips into their stomachs, they now jolt, twist and writhe under the impact of bullets, before slumping to the ground after a more realistically brief onslaught. It may seem like a strange detail to fixate on, but it's astonishing how much drama the right reactions can bring to the game's shootouts. When you fire guns in Killzone 2, it's immediately obvious that you're making things happen, and the result is a more involving experience, even on a short playthrough.

AI was an arguably a bigger problem with the original game, and it's another aspect the team have taken pains to address. "With AI the frustrating thing is if you get 90 per cent right, that last ten per cent with someone who gets stuck on a wall can let you down," says game designer Rob Heald. "Killzone 2's AI is still an evolution of the AI in the original, we haven't started from scratch. But we have taken advantage of the technology. The AI can make more decisions, decide between greater threats and different inputs. They're capable of dealing with a much more dynamic world. You'll see a lot more rolling out of the way of grenades, flanking, avoiding destructible objects. It's a cliché, but you won't see the same encounter play out twice. And there's more variety in the enemies: there's long-range guys, and short-range guys who will move in and flush you out."

Playing through a few sections of the campaign reveals that the Helghast have become fearsome opponents, far removed from the pop-up targets of the first game. They soften you up from afar, move in to flank, and will come looking for you if you start to hang back, and the game's varied levels give you plenty of time to try out different strategies as the fighting switches between open environments and grotty close-up battling. Set-pieces are everywhere, from a tank suddenly barrelling over a wall before disgorging troops into the heart of your squad, to a prolonged scramble through a collapsing military installation, and the opening dropship invasion.

The controls will take some getting used to. An emphasis on realistic recoil means that Killzone 2's weapons can initially feel unwieldy rather than simply weighty, and the slightly slippery aim, which seems too slow in the centre of the screen and too quick at the edges, is going to require acclimatisation for any hardcore COD players. But even though the game allows you generous options for tweaking sensitivities, assigning different button layouts, and effectively recreating any other game's mapping, the more we played, the less we wanted to substitute Guerrilla's control scheme for something more familiar. After an hour or so, Killzone's layout starts to make sense, its weak running and gunning options forcing you to find a space and make use of the iron sights, while the slightly slow turning and lengthy reload animations draw you into a game that plays out at a tenser, more measured pace than COD or Halo.

Throw in a cover system - in single-player only - that doesn't take the player out of the first-person perspective, but instead relies on a surprisingly cinematic lean-and-peak mechanic, and you have a seriously tactical, if traditional shooter starting to find its feet. The overall feeling of what we've played so far is a carefully constructed solidity: Killzone 2's world may not constantly surprise you, but it's remarkably tangible, from the heavy guns, to the thick, alien wind roaring in your face, and the drunken staggers of dying enemies. Despite its conservative aims - rather than introduce new ideas, Guerrilla wants to perfect a few old ones - no other shooter plays quite like Killzone 2, and no other shooter looks quite like it, either. That's a risk in a market as saturated as this, but the one thing Guerrilla has never struggled with is drawing attention to itself. Now at last there are promising indications that it's got the game to go along with the hype.

[Jonesy]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

Thanks for posting all this Flawless, sounding very awesome, hope it lives up to the hype....

[ThaGenecyst]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

[Jonesy]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

They look very cool.

Ya gotta love how just about every FPS has red explosive barrels laying around the place.

[Flawless]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

Release Date: February 27th, 2009

Tonight, X-Play brought you the release date for Killzone 2, the highly-anticipated FPS from Guerrilla Games and Sony!

That date: February 27, 2009 for the United States. There is no word on other territories yet.

There were a lot of rumors about the 17th, but it will be 10 days later. Get your pre-orders in!

[backbreaker]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

this right here is direct feed hd footage is awesome violence. Flamethrower never felt so painful as those helgangs try to put out the fire. WOW

http://www.g4tv.com/trailers/hdvideos/35326/Killzone_2_Bonus_DirectFeed_New_Weapon_Footage.html

[Flawless]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

Killzone 2 Team Interview

GameSpy: Shooters are often remembered for their most unique weaponry. What are the most interesting weapons available in Killzone 2?

Steve Ter Heide: We wanted to create weapons that each have their unique capabilities, rather than a large set of similar weapons. We have got [everything] from the knife to an electricity gun [to a] gun that fires explosive bolts than can pin enemies to walls. Personally, I like the electricity gun a lot. The effects of it firing are great, you feel really powerful. Oh, and the Exoskeleton can be considered a weapon as well, it is this big mech that you can use to fire missiles.

GameSpy: From what we've seen so far, the lighting techniques used in Killzone 2 are particularly impressive. Could you explain what lighting techniques are utilized here and the effects they impart?

Jan Bart Van Beek: Our engine is built around a deferred renderer. The strength of such engines is that they are very good at lighting as it's much more efficient at dealing with a lot of lights while at the same time being much faster at lighting then traditional, so called "forward" renderers. Of course with any advantage there usually is a disadvantage as well, which in the case of deferred renderers is their limitations regarding transparent objects, so glass objects but also grass and leaves. To overcome that weakness Killzone 2 actually uses a second engine for rendering transparent objects and particles. The advantage of a deferred renderer is that shaders themselves are a lot cheaper to process, as all the expensive lighting calculations are taken out of them. This has allowed us to experiment a little more with some more advanced shader techniques.

As we were developing the game, the engine became more and more robust and mature. One of the main developments was that more processes that were initially handled by the main CPU were being moved to the SPUs. Physics, lighting set-up, particle set-up, animation and such are by now all running on the SPU, leaving the CPU to calculate the more tricky game systems that aren't easily made parallel. At some point we even found ways to start doing certain GPU calculation on the SPUs, so now a lot of our post-processing such as bloom, depth-of-field and motion blur are being rendered by the SPUs. This freed up performance from the GPU, which in turn allowed us to go even further with shader complexity and particle density.

GameSpy: What sorts of matchmaking options will players have so that they can find an appropriate game?

Eric Boltjes: Players can search for specific maps they like, mission modes, preferred player numbers, filter out games from their own region and their own rank. This is all to ensure they find the game they want to play and that you do not get thrown into games with players much better/worse than themselves.

GameSpy: The badge system allows you to combine the attributes of two different classes. Are you finding that particular combinations work especially well together?

Eric Boltjes: Yes. It all depends on your own play style. For example, I love playing the Tactician because of the deployable spawn points, but to give me a little edge I replace its Air Support ability with the Boost ability of the Assault badge. This allows me to quickly run behind enemy lines and deploy spawn points there, allowing my friends to flank them. I also combine the Repair ability from the engineer a lot with more offensive abilities like Extra Armor and the Cloak Suit, so I always have ammunition nearby.

[Candyman5]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

GameSpy: The badge system allows you to combine the attributes of two different classes. Are you finding that particular combinations work especially well together?

Eric Boltjes: Yes. It all depends on your own play style. For example, I love playing the Tactician because of the deployable spawn points, but to give me a little edge I replace its Air Support ability with the Boost ability of the Assault badge. This allows me to quickly run behind enemy lines and deploy spawn points there, allowing my friends to flank them. I also combine the Repair ability from the engineer a lot with more offensive abilities like Extra Armor and the Cloak Suit, so I always have ammunition nearby.

Woah, I dont think I like the deployable spawn points thing.....

[DubTrey1]

Re: Killzone 2 (PS3)

I know this is like stating the obvious, but this title will definately be a console mover for Sony. No doubt. They have to be holding out hope that this game rocks our faces off.