Bioshock Review 19/05/2009

It’s a fairly good game, but I really didn’t get it’s huge critical acclaim.

As far as I know, Bioshock is the first main stream game to break away from initially committing itself to one system, as it has now expanded from just the Xbox to the PS3 after several years as an Xbox only title. This is strange, especially considering how aggressive Microsoft’s marketing tactics are but I assume the reason is mostly cash related. Anyway, who cares, as I’m glad it has crossed over as this game has got such huge critical acclaim I was always curios about it, but not willing to buy a whole new system just for one game (I don’t think a game exists that’s worth that price, as you should just be more tactical when purchasing a system). First of all this is first person shooter (FPS,) yet again, but this definitely differentiates itself from the competition. The concept is incredibly unique as is the combat and use of weaponry, with lots of dense story line, superb voice acting and memorable moments in general. To draw a comparison, and to be informative, this game definitely doesn’t go head to head with shooters such as Resistance 2 or Call of Duty, as i’s simply not a similar game. It’s much more a survival horror/role playing game that’s played in first person, so don’t expect an explosive action title. It’s much more intelligent and subtle than that.

What’s good?

The story here is the most intriguing and impressive aspect. I doubt you have ever played through a story like this one before. You play “Jack” a passenger on an aircraft flying to a mystery destination. Your plane crash lands in the sea and you are the only survivor. You swim to what looks like a like a lighthouse but it turns out to be the entrance to a secret underwater city called “Rapture”. This city is built and inhabited by a community of scientists, artists, free thinkers and generally brilliant minds that wish to hide away from modern scaremongering, god fearing and politically correct society. Unhinged by such moral obligations the idea is to create a utopian community of brilliance and creativity. However, when you accidently arrive you find the city is a leaking decaying ruin, the only inhabitants are crazed genetic mutants hell bent on killing anything and everything and there are small girls wandering the hallways feasting on the dead with giant mutated companions that protect them (Big daddies). What follows is a journey through this incredible city where you must constantly fight for survival, find out what the hell happened here and ultimately escape with your life. However, you discover things are not that simple and Jack is not that unfamiliar with Rapture. There is so much more to it than that, as you learn of advanced stem cell research experimentation, a civil war/rebellion, a battle between Ryan and Fontaine, the cities two founders and 3 alternative endings, but I won’t spoil it. It’s such a ludicrously unique and amazing concept I am curious as to how it ever actually ended up being made. There’s so much detail in the plot and every possibility has been explored as to how it would actually work. As a result the game is plastered in depth and atmosphere and every single pixel is there to enhance the feeling of fear, dread and isolation. It’s not quite as scary as “Dead Space” for example, as the enemies are not as intimidating, but it will send shivers down your spine. It is very much like playing through a film plot.

The plasmids are good fun. The unique selling point of Bioshock’s combat is the use of plasmids. These are bottles of glowing fluid, scattered around rapture, that diddle with your DNA in order for you to gain a super power, a remnant of the genetic experiments in Rapture. These vary from firing electric bolts, setting people on fire, a sonic blast that sends your foe flying, to telekinesis which enables you to pick huge objects up and hurl them at people, or the people themselves, or throw their grenades back at them. They simply add to the games normal weapons, such as shot guns, pistols, machine guns etc and give you many many different ways of dealing with the different enemies. For example, if a group of enemies are standing in a pool of water send a blast of electricity into that pool and fry the lot of them. Is an annoying splicer lobbing grenades at you whilst standing in some gasoline? Wack out your incinerate plasmid and light the bastard up. Simple stuff, but very good fun. There are a myriad of normal guns such as pistols, shot guns and machine guns but all have different ammo, such as armour piercing rounds, electro shock buck shots and anti personnel rounds. All expand on the many options of taking out a foe and gives the often bloody and savage kills a lot of variety.

The enemy AI is very advanced. Your foes are seriously tough sods in Bioshock. They will always get themselves into the best positions to best use their weapon and will frequently try to outflank you when there are several of them. If you set one on fire, it will immediately run for water and throw itself into it to snuff out the flames. If you damage one quite badly it will run to a medical station to try and heal itself. Sometimes they will play dead and jump up just as you get near them and some of them pretend to be statues, same colour and texture, and jump out at you. They are not daft and you have to be seriously on the ball every time you encounter them.

As expected, there is lots of character customising to be done. Not only can you arm yourself with various plasmids and weapons, but each plasmid and weapon can be upgraded, ranging from increasing its strength, the speed of reloading, whether its effects harm you, or how many people are hurt by it in one go. All are very influential. You can also pick up and use various tonics and gene upgrades that will affect your ability to heal, hack items and increase your strength. There are 5 slots in all four of the upgrade aspects and all need to be bought in order to add the huge amount of varying upgrades. There are also U-invent machines that enable you to put together all the crap you find, such as rubber tubing or a brass casing (they all seem pointless but everything you can pick up has a use) in order to make bullets, explosives, and yet further tonics. There is a hell of a lot to fiddle with if you like customising your character and weapons.

The visuals are pretty good as well. The whole city is plastered in detail and every aspect of a rusting, leaking under water ruin is placed here. The water effects are particularly impressive. The whole city has been so very finely constructed and every aspect of an underwater ruin has been thought of. You will discover that there is a garden area for trees and therefore oxygen, a market for food, hospital, engineering deck and all sorts. Nothing has been missed and Rapture is easily one of the most interesting and brilliant in-game cities I have played in. There is also a visual treat every time you set someone on fire or shock them with electricity and there really aren’t any flaws or bad graphics anywhere. Lighting is noticeably atmospheric and I haven’t seen a game use it to such great effect. It’s not the most stunning game I have ever seen, “Resistance 2” is better for example, however, to be fair, it is quite considerably older than most of today’s modern visually flawless titles. As you probably know, this game was released for the Xbox several years ago and the PS3 version is simply a clone of this. Therefore, credit has to be given when it’s due.

What’s bad?

The computer hacking gets really tedious. Every time you get to a droid, safe, or machine of some kind that you want to control/infiltrate then you have to hack it. That sounds fine, but it actually involves playing a mini game. It’s basically a puzzle with a time limit where you have to swap around and reconnect lots of pipe work that slowly fills with blue fluid, so that the blue fluid is transported to a designated place at the edge of the puzzle. Yes, it is a stupid as it sounds and has absolutely bugger all to do with bypassing circuits and re-connecting wires. This may be more of a reflectance of my intelligence or IQ but I really struggled with them initially. It’s hard to perform these puzzles under pressure, and it’s easy to muck it up, especially on your first play through. To make it worse, they are not much fun and if you fail it takes a huge chunk of your health away, as it electrocutes you. They suck. Hacking in Fallout 3 managed to be challenging, puzzle orientated and relatively entertaining to perform, but this just irritates me. Even if you like them, there are far too many to do in the game, plus they get harder and harder, so they will inevitably end up winding you up regardless.

It’s too complicated. Firstly the menus suffer from this as there is too many of them and lots don’t seem to have a point. It’s not badly presented and you do get used to them but it’s really unclear what you have to press in order to view things. You can look at a map, your weapons and quests but the map is really the only one worth looking at. You can view weapons, ammo, plasmids and quests but they are not helpful at all as you cant even do anything to them, just view them. There are other menus when playing that allow you to view weapons, ammo and plasmids and in these you can actually select what you want to use. Why give the option twice, but further still make one of those options absolutely useless as you can’t even do anything with the information? It’s just arbitrary and confusing. Which brings me to my next point: The vending machines are too numerous in number and complexity as well and add to this menu issue. There’s vending machines for bloody everything. For example, you can’t do anything about your plasmids until you reach a special vending machine that enables you to swap gene upgrades and plasmids. It doesn’t sell you anything or do anything at all, except allow you fiddle with your various powers. Why? Surely your character would already have all applicable plasmids etc on him, so why do you need to go to a vending machine to do it? If you want to buy gene upgrades or plasmids you need to go to a different vending machine. Why would it have been so difficult to have the machine do both, or even better let your character have his own inventory to sort it out yourself? Further more, you can’t just use normal dollars in the plasmid machines, you need “Adam”, but you can’t get “Adam” from just anywhere you need to harvest it from the little girls, but you can’t harvest them from little girls until you take down the toughest foe in the game, their giant protectors, the “big daddies”. It really does seem overly complicated. I appreciate that the story is complex and all of the above is necessary in underlying that, but don’t think for a second you will be able to just pick up and play. It’s just not that simple. To make it even worse, each gun has three different types of bullets that generally explode, electrocute or set fire to something, in addition to the normal bullets. It’s relatively entertaining to stun your foe with electric buck shot but it simply delays shooting him normally and doesn’t really make a lot of difference. Normal bullets or nearly always the best way to kill something anyway, plus you have to reload every time you change the ammo which can take from a very long time, to a really frustratingly long time, depending on the gun. It’s not interminable, and you do get the hang of it all eventually, but I really do think they just went too far and you won’t start to get your head round it all until much later in the game. It’s basically not idiot proof, and, being an idiot, this is what frustrated me.

The combat is total chaos. Whenever you encounter enemies, especially several at once, it just becomes total anarchy. The majority of the time the only option is too sprint around all over the place firing wildly. The problem is the only way to avoid your enemy’s attacks is to jink and dodge, which is fine. But the enemy does the same thing, and they and you move so fast it’s really difficult to aim correctly and make the kill. You have plasmids and things that can alter this but most of the time you will simply be blasting away with a normal gun and it’s impossible to switch between guns and plasmids quickly enough to be effective, and reload them. Even if you are the fastest reacting most skilled gamer, there is always an automatic delay when switching weapons and plasmids and arming them. Plus, you are permanently having to calculate the eleventybillion different ways to kill an enemy, the different ways they attack you and the different effects the different bullets have on the different enemies, as some have no effect at all, whilst sprinting in every direction, to avoid getting sliced in three, and trying to aim for the head. You could argue that it’s more realistic this way, which it would be, and you’re not fighting other armed soldiers on a battle field, which you are not, but I don’t care. It does fit with the game and its story, but it just doesn’t flow smoothly enough and it’s too chaotic. I’m sure it adds to the atmosphere, realism and scare factor of the game but it just didn’t do it for me.

The harder difficulties are far too hard. Those of you that want a challenge will probably want to set this one on the hardest difficulty as I found it to be impossible. I played through on easy first, which I highly recommend as there is a lot to get your head round, and it was, unsurprisingly, fairly easy but still entertaining. So naturally I attempted the normal mode afterwards and the huge leap between the two difficulty settings is ludicrous. You take damage a hell of a lot more easily to the point where you can literally have your entire health bar wiped out with one hit from a particularly powerful enemy, and the enemies are far harder to kill. The chasm between the two difficulties is so vast I’m curious as if anyone at “2K studios” actually played it during development. The big daddies in particular are ridiculously difficult to take down, as they can absorb so much fire power, deal out a lot damage and often have attacks that disable and stun you so you can’t even dodge if you wanted, or fire your weapon. You can easily relinquish a full compliment of shot gun shells at point blank range, or around 8 grenades, and it is unlikely to kill him, bearing in mind this is on “normal” mode! The hard difficulty I found was even harder, to the point of not enjoying it, and I didn’t even attempt the new “Every bullet counts” difficulty, the only exclusive aspect of the game on the PS3. I’m confident I would not have liked it. They have complimented the difficulty in that every time you are killed you are instantly regenerated in these blue chambers scattered around that basically work as check points. You have all your weapons and everything as if you never died. The enemy you were fighting will be left in the last state you left him, i.e. damaged, so you can have another pop at him. The problem is that it kinda takes dying out of the equation as it’s so easy to regenerate and just press on, so you start to simply not care. Death basically has no repercussions here so you develop a very care free strategy when taking on a foe as it doesn’t really make any difference whether you die or not. This reduces the fear factor quite a lot. You can turn them off, where it turns into a normal “go back to your last save point” game, but why give the option? It just seems to flit from the far too easy, to the ridiculously impossible and never ventures into the middle ground.

You don’t get to keep any of your upgrades once it’s completed. This is not a surprise really as when you play through you start to realise that it simply wouldn’t work in the context of the story line. But I’m not convinced. You spend the 20 hours or so building, customizing and upgrading your character, plasmids and weapons, most of which you don’t really get to use until right at the end, and then they are gone. It’s just very unrewarding. Considering that so much expense has been spent on the customising aspect of the game it seems odd that they would choose to take it away from you. It makes the lasting appeal very short.

It’s not quite as action packed as you might think. Although this is undoubtedly a first person shooter (FPS) it’s not quite as manic as “Killzone 2” or “COD 4: Modern Warfare”. True, they are not really similar games and they both lack the complex story line of Bioshock, but it is much more on par with “Fallout 3” in terms of combat. There are a lot of genetically modified nutters to kill here but it is not as fast paced or action packed as you may expect from the previews or other reviews. Nothing is ruined, I just feel I should warn those expecting such traits as it does feel a little slow, especially on your first unfamiliar play through.

Conclusion:

This is a pretty good title, but I just can’t see why it’s got the huge critical acclaim that it has. Maybe it’s just me. It does have a fantastically unique story and weapons, lots of character customisation to perform, it looks really good and there is a lot of stuff to kill. However, I found it to go a bit overboard in its complexity, mainly the weaponry and vending machines, the combat is chaotic and random and once it’s been completed it becomes tiresome quite quickly. I would say that is worth playing if you like such genre’s however, my biggest problem with this game is the current competition. I have recently played “Fallout 3” and “Dead space” and both are not only very similar games, but they engaged me a lot more, were more fun to play, and ultimately gave me a more enjoyable experience. They are both better thought out, more engaging, prettier to behold and generally better experiences, particularly “Fallout 3”. The story lines were not quite as unique as Bioshock’s, but that doesn’t make a game. Is this a good game that’s worth your time and cash? Generally yeah. Are there better games out there that are worth more of your time and cash? Definitely. CA.

Summary:

Is it user-friendly/easy to get into? – 7.0

It’s generally presented well, but the complex menus, vending machines, plasmids and controls will take some getting used to. Don’t expect to simply “pick up and play”.

Is the story any good? – 10.0

Incredibly imaginative story. One of the most intriguing and interesting ever in a game.

How does it look? – 8.5

Not the best I have ever seen, but still more than competent. Excellent use of lighting, fire and water effects.

How does it sound? – 9.0

Very atmospheric. No music as such, but the insane shouts of the mad splicer’s, the deep groan of a big daddy, and the creeks and groans of the decaying structure around you all add to the experience.

Is it good to play? – 7.0

It’s interesting and different, but mad and chaotic. The guns and plasmids open a whole heap of methods in which to kill the enemy, but very tough to stay cool when under attack to use them effectively. Don’t expect smooth game-play or an easy time.

When will I get bored? – 6.0

It will take a long time to complete the first time round, but I tired of it quickly afterwards. Game-play is not enjoyable enough to keep you playing again and again, you don’t get to keep your upgrades and once it’s done, it’s done basically. Plus there’s nothing for it online.

OVERALL – 7.5

Review created by C. Armstrong.

Killzone 2 Review 10/05/2009


It’s excellent and flawless, but nothing unexpected.

At last, the much anticipated, PS3 only, Killzone 2. I say “much anticipated”, but it’s more of a “it took so unbelievably long to develop, that people long forgot anticipation for such a game and just generally forgot” kind of situation. Regardless, it is here and has it been worth the wait? Yes and no, but much more “yes” than “no”. It is yet another first person shooter (FPS) but this is a proper shooter, with guns, kills and explosions aplenty. It is weirdly the third instalment of the franchise, however there was a PSP production in between Killzone 1 and 2 called “Liberation”, so despite the deceptive title it is in fact the third. What happens is, way in the future a planet of warrior soldier types, called the Helghast (what a cool name) invaded an innocent little planet called “Vecta” that was looked after by the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance (ISA), a United nations (UN) of the future, but much more powerful. The ISA managed to fight them off (the story of Killzone 1) but now wishes to take control of the Helghast’s home planet, Helghan, to wipe out the threat at the source. Believing the Helghast have been hurt badly enough from the invasion of Vecta, the ISA invade Helghan hell bent on taking their inspiring commander, Scolar Visari, capture and subduing the helghast threat from the galaxy. You play regular ISA grunt soldier, Thomas “Sev” Sevchenko, as the invasion of Helghan commences. However, the Helghast are not nearly as badly damaged as the ISA believe and are definitely not going down without a fight. You are almost immediately thrust into the invasion of Helghan and it is a most epic struggle, hugely immersive and action packed.


What’s good?

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If you want to shoot guns, kill and blow stuff up then this is for you. Killzone is possibly the most accurate name for a game I have ever encountered, as that is exactly what it is – a kill zone. You have to kill, kill and kill again, and when you have killed everything that can be killed, make sure you kill them again, so that you know they have been killed, or you will be killed. The Helghast are numerous in number and heavily armed and they often pour out of bunkers and buildings firing away and you will always have to slaughter every single one of them. Even on the easiest difficulty setting every Helghast soldier will take a lot of bullets to put them down permanently, but it is a very satisfying process as they react to where they have been shot and blood splatters out of whatever part it is you have shot. You will fire with normal rifles, gun turrets, tanks and all sorts of rapid fire weapons as you race from set battle to set battle. You will very rarely have time to gather breath between fire fights as you are forced from fight to fight. It is truly action packed exciting stuff and if you’re a fan of any shooter, “Resistance: fall of man 2”, “COD4: Modern Warfare” or “Halo 3”, then this will be right up your street.



The cover system works very well. An interesting touch to Killzone 2 is the cover system which enables you to press and hold L2 when near a wall or something similar and your character will automatically snap to it. If you’re in open space you will simply kneel. This enables you to hide from gun fire, and pop up and shoot when you hit the fire button, or stay “popped up” by holding the left analog stick in the up direction. You can also do it on pillars or round corners and peek round and fire, using the analog stick in the appropriate direction. Plus you can literally do it to all surfaces just like a real battle field. It’s a bit weird at first but you get used to it quite quickly and start to wonder why the millions of shooters out there have never made such a system work as well before. You have to be careful though as you can take cover behind things that don’t really offer any cover and as a result you will get your ass shot off. You can’t really take this thing is a just a game as you have to anticipate all scenarios and contemplate all covering techniques, otherwise, as the AI is super intelligent, the Helghast will blow your head off. This is seriously real warfare so beware when poking your head from behind cover, especially on the harder difficulties.



The AI is very advanced and has scarily accurate human traits. The Helghast are not idiots. The AI of the enemy is more than ready and crafty to deal with anything you throw at them. They will always move from cover to cover, as you do, try to out-flank you, take up or move to the best positions for firing and generally act like real soldiers. The harder the difficulty the more crafty they become. They will scale ladders to avoid you if you set up a flank or strong hold, try and attack from behind and generally will act like proper soldiers. It is amazing and I have not ever seen it work as well. This makes it one of the most realistic shooters I have ever played, despite its setting/story, it is without doubt a proper fire fight and not very arcade like at all. Luckily, its not you vs. the Helghast as you have many ISA fellow troopers helping you out constantly. Plus they are just as devious as the enemy and will help you out as well as your human mate could. What makes it even better still as these two groups of soldiers will go at each other just like they would in real life, i.e., the Helghast don’t focus on you and are more than willing to duke it out with your AI pals and ignore you if you choose to cower somewhere until it’s over. You wont get very far if you do that though, as your fellow soldiers get hurt, so you have to heal them, and are not nearly as effective as you will be. This is one of the things that annoyed most about “Resistance: Fall of man 2”, a brilliant game, but the chimera would always attack you and only you, and ignore the hundred other troops shooting the crap out of them. It was just stupid. Further still, unlike Call of Duty games, the enemy will not re-spawn forever either as when they run out of reinforcements they are done for.



Despite the fictional story it’s incredibly realistic warfare. Another thing that struck me is that this is in no way an arcade style action game as it is way more advanced. On your first play through you will quickly learn that you will not ever be able to simply be “gun-ho” and run into combat screaming and firing. You will be killed instantly, even on the easiest difficulty, and I think it’s a good lesson to learn. A lot of other shooters lull you into a false sense of security that you can jump in guns blazing but this is real warfare. You will quickly learn to not ever reload unless behind cover, not to ever leave your team mates side, not to ever try and fight out of a situation if you’re covered from an elevated position and all sorts of realistic proper warfare tactics that would serve you well in any reality battle.



The graphics and sound are absolutely top notch. Are these the best visuals I have ever seen? Yes and no (more on the “no” in a bit) but they are definitely up there with the best. It’s the character detail and animation that stands out the best as it is practically flawless. Every one of your soldier pals has his own distinguishable facial features that contort and move incredibly realistically, as do the Helghast soldiers, as do all the vehicles. Every level you traverse is brimming with details and I did not experience one bit of lag or slow down. It pauses very briefly occasionally to load but it’s so short you really don’t notice. You can even see your shadow cast on to walls and floors when sun light hits you from time to time, and look in mirrors. It’s crazy. You really can’t fault them and they are some of the best I have ever seen. Added to this you have excellent background music and sound effects. The orchestral back ground music will increase and decrease in intensity depending on your current fighting situation and really adds to the drama. All voice acting is excellent, particularly Scolar Visari who is voiced by the brilliant Brian Cox, if at times they do say something stupid (if your fellow drop ship is blasted out the sky by a missile would you really feel the need to shout out “this is fucked up!”? I’m not so sure). The Helghast will shout things like “die invaders” and “burn Vectan scum” while shooting at you and have panicked shouts when you lob grenades in their vicinity. Its all very well thought out and detailed.


What’s bad?

The thing that stuck out the most for me was, although it’s technically brilliant, it does absolutely nothing new what so ever. There are no crazy weapons, the enemy are just people, the story is pretty basic and the cover system, despite it working very well, has been done before. If you have played any shooter you will have fired all these weapons, driven these vehicles and fought these fire fights before. It is a little disappointing and not as engaging as other titles. It depends what you are anticipating but I feel I should warn anyone expecting any unique combat traits, as it really does not have anything.



Despite the fantastic graphics it never really challenges itself, visually. Don’t get me wrong the graphics are very good, but you never view anything spectacular enough to be truly appreciative of them. You spend almost the whole game mooching around industrial looking buildings, alley ways and desert and you don’t really get to see anything that blows the mind, as you would expect. In “Resistance: fall of man 2” you view giant fleets of space ships, monsters the size of building’s, and several scenarios that will make your jaw drop, but this just doesn’t have anything like that. Maybe that’s why they are so good as there is nothing particularly challenging for the processor. The cut scenes are good and there a few small scenarios in the game that are awesome, such as a level on the ISA flag ship, the “New Star” towards the end, but, despite the obvious brilliance of the visuals, there is nothing to see here that will blow your mind. It’s a case of what is there is excellent, but there really is not that much there.



You can only carry one gun at a time and they take an eternity to reload. You can only have one main weapon and a pistol at any time and you cant plonk your pistol down to pick up something else, so you’re sort of stuck with it. It sucks a bit because there are a lot of situations where you need a rocket launcher but you really don’t want it as your main weapon. It would have been nice to have two main weapons and a pistol so you could have a main rifle/machine gun of some kind with maybe a shot gun or sniper rifle as back up, with the pistol for emergencies. I’m pretty sure a soldier could handle that in reality couldn’t he? Nothing is ruined except you regularly get stuck in situations where you are stuck reloading and have blown all your pistol bullets, as it is not very effective, and you will inevitably be killed. You have a knife that is possibly the most useless weapon I have ever encountered in a game. It will often take several slashes and stabs to bring down the enemy and there is not a single stealth aspect or level in this game. Plus considering you have a pistol and the ability to smack them with the butt of your gun which are far quicker to use, it does seem a little pointless. The flame thrower is also rubbish in terms of killing Helghast and it looks awful as well. I’ve seen flame effects much much better than this and in much older games as well. It’s surprisingly terrible. Furthermore, it takes so unbelievably long to reload some of the weapons, especially the shot gun. You will have to learn that you really can’t ever make a break for cover, or do anything really if it requires you to reload half way through. To be fare though, that is fairly realistic and I doubt anyone could reload as quickly as they do in some shooters I have played.



Your AI pals can get you into a lot of trouble. Despite how necessary and effective your fellow soldiers are in Killzone 2, they can often get you into stupid situations that result in your death. When your comrade takes too many bullets he gets injured and drops to the floor whilst wearily calling for help. This is where you have to run up to him and press circle which blasts the poor bugger with some sort of electrical bolt that revives him. This sucks as they often don’t get hurt unless they try some ludicrous kamikaze style sprint towards the enemy whilst shooting wildly. The Helghast are prepared for this and gun him down leaving you to run into the same baptism of fire and try and revive him before you’re turned into a human colander. As it does not really take too many bullets to put you down you will almost certainly die trying to do this. It doesn’t happen frequently but often enough, especially in the later levels, that it becomes annoying. You can just leave them there to die but you often require their help, so it is not advised. Plus, when you reach a check point or load screen, and you have left them to perish, they suddenly spring back up and are absolutely fine and ready to integrate into the cut scene. Nothing is ruined, but it’s bizarre and slightly pointless.



Finally, it is really quite hard. Even on the easiest difficulty there are going to be lots of situations that you will need to have a several goes at, particularly the final battle where you are ridiculously outnumbered for a very long time. You are stuck in one big hall fighting off a constant supply of Helghast for which seems like forever. As an example to emphasise this, you receive a trophy for completing it in less than 20 minutes! For one constant fire fight it’s a hell of a long time. The levels towards the end, when you storm the palace of Scolar Visari, are proper hard as they are huge and Helghast are absolutely everywhere, which makes it really difficult to find cover and not be outflanked. Then there is large heavily armed flying robots called ATAC’s that are really best to be avoided. You don’t encounter many of them but they are lightning fast and will constantly blast you with machine gun rounds and missiles. There is a stage where you have to fight one single handed and as it is so hard I really think the ATAC could have at least one or two weaknesses to give you a bit of an edge. It doesn’t though, but maybe that just makes it more satisfying when you do blow it up. ATAC’s are nothing though when compared to the end of game boss, one of the Helghast commanders, Colonel Radec. He is a seriously tough bastard, with deadly accuracy, super toughness, blistering speed and “Predator” like stealth. He is a most formidable foe and you will need lots of goes at him before your done. You never really encounter a scenario that’s impossible, despite how it may seem, but you will need to have a lot of attempts at some stages even on easy. Be warned.


Conclusion:

With games that take so long to produce, such as this, you do often wonder whether it’s worth it. But with Killzone 2 it makes sense as it really is pretty flawless, showing full detailed development and production. The fighting is intense and action packed, the enemy are heavily armed and highly intelligent, the visuals are excellent, as is the sound, and it really will teach the art of soldiery properly. If you don’t treat it as real warfare you will be killed a lot. There really isn’t anything new or unexpected here, but honestly, the only negatives pointed out are really just “nitpicking” so I wouldn’t take them too seriously. This is because overall it is a most excellent game and anyone who is a fan of shooters or action games would be wise to spend their cash on this. Personally, I reckon “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” threw the gauntlet down for all shooters last year and I have not seen a game top it yet. Killzone 2 comes seriously close; however, I reckon most have COD4’d them selves to death by now leaving Killzone 2 to take the crown as today’s king of the shooters. Buy it PS3 owners; it is easily the best shooter out right now. CA.


Summary:


Is it user-friendly/easy to get into? – 9.0

Everything is easy access here and simple to use. The controls are not the best ever but you will quickly adapt.


Is the story any good? – 8.5

The story is not the most engaging ever either but there are still a lot of heart string tugging and dramatic scenes.


How does it look? – 9.5

They are almost perfect, some of the best ever seen, despite not challenging themselves to hard.


How does it sound? – 9.0

It cannot be faulted. Excellent voice acting, especially Brian Cox, with dramatic background music and sound effect’s of battle.


Is it good to play? – 8.5

It’s fast paced, action packed, realistic and very entertaining. Cover system works very well. It can get a little repetitive after many weeks of play and it is quite tough, however.


When will I get bored? – 8.0

You will definitely have several goes at this, as the better you get at fighting the more you will like it. Lots of online stuff for those who like it. As I said, it gets repetitive though.


OVERALL – 9.0

Review created by C. Armstrong.