Killzone

After watching the first trailers of Killzone a year or so ago I started to get interested in this game. It didn’t look as good as Halo but good enough for me. 2 weeks ago I bought the game for 20EUR (the price was also my main motivation here ;-) ) and started to play it actually with not so high expectations afer reading some reviews. But to say the truth: I was quite suprised. The game is easy to get into it and also offers a quite good storyline around the conflict between the Helghast and the ISA. The battle takes place on an ISA-world basically overrun by Helghast troups.

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The gameplay appears to be quite inspired by Bungie’s Halo with the player having a primary and secundary weapon and being able to throw granades at any time. The handling of the character feels just right and the character also seems to be able to run a little bit faster than the Master Chief. After the first mission you can choose between up to 4 characters but I can’t really say anything about their handling or there special abilities since I still always played with the main character. You can choose one of these characters before any of the other 12 missions to come so you don’t have to worry if you made a choice you didn’t like ;-)

Each of these 13 levels is split up into 3 or 4 smaller parts. This is actually a good thing since all levels are quite long so splitting the very long levels into long parts definitely helps the player ;-) These levels take you everywhere: Snow, rain forests, space stations…. there should be something for everyone.

The game also offers a multiplayer mode which I haven’t really tested yet. I’ve only once played against some bots which was actually quite entertaining. Given the complete lack of bots in Halo and Halo2 this is at least for me a big pro-point for Killzone :-)

The AI in the single player campaign appears to be quite decent. The Helghast hide behind trees, tables and walls and only re-appear from time to time… in constant intervals ;-) Once I even managed to scare a Helghast so much, that he stayed behind the wall :-(

But now to the things I didn’t like about Killzone: The game has a few bugs that are really annoying. The biggest problems seems to be the sound system which caused an accustic chaos at the end of level 9 with weapons being completely mute as well as enemy soldiers :-( At least this was the only time during the campaign that I noticed something like that. Only sometimes the shooting sound simply disappears but gets back after a few seconds. Also the graphics engine could use some polishing. There are far too many popups and clipping problems for my taste. The scripted events can also become annoying esp. if you trigger them multiple times ;-) Once I went through a door and a voice event was triggered. The I went back and once again through the door which triggered the event again. Not good.

If you want to spend 20EUR for a Halo-inspired FPS with apocalyptical touch Killzone is definitly something for you. Esp. if you can live with the bugs I’ve mentioned above. The game is entertaining from the first second to the last battle with only very rare boring phases. Worth the 20EUR IMO :-)

Over the years I've written quite a few reviews 🙂 You can find them at /reviews/.