Previews// Killzone 2

Amid all the sweating, meat eating and copious amounts of coffee drinking that was this year's Games Convention over in Leipzig, I took some time to take a look at Sony's upcoming possible Halo-killer: Killzone 2.

Killzone 2, if you've been hidden under a rock with radioactive rats stuffed in your ears for the last year or so, is the highly anticipated follow-up to the PS2's Killzone and the PSP's top-down Killzone Liberation. In a nutshell it involves the ISA (goodies) dealing with the Helghast (baddies) and using as much firepower as possible to do it.

Steven Ter Heide – producer of Killzone 2, and Mathijs De Jonge – the game's director, set their hands on the Sixaxis to show me what's what and give me a painfully brief twiddle myself..

The part of the game getting shown off at Leipzig was the 3rd mission. It takes place on Helghan – the Helghast homeworld – moving the action on from the from Vekta, the location of the previous games.

This year's E3 trailer – actually a cutscene - kicked off the action. The cutscene, I would like to point out, merges seamlessly with actual gameplay (thanks to technology that will be explained later), a move that looks immensely satisfying when compared to pesky loadscreens.

Anyway we open the display with aircraft called Cruisers dropping what developer Guerilla calls 'Intruders', which are the vehicles the player rides in on. This is, Steven informed me, “a full scale invasion of the Helghast homeworld. In this specific mission, what the ISA is trying to do is stop the Helghast war machine, so they need to capture Visari, the Helghast leader. There's a convoy approaching the city, but it's being stalled. What happens now is the navy have called in the Legion. The Legion is a special forces unit. The player's part of that unit. There's a new player character, called Sev.”

Worry not, however. Rico, a familiar face from Killzone and Killzone Liberation, is present and accounted for as the commanding officer of your particular taskforce.

“Basically, you're sent down to help see what the problem is with the convoy”, Steven said. The problem quickly became evident. The grim square where all the trouble was happening had a big ol' nasty pair of mortars at the back firing at the ground troops, the poor little blighters. There's also an Arc Cannon, which fires electricity (or reverse lightening, as I've fondly come to know it) into the sky taking out anything flying by that doesn't look too friendly to the Helghast.

The game was running in development mode, so Steven could pan out and move the camera around the level. As he said, “The entire world is being drawn there, it's not an image that we're drawing, it's fully 3D. This is one of the things that we have to do, basically, in order to allow for a seamless transition from the cutscene right into the game. So all of the geometry is there. There's no trickery going on there.”