Also, being a bit of a PC gamer elitist, I really don’t like playing FPS games on the console with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. However, this game will never come to PC, so like Resistance 2, I swallowed my pride and decided to play it.

Update 1 – 29/04/09: How original! A grimy grey and brown war game!

Ok, sorry for setting off your sarcasm detectors. But seriously, the art style in this game could of done with some tweaking. Everything has this muted post-processing done to it, which makes all the buildings and environments just alternating shades of grey and brown. It reminds me a lot of Resistance: Fall of Man, but thankfully they mixed things up for the sequel and had green environments with blue skies. I really hope the further into this game I get that I will start to see more enviroments that aren’t A) sewers, B) crumbling war-torn concrete buildings or C) Dark corridors.

Other than the style of the game, the gameplay is actually quite enjoyable. It’s irritating aiming with the analogue stick, but thankfully there are some auto-aim features built in to aid the player. In saying that though, I’m a few levels in and my favourite weapon has become the knife. The frequent narrow corridors make it an excellent weapon to use, as it is pretty much one hit kill. I’ll see if this remains the case as I progress and the difficulty increases.

Update 2 – 01/05/09: The drearyness is getting to me

I haven’t played Killzone 2 in the last 2 days. I played a bit more after the last update and its just too… too… samey. The colour palette is worse than Gears of War. I mean at least in Gears of War there was some plants, and then there was the golden glow of the Imulsion, but Killzone 2, thus far, is all muted greys and browns. It just isn’t appealing. I’ve always held that to keep a game interesting you have to do at least  1 of 2 things. 1: Consistently change the environment or 2: Consistently change the gameplay. Killzone 2 is doing neither, the weapons and level format is staying the same, and the levels are all starting to look the same. I dunno. I’m going to give it another chance this May long weekend, but disappointed is an understatement.

Update 3 – 05/05/09: Good, but not worth going out and buying a PS3 for

**Spoiler Alert** Finished this game over the weekend. Was meaning to try out the MP aspect of the game, but after finishing it I just couldn’t be bothered (for some reason FPS VS on the console has never appealed to me, I’m a KB/M addict I guess). It was a good game, ramping up to a excellent crescendo with the last level and the attack on Visari’s palace. If you’ve played it you’ll have recognized that the format of the push into the palace was very similar to how Call of Duty sets its battles, in that the enemy will keep respawning unless you move forward. It’s a very good mechanism as it means you are constantly under fire, and can’t merely take up a nice protected camping spot and pick off all the enemies before sauntering across the battle field. The final boss battle against Radec was a bit of a let down, and needed really no strategy. He basically just lunged at you with his knife, then tries to shoot at you from cover and repeats this until you’ve finished him. After this I was really expecting a really good battle against the main opponent Visari. Something along the lines of the ending of Wolfenstein perhaps (i.e. Visari jumping into a huge mech that I need to take down.) Instead you have a little chat with Visari then your buddy, a la Se7en, gets prodded into shooting him out of anger, you then realise that everything you accomplished in the game was pointless as Visari had a hidden super fleet ready to attack you all along. Overall I found the game too short and aside from the good AI and body physics the environment was drab and the combat somewhat repetitive. I found the AI did not react well when I rushed them with my knife out (something I started to use frequently once I realized how overpowered it had been made) and would turn around confused as if wondering why I wasn’t ducking for cover. I have a feeling, much like CoD4, that the SP campaign was merely meant as a taster to the MP. But where CoD4 succeeded in wrapping a very good narrative into a relatively short time frame, Killzone 2 failed. By all means give it a go, but I’d recommend renting it as the extremely short SP campaign will leave you dissapointed if you don’t intend on playing the versus (or obsessively unlocking trophies)