Killzone 2 review by Frisky Wabbit

Yes, I am aware that Killzone 2 is a PS3 game. However, I just spent an hour watching some gameplay in the college game lab so I thought I ought to document my experience.

First, of course: the look. I thought this game was beautiful, from the detailing in the weapons to the explosions. Luckily, the player I was watching liked grenades so I got to see the grenade effects quite a bit, and they were stunning. The grenade explosion depended primarily on how much dirt or dust was around it, throwing everything around the area in the air, and making a everyone die with it....aww, beauty at its finest.

The maps reminded me of a Fallout theme with the battlefield size. The size was rather huge, however the killing was not hindered by this fact. All players' armor had little blue lights on their armor (I didnt see from the humans/marines p.o.v), which wasn't extremely noticeable. The assault rifles could reach across the maps, but it did keep up the tempo.

The major thing that I found fascinating, and made it worthwhile to write this, was the extreme resemblance the classes had to Team Fortress 2 (without all the funny lines and shooting beer out your nose when the demo yells out "They're goin' to have to glue you back together...in HELL!") <--- best tf2 line I could think of.

The classes are as follows:

Rifleman -Default character, standard issue weapons (I wish that TF2 had this class: just a simple m16 or any assault rifle class, but I digress).

Engineer - Can build a mounted turret, or these bad-ass unmanned flying things.

Medic - Toss health on the ground and also revive downed teammates. I found the system of dying Killzone has set up to be interesting. If you get shot almost anywhere (but the head), you get a mortal wound, and you can be revived by a medic. Or, you can wait 10 seconds, then press X to respawn. So instead of dying and waiting in lobby for 10 seconds, you are always active, and at least you're waiting for a medic with the possibility of coming back. On the other side, it was hilarious to watch a downed player with his leg blown off then you go up and smack him a few times.

Scout - or Sniper, as the player I watched called it. They can go invisible and mark enemy players which broadcasts their coordinates.

Assault - The "heavy weapons guy" gets extra armor (sounds familiar), and a rocket lauchers that look like it's shooting flaming meteors.

Tactican - These guys take the TF2 engi transports to a new level. They can throw a smoke grenade which lets their team spawn in to the location of the smoke, kinda cool.

Saboteur - The Killzone Spy, he can disguise as anyone and gets to plant sticky, prox. C-4 charges.

If you are asking why the hell did I just read a review of a game that I can't play, I don't know what to tell you. Just a little look at a neat game that may someday - if the company gets wise - come to us poor, deprived PC players.

Wabbit