E3 2004: Killzone - Hands-On
Two editors play Killzone for a very, very long time. Honest impressions, and new direct feed video inside.
Both Ed and Ivan found themselves attached to Guerilla Games' Killzone, displayed in a place of some significant prominence within the greater Sony booth. The game, hailed to be the Halo-killer PS2 fans have been clamoring for, is scheduled to ship to retail later this year. Because we're all big on boasting what deserves to be boasted, we decided to give Killzone the kind of treatment most E3 debut titles dream of. Why? Killzone looks like a quality first-person shooter. So, read these impressions and then watch the accompanying videos to find out why.
Ivan says:
Never having been big on console first-person shooters (save Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and Halo), I played Killzone expecting little, but wound up quickly appreciating quite a lot. Though the game seems overtly straightforward at a glance, it's meticulously paced and designed in a way that's nothing short of thrilling.
I started, turned a corner, was ambushed by several vicious Helghast troops, and suddenly found myself hooked. Broken buildings spilt out onto the cluttered streets of a long abandoned ghetto. My team of four, where only one is playable, skulked from shattered hallway to cracked corridor slaughtering the enemy with screen rattling bursts of heavy and light machinegun fire. A quick sprint to the next shelter and the hail of bullets start all over again. It's not always spitting distance corridor hunting. A lot of Killzone has a trench warfare feel to it. The good stay on one side, under a variety of cover and pelt the bad, who also stay in their place. This makes for intense, more drawn out and satisfying fights, especially since bad guys aren't afraid of hiding or running away.
The key to successfully destroying the Helghast is not being transfixed by the art style. Saturated, sun-bleached colors turn otherwise drab rocks and concrete bunkers into luminescent, war-torn rubble. It's a brilliant collage of the many consequences of a planet-wide catastrophe. Character models all form up, run, hide, duck, roll, reload, shoot, move, twitch, flinch, and die with startling believability. When set against the blaring sky and the many clear electric ricochets, bullet impacts, and swirling clouds of massing dust, the enemies and comrades presented in Killzone take on lives of their own.
And this is what excites me most. It has a pacing Call of Duty and Allied Assault would be hard to match, an incredible, distinct art style, invigorating combat, and this promise of an actual story that develops, twists, turns, and comes to an ultimate conclusion. Better still, it's an original piece of fiction, and not some rehashed WWII shooter or a lame spin on an overused franchise. It's an attempt at constructing sci-fi reality -- an experiment to see if people will buy into a future without lasers and freeze rays. I can respect that and I can dig that.
There is a problem. There is always a problem. Right now the game is not the smoothest running title around. All of it was certainly playable, the occasional stutter or glitch not withstanding. If Guerilla can pump this baby up to a consistently smooth framerate, it will dominate the PS2's shooter genre.
Ed says:
Killzone has come a long way from the first time I got to play it back in February. Back then, the engine was in place and there was a clear style in the graphics, but the gameplay was still lacking. With the enemy AI still in its infancy stages, it felt more like a demo than anything approaching a game. Today, my impressions of the game have been changed by being able to play through three different missions at the booth here at E3. The game is getting better before our very eyes and it's making me think that maybe it is beginning to be worth the hype.
Graphically, the engine is getting smoother with a more solid framerate than before. Sure, the color schemes are more reminiscent of old war movies than the color-soaked GTA: Vice City, but this helps to deliver the dilapidated and war-torn feeling that runs throughout the whole game. The missions that we played all had a very cinematic feel to them, as if we were caught in some old-fashioned vision of the future.
The missions that we played are fairly linear with lots of scripted events, but they're still done in a compelling way with lots of tight spots to fight through along the way. Think much more along the lines of Half-Life that was incredibly scripted with a variety of events, rather than Medal of Honor: Rising Sun that was incredibly scripted with a huge amount of identical events. Many moments were spent providing cover fire for other soldiers or running from a barrage of explosives.
The best crap-your-pants moment came when I walked through an open area and a half-dozen Helghast dropped in from a ship. With minimal objects to hide behind, I had to fire at all the Helghast as they dropped down and crouch behind the one safe spot. Just a few seconds later, the whole incident was over, but damn, it was fun.
Throw in a variety of weapons that have some of the coolest reloading animations that we've seen and it's a first-person-fragfest. After just a half-hour of playing through, this game has gone from being an overhyped mystery in my mind to a title that truly is worth watching. If you don't believe us, you can watch the movies and decide for yourselves.
Quelle: ign
Zieht euch auch ruhig das Video:
http://s.streamingmovies.ign.com/ps2/article/513/513992/killzone_051204_01_wmvlow.wmv
Bis wir dahin kommen, werden wohl noch einige Jahre vergehen. Aber zum Glück gibts ja in den meisten guten kommenden Shootern Onlinespielmodi, dann brauchen wir uns um die KI der CPU-Gegner von Socom, Halo, Killzone oder was auch immer nicht mehr so viele Gedanken machen. Gegen menschliche Spieler machts halt mehr Spass.