The worst thing to ever happen during the development of Killzone was for someone in the media to label it a Halo killer. It is often a bad sign when someone puts a label on a game, especially when the standards are set so high. So let me clarify, this is not a Halo killer, and honestly, even if it was the best game ever created, it still wouldn’t be, since Halo is so different at its core from most first person shooters on the market. Killzone had a lot going for it, and I do mean a lot. When you load up the game, view the menu’s and opening sequence, you are being set up for an awesome gaming experience. Even when you first start the game, everything just seems right. Unfortunately that changes very quickly as Killzone suffers from an overall lack of polish and what could have been an excellent game, turns out to be fairly average. 

The story casts you in the role of several resistance fighters trying to take back freedom from a tyrannical leader controlling an army of soldiers called the Helghast. The game pulls you through the storyline through the game itself and it gets considerably deeper towards the end. The Helghast are an excellent enemy on paper and sometimes they even spark some tension in the game, but the game seems to fall on their soldiers and they don’t always deliver. As the game progresses you can play other characters that follow a different perspective. This was a neat idea also in theory, but it sometimes causes confusion. Overall the voice acting is suitable with a notable exception of Brian Cox (X-Men 2 and Manhunt) who once again delivers an outstanding performance of an outright psychopath.

 

 

The gameplay is fairly straightforward with your character being given objectives at any particular moment. Pretty much everything happens on the fly and while the game tries to emphasize squad combat, there will be quite a few times when you are left by yourself to mow down a hundred Helghast soldiers. As with any shooter, you are given basic weaponry like a pistol and grenades, along with an automatic unique to your side of the war. None of the weapons were particularly striking but each featured excellent reloading animations and all of them looked believable and crisp. The animation wasn’t as fluid when they were actually being fired, but in the high adrenaline moments the game throws at you, it’s hardly noticeable. There were some truly engaging levels, mostly towards the end that really showed off the concept of what they were trying to present to us, but for every little thing they did pull off, something wasn’t so polished. One of the most entertaining ways to dispose of enemies is to initiate a melee attack when you get up close which usually entails your character snapping an enemy’s neck. It was backed up by excellent animation, a scene which in itself was already satisfying. The rest of the game is a fairly standard story driven shooter which is no different from a game like Halo, but of course the story often had too many holes or wasn’t as fulfilling as it could have been. The game is quite long though, and you could be playing it from 15-20 hours if you stuck with it.  

What may turn some people off is the sometimes horrid enemy AI, which ranges from “trying to be intelligent” to “Oh wow, he’s just stupid isn’t he?”. Sometimes enemies will take cover from your fire and do their little rolls and call for backup, but then there are other times when they will simply run straight at you shooting the whole time as if they are a kamikaze waiting to explode. Sometimes it becomes mind numbingly annoying, but for a shooter like this it’s not a game crippling issue.