Reviews// Killzone 2

Your squad mates aren't around to act as accidental comics through the game - they play a much more serious role. Throughout most of the campaign they're your co-combatants, your buddies, providing support and covering fire. Having a non-player character at your side is a tricky balancing act for any game. Too active and you could stand back while they do all the work. Too passive and they're pointless baggage. In Killzone 2 your buddies certainly appear to make themselves busy, to the point where I was almost convinced.

Where they fall down is in their appetite for battle, specifically their habit of charging into untenable positions, where they fall in a blizzard of gunfire. Having your storyteller laying dead simply won't do, so to answer this they lay writhing and shouting for your help. Given the intensity of some battles, it's probably best you help out with quick zap of your magical medic device. It's a shame they can't do the same for you. Still, the checkpoints are plentiful and the restart time after a careless death is mercifully fast.

I say mercifully fast because, despite being a seasoned FPS gamer, I have to admit to not being very good - particularly when called to zero in on a target in a pinch. Perhaps its my age, with reaction times slipping away with every year that passes. Seasoned or not, the game controls are gently introduced from the moment you take charge on leaving the dropship and enter the battle on the shores of the Corinth River.

There you go, sprinting, crouching, taking cover and using the much talked about "peek and lean" feature. I can't understand why this has become such a hot topic - it's not like it hasn't been done before. Never the less, it's an essential skill to master if you're going to make serious progress because, before long, you're subject to the unwelcome advances of dozens or so Helghast.

A criticism on the first game was the lack of the ability to jump, so it's a welcome addition that is well implemented - you can hop onto or vault over anything at waist height, but you can't make infeasibly huge leaps. This keeps you within the prescribed route without the sense of being completely hemmed in by the scenery, as with the original game.

In a bid to do away with as much visual clutter, and present a more cinematic experience, the game's designers (Guerrilla Games, as if you didn't know) opted to do away with the usual status and informational displays such as ammo levels and health. To indicate the direction of incoming fire the screens is spattered with blood on its relevant portion, which works well when you're taking small fire. Under heavy fire it becomes more of a problem, as it's difficult to pick out the source of attack when those spatters overlap an become screen consuming mess. In these situations you've little option but to run and hide instead of quickly dealing with the threat. I found this happening a lot initially, as Killzone 2 is pretty brutal in the amount of damage you take from what in most FPSes would amount to little more than a scratch.

Weaponry - ISA and Helghast - sticks almost completely within the realm of today's conventional firepower rather than energy weapons and force fields. From sub-machine guns and assault rifles to grenade and rocket launchers, despite the futuristic setting Killzone 2 is much more about believable combat than a scrapbook of sci-fi fantasy. Accordingly, needing to watch your remaining ammo and manually reload during moments of respite means it pays to consider each engagement before throwing yourself into it - this isn't a run-and-gun affair. This is especially true because you're only able to carry two firearms at one time - and one of these is always a pistol.