Previews// Killzone 2

I was mighty pleased to see that the game looks as good in action as it does in the screenshots that have been released. It's dark, dirty, atmospheric and frantic. There's an undeniable brutality to the game in motion that should keep fans satisfied.

A fair amount of care has obviously gone into the game's look and feel. “To us, it means a lot that the characters are able to express themselves”, Steven said. “We want it to look and feel realistic. We're looking not to create a simulation type game, it's Hollywood realism that we're going for.” Just as well, really, since its difficult to simulate something that's not real, but anyway...

“So, things go spectacularly boom, instead of the regular explosions that you might expect.” Well... it must be said, one area that did let the game down in the build I saw was the explosions. They were big, they were flashy, but they were also a bit pixellated. Since Guerilla has 'til Odin knows when before release, however, I'm giving the developer the benefit of the doubt and assuming we'll see an improvement before the final code hits retail.

It must be said, possibly my favourite part of the demonstration was seeing the game sped up to hit a later part of the mission – burly soldier types running around like ants on amphetamines in a David Attenborough documentary and talking like Alvin and the Chipmunks is just as hilarious as it sounds.

“We're using a lot of post-processing effects to make sure that the picture is a whole, basically”, Steven said. There's a lot of stuff flying around the screen – characters, aircraft, gun emplacements, explosions, smoke effects – and when the game was shown without the post processing filters the images on screen looked a bit disparate. Not to worry, though, post processing suitably dulls the lighting to merge it into one seamless whole.

“We're also using the post processing filters to allow for this HUDless game that we have here. There's virtually no HUD (Head Up Display) in the game. One of the things we wanted to achieve was to have a very cinematic feel to the game so it's just you, your gun and the world around you.... Things like the health system, you'll be given visual clues to that”, I was told.

Basically, if you're taking fire, the world around you will dim, the contrast will change and it'll be time to get the hell out of there and find some cover. It was difficult to judge the effectiveness of the approach, since there was a lot of debug text floating around the debug build I saw, but it does seem to give the game a more intuitive feel than having an energy bar flashing at you.

One of the new features that's been implemented in Killzone 2 is something that Guerilla's calling 'first-person lean and peak' (snappy, I know). It's not a million miles from 'Duck and Cover' in the first Killzone, which enabled players to take cover then hit the fire button to stand up and take a shot. Here, similarly, [L2] will allow you to latch onto cover and then lean out to either side or, if you prefer, fire blind over the top of whatever's stopping you from getting blown into tiny little pieces. The feature's designed to add another level of technicality to the game, pushing players to choose their route and use cover and their environment more carefully.

It's a nice feature, but I couldn't honestly say I was blown away by it. It's hardly unique, having already cropped up in the likes of F.E.A.R.