N'Gai Croal
|
Jul 12, 2007 06:23 AM
After two years of intense skepticism (see our next post
for a more thorough airing of the backstory), Tuesday night's first
showings of Sony Computer Entertainment and Guerrilla Games' Killzone 2
to journalists have generally produced extremely positive reactions.
But having cleared that first high hurdle, the next question everyone
wants to
know is: how does it play? We were fortunate enough to be the first to
play Killzone
outside of the folks at SCE and Guerrilla, so allow us to give you our
hands-on
impressions of Killzone 2's gameplay elements; our close-up look at the
game's visuals, along with some exclusive first details on the title's
design choices and story elements, will follow shortly.Once
our intruder landing vehicle hit the ground, it was time to
go to work on what we were informed was the third level of Killzone 2.
We immediately took refuge behind a berm, hit L1 to drop
into a crouch, shouldered our standard-issue ISA assault rifle and
started shooting at our Helghast opponents. Pushing in R3 on the right
analog stick gave us the iron sight view through the assault rifle's
scope--which, when we informed our Sony and Guerrilla hosts was the
aspect of the demo which had most impressed us, gave them a bit of
pause, followed by minor hilarity, until we explained ourselves
further. It's not that there aren't several other impressive aspects of
the game. It's just that the focus blur on the outside of the rifle
scope, the scope's green tint and curved glass feel, and the green
laser dot that indicates where your bursts of ammo should land--all
combine for a wonderfully immersive view of the game that sucked us in
both as spectators and active participants.
As we cautiously picked our way through the ground combat's opening moments, game director
Mathijs de Jonge
gave us the first official explanation of the game's cover system,
which many of our observant peers picked up on during the Tuesday
evening previews.
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