Killzone is an underrated game that isn’t bothered much at all by its so-called bugs or a broken game.
You can carry three weapons with you instead of the Halo style limiting you to only two. The game has many different weapons that are both innovative and fun to use. You have grenades and there is even a melee weapon. The game has a different way to use a melee attack with any weapons, which is to run up to your enemy and hit the X button, and it will perform the attack for you and kill your enemy. The sniper rifle has a very distinctive style of aiming which adds another different element to the game. The enemies AI is actually pretty good and will give you a tough battle anytime. You have to use a lot of duck and cover tactics to do well in the game. If you attempt to be a hero, you’re going to die very quickly.
As the game progresses you end up working in a team of four to stop the Helghast. It’s very basic team action and you’ll do most of the work but your fellow troops will help you, but they never die even when taking many shots to the head for example, which takes some of the realism out of it. Some parts of the level design are not perfectly laid out and some times you’ll shoot by some barbed wire and you’ll see a reaction that your bullets are hitting it and ricocheting, but you’re still hitting the enemy your shooting at. This and very few other spots of the game have light level issues but this is an incredibly small nit pick that is a problem in most games you’ll play in some part of it and is probably not worth mentioning.
The game has an incredibly great looking art style that combined with a grain filter over the game really portrays a realistic warlike future atmosphere that really works well with the genre style. The levels look great and really feels like a depressed battle zone that has seen some action and would be home to the kind of guerrilla warfare at hand. The character models look excellent and you can tell in game to produce them on a PS2 they lose a few pixels to be able to have as many onscreen as they do. Which the game does provide some great wars with quite a few enemies and your allies as well.
The explosions look really good except for in some rare cases you won’t see much if any of an explosion except the blacken charred ground on which it was supposed to take place from a grenade. Now the real negatives to the game graphics are that you will see some pop in, including one time I was shooting at weapons generating in front of me with people part by part loading behind them. You will see some texture late to the party in cut scenes and in normal gameplay occasionally.
The biggest problem that you’ll here about Killzone is that yes there is a slight frame rate issue. Now this will only show up when a lot is occurring on screen which doesn’t always happen and isn’t too bad to play through. I personally wasn’t bothered by all by it and it didn’t hurt my aiming or playing the game at all except for one or two times being very slightly annoyed by it. The style of fighting you have to do though mostly has you hiding and fighting only a few guys at a time and this is good for not seeing a frame rate problem only certain times when fight a large group of enemies or explosions or firefights you’ll see a problem, nut not always. Some time it will happen more if you’re using a particular gun, which it’s still not more unplayable with a particular weapon. But, overall it’s just a great looking game that has some very minor graphical glitches that I would imagine would bother some people more than others.
The game has a very nice musical score that works well for the game. I think the guns sound great and make their presence known. The voice acting was good enough, though it could definitely be a little better. But there were some lines that could have used another read. The game is long, and so are some of the levels, but I didn’t find them to be repetitive like Doom 3’s endless corridors of demons two at a time.
Overall, its probably somewhere between 10-15 hours, with many different level times. Some levels are 10 minutes and some are over 50 minutes. Which only have check points which you can’t save from so you can’t go back to that point in a level which means you have to beat it in one shot. So obviously the game could use a better save system. The story is decent at best and could certainly use a tune up. This game just needs some very slight polishing and a better more powerful system to be played on and it could have been great. It’s still a good game and I certainly enjoyed it, but I look forward to Killzone 2 on PS3 because that could actually be a Halo killer if the necessary improvements are made.