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Early Killzone 2 Reviews Looking Good
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.
EDGE (a magazine which has been going rapidly downhill for the past few years)
Personally, I wouldn't agree with that. Edge provides solid reviews, and they actually use the full review spectrum (i.e. if a game's crap, it gets a 1 or 2, not a negative write up and a 6)
While Edge is sorely missing someone of the calibre of Mr Biffo in their columns section, and their gaming comic, Crashlander is trash, they're the only review that I (as a dev in the industry) actually want to read (although Eurogamer's reviews are starting to become equally as credible, although sometimes they're still a little too easily distracted)
Having read the review in question, I can also understand exactly why it is lower than the average. The game seems to be competant and pretty, but not anything 'great' in terms of gameplay or pushing the FPS genre forward. Which sounds like 7/10 to me.
Baka Drew
This line has been repeated, ad nauseum, by almost everyone who has encounted or reviewed the game. I'd like to take this to task.
Firstly, on the matter on graphics. Personally, while I understand that they are good, I do not agree that the graphics in Killzone 2 are as much above other games as they have been made out to be. While they are technically impressive, they do not completely eclipse the graphics that can be seen on many recent titles(Gears of War 2, Resident Evil 5, Uncharted). Having said that, this is just a personal opinion, from someone with poor vision.
Secondly, the criticism that the game is "generic" or "unoriginal" is in my opinion, totally unjustified. For those who have not played the demo, let me explain.
Killzone 2 features a cover system. Holding L2 while against cover will cause the player to "hug" the wall. At the point, the left stick can be used to shimmy along the cover, and to peek out over or to the side in order to shoot. The gameplay encourages this by making it clear that running out of cover and shooting is very likely to get you killed very quickly.
This is a new game mechanic that fairly radically changes the gameplay of the FPS. Like the shoulder view in Resident Evil 4, Z-targeting in the Ocarina of Time, and the cover system in Killswitch, this is potentially a genre changing innovation. Killzone 2 is essentially bringing the Killswitch cover system from third person shooters, into the first person shooter domain. If this is not innovation, then I'm not sure what qualifies.
Personally, having of late seen reviewers, time and again, criticize first person shooters for being "unoriginal" or "bland", I can only conclude that the review community has become jaded towards the genre. I think they are finally coming down off their shameless hype high preceding Halo 3 and have become cynical about the entire concept of FPS games. While the FPS market is admittedly saturated, there is still innovation in this area, even if reviewers are unable to see it.
May the Maths Be with you!
Yeah, what we have here is a classic case of a game which is, let's face it, more about the petty politics of console wars rather than the quality of the game itself. It's not alone in this; Metal Gear Solid 4 on the PS3, Gears of War and its sequel on the 360 and... well... pretty much any first-party Nintendo game on the Wii (Nintendo fanboys are particularly bad for this) all fall into the same category. The rabid elements of the system in question's fanbase have a psychological need to believe that this game must be the BEST THING EVER and any criticism of the game, no matter how moderately expressed or well evidenced, is an OUTRAGEOUS INSULT not only to the game itself, but also to the host system and the personal honour of the fanboy himself.
Owning all 3 systems and not having a particular ideological bias in favour of one of them (though I do find that the nature of the Nintendo fanbase occasionally pushes me away from the Wii a bit), I can generally at least try to take a balanced view of the games in question. Killzone 2 looks very pretty - there's no denying it's making good use of the PS3 hardware. I don't think it's on a par with Crysis graphically, but then, good luck experiencing Crysis properly on any system that doesn't cost at least twice the retail value of the PS3 (even with the performance improvements they made in the patch, and in Crysis Warhead). The gameplay looks fairly generic shooter, albeit with some decent-ish AI. But I'm not really seeing much to set it apart from Gears of War 2, Resistance 2 or FEAR 2, all of which have more or less sated my thirst for shooters in recent months to a perfectly satisfactory standard. I might pick it up at some point, once I've finished FEAR 2, but I can't claim to be in a particular hurry, particularly with Dawn of War 2 due for release any day and liable to soak up a lot of my gaming time over the next month. The apparent flaws relating to plot, variety of enemies and controls are all worrying, though I know better than to trust reviews too far over these things.
To be honest, the shooter I'm really starting to get excited about now is the Aliens title, due to be published by SEGA, but I note the release date on that has now slipped to 2010.
Gears, Vegas, GRAW and many other games not only have cover systems, but implement them better than Killzone. That it also sticks doggedly to a first-person view so you can't see much while in cover isn't a significant innovation, if you ask me.
Yes, Edge got rather carried away with their review of Halo 3. However, 7/10 is if anything better than I'd expect to see at the bottom of that text - they've reviewed tonnes of PC FPS titles like that and given them 6/10.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
You're somewhat in the right direction, but not entirely right. The main difficulty programming the PS3 is not that it's particularly hard to break up a game engine/ AI/ graphics effects/ whatever into enough threads to keep the PS3's SPU's busy, the hardest part is actually scheduling the threads to prevent memory contention, stalling SPU processes, communicating inputs & outputs etc. It's a step back from writing code and having the compiler do all the hard work, only having to track the interaction between 2, maybe 3 threads that run all the time. With the PS3 you'd be handling the same 2 or 3 threads on the PPU, plus tens, maybe even 100s of 'micro-threads' distributed over the SPU's, constantly starting, pulling data from RAM, spending some time processing, pushing back the result, etc.
It doesn't really help that game engines are generally based on existing codebases and ported between architectures all the time either. It's not easy to extract high performance from a game engine that has to run well on the homogenuous 3-core architecture of the 360 as well as on the heterogenuous 2+7 core architecture of the PS3. And let's not forget the split-memory architecture, where half of the main memory effectively has zero bandwidth to the CPU and should only be accessed from the GPU. Which leaves only 256MB of RAM or a major headache laying out your data in memory.
Last but not least you're right about the GPU: the 360 GPU has significantly better fill-rates, especially when complex shaders are used. The Cell in the PS3 can be used to offload graphics stuff and not be limited by shader performance, but again it's not easy.
I believe the KZ2 engine was designed from the ground up for the PS3 architecture, which probably explains why it looks so good compared to cross-platform PS3 titles.
It wasn't really that odd. Sure the PS3 fanboys went mad, but that was to be expected for anything other than a 9 or a 10. The review its self was pretty positive (if you read it), and Edge traditionally scores lower than the IGN or Gamespot's. 7/10 is a solid score.
Ive not played the game, but honestly from what i have seen, the gameplay is nothing other than run-of-the-mill for a shooter. Multiplayer seems to have had more thought put into it, but even that is basically COD4's level/unlock system.
If i had a PS3 i would buy it for sure, because i like shooters. But for anyone else there are games that provide the same experience already out.
Often with these big platform exclusive games, their review becomes a review of the platform -- rather than the game -- in many readers eyes. Saying Killzone 2 is average is saying the PS3 is average, so there is more at stake for some than just a game review.
As for Edges reviews generally. There are some inconsistent scores. But because the review is written and scored by an individual, and that is the only opinion given in the magazine. It is bound to happen from time to time. Overall the magazine is still one of the few i trust for an engaging read and sensible reviews.
Wannabe nerd.
Pfft, Monopoly is for casual board gamers. At least get something like Puerto Rico or Agricola when we're talking about hardcore qualifications!
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
For several reasons. Here are just a few.
If I sound angry it's because I've spent the last 2 1/2 years dealing with the PS3's stubborn way of making something that should have been very simple into something incredibly frustrating and annoying.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yeah he's way out of line. You're not a hardcore gamer unless you have a Sega Saturn.
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