PS3 has got its own "Gears of War" at last! Now with broken multiplay.
And now that the game is out, you can easily tell that this is one of the rare cases when all the hype was justified: the game is great! It has its own issues and weaknesses, of course, but nonetheless, it's a great game. From the very moment you put the disk into the PS3 you can tell: a lot of love went into the game, especially from the technical standpoint: the game looks and sounds absolutely fantastic! The graphics beats Gears of War on the competitor's console hands down. Still, you can see the level of detail popping every now and then, but you have to pay attention to notice it.
The developers have paid a lot of attention to every detail, how ever small it might be - from the title screens down to the killzone.com web site, where you can track your progress and do many other useful things.
I've spent about 1 hour playing online so far, and the multiplayer mode seems pretty solid, and is tied well with the killzone.com website. You can even log into the web site and replay your match in a map mode, where you can see your and other players movement across the map, so you can see what was going on and, probably, plan for your future actions on that map.
There are, however, some things that personally I didn't like. One of the issues is the controls - specifically how the joysticks work. The movement is very inertious, so even if you move a joystick just a little bit - you'll most likely overshoot the target. It's extremely difficult to aim with such "wobbly" controls, especially if you compare it to, say, Call of Duty 4. Plus, the default sensitivity is pretty low, so it takes a few seconds just to turn around 360 degrees. Sure you can increase the sensitivity, but then aiming becomes a complete nightmare.
The game freezes up sometimes, with "Loading" showing in a corner. Seems like it can't keep up with loading the content from the BD disk, as the game has no installation option (which, by the way, also results in pretty long loading times).
Also, I think that if a game has a tropy dedicated to "beating the final boss in less than 20 minutes" - something is really wrong with the game. Beating a boss should be challenging, but it shouldn't be an exercise in frustration.
But those all are pretty minor issues. Overall the game is great, and it's very nice to see a game showing a true potential of the PS3. Finally PS3 fanboys have something to brag about :)
UPDATE: While the game itself is great, the KILLZONE.COM web site is another story: even a week after the game has been released, it's still mostly down, with lots of problems, bugs, glitches, error messages - you name it! It's amazing how clueless the site admins, apparently, are, when it comes to heavy-traffic web site hosting. Worse yet, the link to the web site from the game itself indicates that the site is not even designed to be used from the PS3 itself, as it shows incorrectly, requests to install Adobe Flash 9 and overall is practically unusable. But then again, it's unusable period, regardless of where you're trying to access it from. Apparently the SOCOM.COM fiasco hasn't taught anyone anything...
UPDATE 2: Lowering rating because the online multiplay is severely unbalanced and is pretty much broken. GG decided to listen to the whiners about spawn grenades, completely removing invulnerability upon spawn instead of at least shortening it, making them completely useless. They also have made it exceptionally difficult to deal with bots, at the same time turning the bots into snipers, capable of scoring a headshot on running with "Boost" target. A lot of people stopped playing the game after these changes. Oh well, it was good while it lasted...