Samrat Sharma

Somewhere between Edge’s Killzone 2 7/10 review and its impending release to the teeming masses, the intarwubs caught fire.

PSX extreme (in a turn of events too ironic to count, I refuse to link to ‘em), went ahead and published a piece admonishing Edge’s review as unworthy of the game, and their score an attempt at getting more publicity by being a contrarian. This particular article was also a subject of one of the best examples of fun games journalism in recent times by Destructoid’s Jim Sterling.

Long story short, a lot of people were upset, and thought anyone who thought Killzone 2 was anything short of life-changing was completely demented. Well, call me delirious and paint me monkey, because I wasn’t too impressed either.

Do take into account that I am the curmudgeonliest of gamers, and games like Gears or War 2 or Halo 3 have often felt my righteous and completely futile ire. My personal game of the year for 2008 would probably have been World of Goo or Professor Layton.

Regardless, I do love me my shooters. That I play almost all that come out is some bizarre fascination with the genre, or my complete lack of pragmatism. I did try on KZ2 with the same morbid sense of optimism that this is the next best thing in shooters. It’s not. It’s fine, by all means, in fact it’s pretty much exemplary in a lot of fronts. But it’s yet another shooter.

At first look it’s gorgeous, no doubt. The smoke, the explosions, it’s all sensory overload, and it gets the job done in convincing me that it is the best looking game I have played ever. Beatzo called me the other day asking about it, and I shared his enthusiasm about how good this game looked.

Then I looked at the little details. The plain geometry; straight edged and out of a 2004 era shooter. The shady looking rubbish sacks. The blurry, gray, ground and building textures. Wow. Almost didn’t see ‘em.

No doubt, the presentation is still rock solid. The NPC and NME models look great, the animation is wildly awesome. The effects are shattering in their execution. But is it the game that crosses all graphical boundaries and takes the medium to a whole new level? Hardly.

The gameplay itself is great fun. I loved mowing down enemies, and the fact that you die often meant I quickly learnt to take cover and make intelligent choices. The enemy AI is quite good, and moving from set piece to set piece, the adrenaline level is at a constant high. You love it too, if you learn to ignore the hokey and gutter mouth (at the same time!) writing.

And then lethargy hits you. The game shows you all it’s tricks within the first few hours. The default gun is indispensable despite the newer ones they keep throwing. The levels are linear as hell, and save a few moments, it’s all rote shooter territory. Cover, shoot, forward. Miles and miles of industrial interiors with nothing interesting to do or see reminded me of the misstep that was Quake IV.

I like driven, visceral shooting experiences, and Killzone 2 does not cut it. It’s good, but it’s NOT phenomenal. Making a shooter is not as easy as drawing a corridor, placing a few barrels and spawning 5 men with guns. Too often we are numbed into thinking games can be objectively measured in their quality by their graphics, sound, AI or whatever. The IGNs and the Gamespots of the world have taught us that games are a sum total of their parts.

This, I submit, is why the Gamespots and IGNs cannot help heaping praise on this game, calling it nothing short of a masterpiece. But for those old fogeys like me who understand that a shooter is the moodiest, trickiest genre to make games on, where the ‘feel’ of the shooter, the thrill of control is more important that purdy graphics, we demand more of a game purported to be the second coming. I demand more of you Killzone, not because you were my last hope, but because you said you were the new generation – the next generation even.

Valve still can’t be beat, then. I can’t describe the way the controls in Left 4 Dead felt when I played it last year. I could see it in the controls, the way ti moved and felt that this was a great shooter. I hate to side with the contrarians, but this game left me strangely unaffected. It’s good, it’s not great, and I think if a mature magazine reviews it maturely, I can understand their point of view.

I have no mercy intarwubs. I will fuel the fires with my little matchstick of a blog.