Eurogamer Expo: Killzone 2

It's time for my final hands-on from the Eurogamer Expo, and I have most definitely saved the best until last. Sure, Mirror's Edge and EndWar are trying new things, but for sure awesomeness, I turned to the two massive screens set up for Killzone 2. You can say what you want about E305's "target footage" or the obscene amounts of money being spent on the game's development, but when you finally get a controller in your hands to play the game, all of this slips away.

Having queued for a good half hour (I say queued, it was more just a mass of people waiting in a completely incoherent manner), myself and the Wanderer perched ourselves on the stools in front of the 42" screen, and surrounded by Dolby's latest surround sound speakers (bizarrely, the Dolby rep quizzing those waiting was actually asking about PC sound). The first thing that strikes you about Killzone 2 is, depending on who you ask, how good the graphics look, or how grey those graphics are.


I kid, I kid - Killzone 2 is a beautiful game. From the way the scenery sways in the storms in the skies of Helghan, to the ominous glowing orange eyes of the Helghast themselves, it really makes you take a breath. Any recent video you might have seen? It looks exactly like that, and maybe a little better. And the grey and dull colours of the surroundings, the subject of much debate, is really explained by playing the game yourself. Comrades and other ISA units (tanks etc) have slight blue tints and lights on them, but the main colour in the game is orange: the eyes of the Helghast and the awesome blood spatters on your screen when you take damage being prime examples. But its clear that Guerrilla Games have taken the criticism on board; there's gorgeous orange (and sometimes inexplicable) lens flare as well as just more subtle hints of colour all around. The actual design of Helghan is something also massively improved over the original video, and the planet really has a unique character: industrial, but with elements of steampunk and even a little art deco, perhaps inspired by Bioshock.

But the graphics are something you can see on video - the main thing I want to talk about here is how the game plays. The answer? Really well. I've never played Call of Duty 4, so can't make comparisons there, but the guns feel like they have real weight behind them - your character clunks around with the weight of their packs and guns (as do the Helghast), and the weapons themselves chuck back with quite a bit of force. This is likely assisted in part by the DualShock we were playing with, but also by the game's incredible sound. Each shot sounds great, something quite hard to describe using text, and the game uses an evolved version of Home's location-based sound to give a realistic sense of sound depending on how close or far away you are to nearby gunfights.


I guess I should address the one other down-point that other previews of Killzone 2 have brought up: that the enemies take too many shots to kill, giving an illusion of weak guns. Whilst the guns are in fact very powerful, yes, the Helghast do take a lock of shots to go down. And anyone writing this as a negative in previews has evidently never played the original game. In Killzone on PS2, the Helghast could be real bastards at some times, taking a couple of shotgun bullets even to go down, and this was something that actually made me love the game, that you really had a sense of "these invader guys are actually pretty good". Yes, 2 takes place on the Helghast homeworld and that sense is now of "these guys really don't want to be beaten", but the strength of the Helghast force is still there, and I love that.

As a massive fan of the original game, I am really hyped for Killzone 2, and hopefully it'll live up to those expectations when it launches in February.