Like a screen door on a submarine....

So, I grabbed the Killzone 2 demo off PSN late late late last night. For those not in the know, in a silly bit of retail gamesmanship, if you pre-ordered Killzone via Gamestop, you could download the demo early on Feb 5. All others have to wait till the Feb 26 to grab it. The game comes out the 27^th. Wouldn’t you want to get the demo out early, especially in light of the (overly) enthusiastic reviews ? However, the demo was made available to all PSN Europe users yesterday, for some reason. All you need to do is setup a Euro PSN account. Its free and it takes 5 minutes to setup.

Thoughts:

-Freakin short demo and doesn’t build to a good payoff to get you hooked for the full version. You literally walk through a door and a cute outro video plays (Ballet of Death)

-Yes, it looks very very good.

-The main artistic achievement is/are the guns. Easily the best looking FP weapons I’ve ever seen. Beautiful use of post processing, sweet animations, AWESOME sound, awesome muzzle flashes yadda yadda yadda.

-Really cool FX all around

-Sense of weight and mass is very impressive. The guns don’t feel light and flimsy.

-Shooting dudes looks and feels great. Love the hit “pings”, gouts of blood, and ragdolls

-Characters look good, not amazing, but very well done.

-Opening scripted sequence (beach landing of the future complete with inanely designed FUTURE Higgins Boat) is really really impressive

-Demo is broken up into 2 very brief segments. Part one is a beach landing and LZ securing op. This part is straight up CoD 4. Bad guys pop up where scripted like turrets, nothing happens till you move forward and trigger the next volume. 2^nd segment is a warehouse fight that is ever so slightly Halo-esque. Bad guys do a fair bit of displacing and maneuvering, try to get behind cover, flush you out with grenades. Combat Space 101 design though: Red explosive canisters and barrels EVERYWHERE.

-Controls are going to be the sticking point with everyone and rightfully so. They are, at least by default, very sluggish. It certainly adds a sense of mass and helps keep you rooted in the world, but it makes shooting tricky. Helps that the PS3 controller sucks balls for FPS. You can aim down the iron sights (which look awesome BTW) but the default button for this (R3) felt weird.

-Cover system ala Rainbow Six Vegas. Hold L2 when near a wall and you go into cover. Doesn’t yank out to 3^rd person though, which I liked. Works ok, but it seemed difficult at first combo-ing the cover button with the iron sights view.

-Melee button and animation aren’t very good.

-Lighting is great. Really nice optical effects with god rays punching through clouds of smoke and dust.

Overall, pretty cool. Not mind blowing in the least, and I would argue that Gears 2 is still the best looking game out right now.