What happened was that I fell in love with the game, no joke, I love this game now. I started off hating the fact I had received this game in the post, changed to mild amusement at the sackboy sixaxis movements and costume designs, laughed at the odd design of the levels and then just proceeded to think this was one of the best games I’d played in a long time. Graphically the game is simple, although it does have it’s moments (soft fabrics and materials look especially realistic and tactile) but what sets it apart is the consistent, mildly difficult platforming and puzzles. What makes it even better is the knowledge all throughout the game that it is giving you the tools to make levels equal to the ones you are playing. I literally completed the entire main campaign in one sitting over the course of a day with my better half, and as soon as I was finished started trying out some of the community made levels.

The quality and rating system is such that you can easily tell which levels have been liked by others, and so far I haven’t been dissapointed with them. This gave me the gusto to make my first foray into designing a level myself. I’ve used a few level designers on the PC and they have never been user friendly, but LBP has hit the nail on the head. Within 10 minutes you can have built yourself a rocket car, within another 20 you can of designed a complete race course to drive it along. I must of plowed a good few hours into a level I was building to test out various features and mechanics of the game, but it only felt like I’d been playing for half an hour.

This is the true test of a game in my opinion, if you can play it and become so engrossed in it that you don’t even notice the passage of time. There’s really not much more I can say about it, the gameplay is excellent, the artstyle will appeal to all ages, the soundtrack is perfect and the developers have given you, the gamer, the steering wheel. I like it so much I’ve sent back my rental copy and bought the game. If you haven’t already I’d recommend playing it, and if you are looking for that reason to buy a PS3, this game is it.

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)

Anyway, I recently went out and bought the game finally, which is odd for me as I will usually rent it first. But there was something that told me I was I going to like this game even though I’d only ever seen videos and screenshots of it. I will usually critically play a game to see advancements in gameplay or graphics, but for this one I was genuinely excited to open the packaging and flick through the manual in work, watching the clock and counting down until I could get home and load it up. Maybe it was a throwback to a simpler time when toys and games where the best things in the world to me, or maybe it was a genuine want to play a game that was actually good after recently wading my way through a bunch of overhyped and mediocre titles.

I have to say, it did not dissapoint. The game is a classic example of one that is easy to play yet hard to master. You’ll be pulling off Ryus fireballs, hurricane kicks and dragon punches in no time. If you think you’ve mastered it though by being able to pull off all of your favourite characters moves, you will be sorely mistaken. The more I play, and play online, the more I see just how detailed and nuanced you have to be to know when and how to use each move. Sometimes a light punch is better than a more more powerful hard hurricane kick.

Those looking for a variety of modes in their fighters will find this lacking. There is an arcade mode, a training mode and then some extra timed and survival modes, your basic fair really, and they are really just the same as the normal arcade mode. They are really just included to give you a variety of different ways to practice, and practice you must if you hope to even begin to enter any of the online ranked matches.This game is built around competition. There are backstories for each character in Arcade mode, but they are largely irrelevant. You will spend the majority of your time practising against the computer in the wide variety of difficulty modes, building up the muscle memory for combos in the training section then pitting your skills against players in either the unranked or ranked online modes. The unranked being a good area for beginners to cut their teeth, and ranked being only for those with a good amount of practice and skill with their chosen character(s).

If you don’t like online play, or even local versus, then you really aren’t going to get a whole lot out of this game. Once you’ve completed the Arcade mode and unlocked every character there really isn’t much more to the game if you don’t intend on playing online. But then if someone bought Street Fighter IV expecting a great single player experience they clearly didn’t know anything about it.

In regards to graphics and presentation, the menu system is functional but lacks any flare or creativity. The character models are excellent and the styling is really good (they’ve gone for a sort of painted look, rather than completely realistic). My only gripe would be with the apparent lack in stages to fight on. Aside from that though the audio (although I’d of preferred an option to enable a retro arcade soundtrack) and visuals are very good. It might not scrape at the surface of the likes of Crysis in regards to the number of polygons it’s pushing, but for a true-to-form 2D fighter adaptation it has done very well.

Overall, I’d recommend this game for fighter fans or people who like some tough online competition. For people who are more casual and like to play through the singleplayer sections only then it is probably only worth a rent, if that.

For me though, I’m pleasantly surprised with it and can see myself pulling off more than a few HADOKEN’s every evening after work for the next good while. Watch the video below for a good taster:

The game itself would be classed as a “Tower Defense” game, whereby you need to build towers and turrets to protect your base from “creeps” or the baddies that will march towards your base. It’s kind of like a very basic RTS, but immensely satisfying in my opinion.

Unlike most other Tower Defense games I’ve played (on PSN there’d be Pixeljunk Monsters for example) this one is full 3D, meaning you can rotate around your towers, zoom in and out and change the viewing angle, you can also choose to change your view so that you are looking directly down the barrel of one of your turrets, but this is more of a novelty as it has little use while actually playing the game.

If you’ve played Tower Defense games before, you’ll know the main aim is to either slow of destroy the creeps before they get to your base and do any damage. This game gives the player a multitude of options in this regard. You can either completely block the creeps paths on some levels, forcing them to attack your towers or you can invest in heavy artilliary to bombard them before they even get close to your base. Each level will force you to change tactics and there is a nuance to making decisions as and when to destroy and build towers, depending on where they are coming from. Like most good games, this ones is easy to play, hard to master. Most levels you’ll survive to the end, but one little creep will have snuck past your defenses to do damage to your base, ruining your perfect score. For OCD perfectionists, they’ll get hours of gameplay out of this game.

Also, another aspect that separates this game from other games in the same genre is the sheer amount of choices you can make in a round. Most tower defence games are fairly straight forward. You simply place a tower in the path of the creeps, try and block their path so that walk past as many of your towers as possibly, then upgrade them as and when you need to, buying newer towers when you have the money saved. This game throws a whole bunch of other dynamics into the mix. Now you can choose how to weight bonuses for your towers, you have to balance between giving them strong shields, giving them stronger weapons or allowing them to get more money for each creep stopped (which will allow you to buy more towers). For the majority you will be making these changes on the fly as the game progresses. The enemies you face are also very varied, with some attacking your towers, some flying over your blocking towers and others burrowing under them. There are a multitude of towers for each type of creep but you will rarely have enough money to buy all of them, so you will have to make tactical decisions as and when to sell towers, buy new ones, upgrade them… etc

This short review though is really just scratching the surface of the game. It is nowhere near as complex as the likes of Warhammer or other RTS games, but as a good game to play after a day of work to stop your brain from shutting down I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Definitely a must have if you have a PS3

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The gameplay is deceptively simple. You start as a petal and you have to control the wind to collect more petals. After you have collected enough petals you will finish the game to make the flower tied to that level bloom. But it is so much more than that. The fluidity of movement using the PS3 motion sensors in the sixaxis controller, the wind effects on the grass, the high definition scenery, the musical score and how each petal found will chime a new note.

This games aim was not to create addictive gameplay, but to evoke emotions that most other games can’t, and it does this wonderfully. If you want a game to make you feel elated, refreshed, relaxed and serene then this is for you. Watch the video below and then get it, so that hopefully more developers will have the courage to take chances on something unique.

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