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They story of Killzone is a scifi spin on all the WW2 games that have flooded the market for the past few years. A crazed dictator from the planet Helghast, who lost a previous interstellar war, unleashes an invasion against a neighboring planet. You play the role of one of four combatants who find themselves involved in the key events of the invasion. The characters are an incredibly generic group: you have the young and passionate captain who is an all around excellent soldier, the sexy stealth assassin with a shady and sultry past that involves the captain, the gung-ho heavy weapons soldier whose entire squad was massacred by the invaders, and the alien spy who can bypass the enemies defenses. Needless to say, the last two do not get along very well and a lot of the story revolves around them bickering and threatening to kill each other. I found myself wondering a lot more about the reasons behind the interstellar war than why my compatriots did not like each other. A background dossier about the conflict placed in the game options would have done a lot for fostering player immersion in the game.

The visuals in the game are among the best realistic graphics I have seen on the PS2. This both helps and hurts the game. The large number of highly detailed models, textures and particle effects put a strain on the limited resources of the PS2. If you get too many enemies on the screen at one time you can watch the game scale down the level of detail on the characters to a level just below that of the PS1. Once you have cleared the areas of the enemies, you can watch the dead bodies suddenly scale back up to their full level of detail. On the technical side this allows the game to have large numbers of characters moving around at once time in expansive areas, but watching those characters go from blocky splotches of color to high polygon photo-realistic models, and vise versa, in front of you is something that I could have done without. The environments, thankfully, do not scale. They remain gorgeous throughout most of the game, with a few notable exceptions. The exceptions occur when the game takes you out of the city and into the wilderness environments. There is only so much flat-polygon shrubbery a man can look at before it gets to him. It is even worse in the swamps when they add a pea-green atmospheric effect in addition to plants that prevent you from seeing more than a few yards ahead of you. However, the enemy can still see their full distance and take full advantage of this. Going back in and adding some variety to the elements in these environments would have done a lot for the game as a whole.

One of the areas where Killzone does shine is with its voice over and audio effects. The first thing that any movie fan will notice about the game is that Brian Cox, of X2 and Bourne Supremacy fame, is the voice of the Helghast dictator. The rest of the voices, while not as famous as Cox, are equally good, although there appears to be an abundance of people with British accents on alien worlds in the distant future. One of the things that surprised me was the use of adult language in the game. It was a good kind of surprise, however. In intense situations like those presented in the game, characters would not be minding their Ps and Qs. The language is never over used and it adds a nice bit of realism to the game. The sound of bullets zinging past you also adds to this realism. In many cases you will often find yourself relying on your ears and not your eyes to tell where that last burst of gunfire came from. As a player, I enjoy it greatly when games force me to use more than one sense to make my way through a game. If everything in Killzone were as good as its audio, then this would be a great game.

Sadly, the place where Killzone needs to be at its best is where it is at its worst. The controls of the game are among the poorest of any console first person shooter. No matter what character you chose, you move slowly and clumsily. If you chose to pull off a melee attack, the game will take control completely away from you while it executes the scripted actions. Climbing ladders and vaulting low walls also takes control away from you in the same manner. There is no jumping in the game which feels like a cheap way out to confine the player to a set path. Finessed aiming is a tedious endeavor, made even more frustrating by the inaccuracy of all the weapons. The weapons themselves are a generic mix of assault rifles, pistols, a shotgun, machine guns, various types of grenade or rocket launchers and the ubiquitous sniper rifle. Almost all of the weapons are completely worthless and you will find yourself relying on the Helghast rifle, the sniper rifle and some kind of grenade or rocket launcher for the entire game. The sniper rifle can quickly give you a headache with the horrible orange filter that I assume is supposed to be some kind of "light amplifier". It does not amplify light, however, just the difficulty you have in picking out the enemies at long distance.

The levels run the gamut from being confusing to mind-numbingly linear. Your allies will do their best to guide you to where you are supposed to go next, but often times they will run off to that next location leaving you to wonder where they went. Once you get out of the cities and into the swamps and jungles, this problem gets even worse. There were many times where I found myself going around in circles in one area while I looked for a small little nook that lead to the next area.

Design issues like the level and weapon design could have used some serious retooling to make those elements things that added to the enjoyment of the game, not detracted from it. Sadly, this is true of much of Killzone. The game feels it has been rushed in too many places. For me, Killzone was a game that was worth it to rent, but not worth it to buy. There are too many uneven areas to make this game worth your money, and this is coming from some one who loves a good first person shooter. It saddens me to say that, because it means that the PS2 loyalists will still have to look to the horizon for their break-through first person shooter.