Bullshot

As an Avid fan of Killzone 2, it’s sort of hilarious how much I have lost interest in this franchise after playing Killzone 3, and now this–a remaster of the game that started it all. I’ll be honest here, I didn’t play the one on the PS2, because there was no interest. The franchise basically started with Killzone 2 for me and I, for one, was very excited to play the first game in HD.

A mistake… it was.

I thought Guerrilla Games were tech wizards. So what happened? Why does this game look rubbish? It’s not like my standards have changed drastically, I still play old, crappy looking games. But this, however, managed to offend me, and in a way I am sort of glad I didn’t play the game on the PS2.

It does do a lot of things right, however, with the weapon weight being portrayed accurately, and you also don’t see Sev anywhere. So no bad characters! (I like Rico). Sad thing is that, the Helghasts are less cooler here than they were in Killzone 2, and the game as whole was made by very inexperienced developers. No you don’t have to see the studio’s portfolio to tell this, the game tells you all that you need to know.

Brown recycled levels, some random levels with plants, and awful level design sometimes makes me think that Guerrilla just didn’t want to do this. Remaster this. Could have ported to a competent studio like Blue Point maybe?

Yeah, that’s how it looks

You know the Halo: Combat Evolved remake by 343 Industries? That’s what these guys should have been targeting, because Guerrilla is basically the best studio Sony has when it comes to tech.

So what went wrong with this? This game is the perfect definition of the word generic. It might have been decent to look at half a decade ago on the PS2, but for a PS3 version it’s an abomination. It feels like you are just playing the PS2 game again, and when you compare it to the work 343 did, it’s highly disappointing.

You take control of characters that are very cool, I might add. Shooting the Helghast is a blast as always; the guns are quite satisfying to use and there are some unique ones here; the reload animations are amazing. So there’s fun to be had if you can tolerate the overall mediocrity that is presented before your eyes.

The AI is quite disappointing too. They, you know, the Helghasts, come and fall at your feet like, say, your cute doggie? Don’t go d’aww here though, obviously.

Best. FPS. Ever. (Yeah, “IMO”, and it’s my review.)

The levels are your standard FPS far with varied environments, and there’s one or two which looks significantly better than the rest. But having to dig a massive hole just to find water seems a bit stupid, doesn’t it? Yeah, I think that’s a perfect analogy for what you are getting here.

There are people who will dig the hole, while the majority i.e. 97.25% won’t. And yeah, that’s what the game is going to sell as well. Here’s a bold prediction, only 2.75% of people who own a PS3 are going to buy the game. I may seem overly harsh here, but there’s simply no excuse because Guerrilla Games is capable of much more. So what went wrong, again I ask? Did Sony give them $100 to finish this remaster? Or were their minds and hearts clearly somewhere else?

I wouldn’t recommend this ‘HD’ version even if you are a fan. But you already bought it, didn’t you? Yeah… like me. You can’t possibly be a bigger Killzone fan than me, though, and even if you are, coming from another Killzone bro, avoid this game.

This game was reviewed on the PS3.

Guerrilla Games have announced that Killzone HD and the entire Trilogy is now available on the PS3. The first game can be downloaded from PSN for $15, while the others can be bought separately (duh), or in a pack called the Trilogy Edition.

If you haven’t played the Killzone games before, this is a good deal as all the games are available for $40 (and Rs. 3,299) in India. Having played the first two games, the Killzone HD remaster is something that excites me the most.

There’s a double XP weekend as well which starts tomorrow, so if you play Killzone 2 or 3’s multiplayer. Time to rack up some points. And here’s a speech by the awesome Visari.

“My people… Sons and daughters of Helghan… Today is a glorious day for our nation. For many years, our history was incomplete – divided, fragmented, and split up over multiple platforms. But on this day, the record of our great struggle is made whole. On this day,Killzone Trilogy is released for PlayStation 3!

Experience the power of the Third Helghast Army in the original Killzone, remastered in majestic HD. Witness the tyranny of the ISA as it attempts to seize Helghan in Killzone 2. Tremble before the awesome might of the Helghast war machine in Killzone 3. Then, go online and smite the enemy on any of the enclosed DLC multiplayer maps!

In honor of this momentous occasion, I have declared the coming weekend a Double XP Weekend. All acts of valor in online multiplayer matches of Killzone 2 and Killzone 3 shall be doubly rewarded! Go online and strike at your foes without fear or hesitation… Remind them, with every bullet fired and every drop of blood spilt, that Helghan belongs to the Helghast!”

If you have played the Killzone games you would notice how different it is when it comes to gameplay mechanics. Killzone HD didn’t feature any jump function and it was supposed to make it realistic than other shooters. We now have an explanation of the said move by Guerrilla.

“More importantly, it would run counter to what we were trying to do with Killzone. The omission of the ‘jump’ button was a very deliberate design decision, almost like a statement against other shooters of the time,” technical director Michiel van der Leeuw said in an interview with the PS Blog.

“We wanted players to have a visceral, realistic experience, and that meant preventing them from traversing our game by bunny-hopping or rocket-jumping. Even when we re-introduced jumps for the obstacle-heavy terrains in Killzone 2, they were ‘weighty’ jumps – not perfect parabolic arcs, but the sort of short leaps a heavily packed soldier would make.”

The first remastered game releases on PSN and via retail later this month.

Different companies remaster games in their own style. Square Enix doesn’t even start development on it (FFX HD), Capcom butchers the remaster (Silent Hill HD), Bluepoint Games does a fantastic job on whatever they do and then you have first-party studios like 343 Industries (Halo Anniversary) and Guerrilla Games (Killzone HD).

The Killzone HD remaster had a lot of work invested in it, but that’s what you expect from a technical powerhouse like Guerrilla Games. Killzone was originally a PS2 game which looked quite good for its time, and the PS3 version – which was announced recently – features quite a lot of improvements.

“I was asked to dig up the source code and the original assets for the game – things like models, textures and sounds. Guerrilla used a completely different versioning system in 2004, so we knew direct retrieval of the assets was going to be tricky. By comparison, obtaining the source code was slightly easier, because we found a copy in our current CVS,” senior Programmer Frank Compagner said.

“The biggest challenge we faced with regard to obtaining the assets was that Guerrilla’s whole way of working was different back then. The assets had been backed up to tape at one point, but that was almost eight years and two tape robots ago. So we needed an archaeologist, someone to dig into the depths of our backup archives and unearth whatever they could.

“It was quite an interesting challenge. The first issue we ran into was that we no longer had a machine to read most of the tapes. And the second issue was that the tapes were stored, uh, offsite… By which I mean, in a shoebox in the cellar of one of our IT support staff members, without a list of contents of any kind.”

I have never played Killzone on PS2, so this is quite refreshing to know that they have indeed worked so hard on the game.

Tell us what you think in the comments section below.

Via PS Blog.