Killzone

Just finished this game a couple of hours ago. While critics thought this was an average game, I thought it was better than they said. They reported disastrous frame rates, but I have not encountered any drops because I was so engrossed with the game. It's your standard fps but I enjoyed taking on the Helgast. There were many, but I stood my ground with four selectable characters.

The player gets to choose between Templar, an all around player, Lugar, a female assassin, Hahka, a Helgast spy, and Rico, a foul mouth one man tank. In the beginning, I got to only choose Templar, but the other characters started to unlock as I progressed through the levels. After a while though, I started to lean towards Rico because he carried quite possibly the best weapon in the game, a rapid fire/accurate machine gun. Nothing can compare to this gun, it would wipe out 5-6 Helgast in seconds. Lugar and Hahka are totally worthless. The only cool thing about them is that they carry a knife which leads to some really satisfying melee attacks.

Yes, melee attacks. I enjoyed doing these because the animation that followed was a treat. You would get a weapon and smack the opponent to death. The knife animations were the best. Sometimes you see the character throw the knife at the enemy, rush up to them and pull it out. Other times you would see them rush up to the guy then cut his throat.

The weapons in this game are okay. There is a downside to a couple of weapons. One being is that some of them are useless. I rarely used the pistols found in this game. You need have two assault rifles, three kinds of grenade launchers, two machine guns, a shotgun, and a laser bomb device. The other downside to weapons are the reloading animations. There was be a couple of situations where I found myself reloading even though I didn't need it which lead me to my death. Reloading also takes too long for these weapons. They should have cut down the animations by a half second or so. Another thing is that one kill headshots are not to be found here. I would should a guy in the head and see him still standing. It takes several shots to the head to bring them down and even harder as you progress through the game. Towards the end, you start to think if these guys wear a total body armor suit, head to toe.

The graphics in this game are astounding. There are some nice bloom effects to be found here and there. The particle effects, explosions, etc were spectacular. Whenever a grenade shot off near me, a huge cloud of smoke would surround me and stay there for a couple of seconds before slowly disappearing. I enjoyed how the enemies died after killing them because body physics were involved. But body physics were only used a second after they died. After that, I could not shoot their bodies anymore as it would just go through them. It was still cool to see their bodies mangled, arm dangling on a rail, body slumped against a wall after a grendade went off or after I tore them up with a machine gun.

This game was pronounced as a "Halo killer" but it is way off. First, it tries to have a cinematic approach to the game. Sometimes it succeeds, but most of the time it doesn't. There was this one instance where the game could have truly shined, but it was just blah. The cutscenes were good, but it would have been better if the cinematics of the cutscenes were occur during gameplay.

I enjoyed this game because it was a fps. I rarely see fps on consoles. I can't wait to play Goldeneye: Rogue Agent or Call of Duty: Finest Hour.

Oh yeah, the online mode. Cool stuff. You will see me as gamer812. The online mode is still a bit buggy even after all the comments I made from the beta.