New Review Posted: Killzone

[Daniel Weissenberger]

I review Killzone, and have a few things to say about the technology on display:

"With still a year to go, the PS2 already seems to have stretched its resources as far as they can go. I think back to the concept art and demo reels Sony released to hype the PS2 and its "emotion engine," and just how limitless the possibilities seemed. Now, here we are five years later, and all of those technological limits have been found out. All of the PS2's big holiday games suffered from this in one way or another. San Andreas bought its huge contiguous world with ugly graphics, obscene amounts of close draw-in, and obvious texture swapping. On the flip side is Snake Eater; the game's incredible graphics were made possible by frequent loading, tiny areas, and Hideo Kojima's insistence on keeping the camera where it was way back in 1987. Into this climate comes Killzone, another game that might have been better off waiting for the next generation of consoles."

The rest of the review can be perused here.

[Mike Bracken]

Nice work, as usual. Still, the best thing this week was the reader response to your Fable review. That's just priceless.

Gamers are great.

Mike B.

[Daniel Weissenberger]

Yeah, I know - normally I edit the public ops for spelling, tense problems, capatalization, and th elike, but I really felt his opinions deserved to be expressed in his own words.

[Mike Bracken]

Good call on that one.

Mike B.

[Andrew Fletcher]

The only issue I had with this review was the fuzzy definition of a games designer in the closing sentences.

Having taken on the role myself in the past year, I have to say that the "beautiful graphics and animation" of a game are far from attributable to a designer. This may be a minor point (and probably is within the context of this game review), but I find it interesting to note exactly to whom critics asscribe certain facets of a videogame's construction. Designers are often seen as the authoring minds behind games, and to some extent this is true, but a great deal of what the player/critic enjoy/despise about a game mwill have little to do with them at all.

Just a minor point, like I say, but it'll be interesting to see how game creators get referenced by critics and audiences in the future. Will the huge teams that work on them be recognised as a multi-disciplined creative force by the mainstream media, or will we see the cinematic paradigm applied whereby critical attention is reserved for assessing the the few roles that the audience can relate to (director, actor, maybe cinematographer)?

[Gouty]

i saw that the pictrer thom moyles lookls like a fag must like guys cause he didt love Fable. fable is so much better than hinm hes such a fog!!!!!!!!!

Sorry, I couldn't help myself.

[GrandRoyal]

You were pretty spot-on with that review. Although I haven't beaten the game yet (one or two levels to go, I believe), the thoughts in that review very closly matched mine. It did fail to mention the inclusion of bots in multiplayer, which to me is a big plus as I don't have ps2 on-line.

Also, I'd like to say that this review (and others since I've read it earlier today) have taken away my building fears that online game reviewers have absolutly no idea about the drivel they spit out. So meet a new reader of this great website, I have no idea how I missed it before and feel said that I've been wasting time at other places that 'review games'. [one reviewer from a 'respectable' site I've been going to rated this game just by saying 'the graphics were bad, the AI sucked, and the guns were unimpressive', more or less. No reasons, he just said it sucked. oi]

[Hypatia93]

Welcome to the site, GrandRoyal!

I'm a (relatively) long-time fan of the reviewers and people of this place. I won't buy a game anymore unless someone here that I know endorses it. The folks here are generally very knowledgeable and friendly, too.

I hope you decide to stay for a good piece.