There’s a bit in the first person shooter Killzone 2, a few missions in, which I replayed a lot. I kept getting killed before making it to the next checkpoint. The checkpoint I would get placed back to started under heavy machine gun fire. Most routes to escape were blocked off, but there was one way to turn. The problem was, a whole herd of enemies were coming from that way. Fortunately, there was a handily placed explosive barrel. Less fortunately, it was so close that blowing it up would kill me as well.
Reverse just enough within the confined space and it was possible to get away with exploding it, though, and to clear a way to the passage behind the enemies, safe from the machine gun. There was another enemy waiting in there. Taking more hits the whole time, my approaching death shown by the screen desaturating, bloodstains blooming across it from all sides, I would dash straight at the enemy as I turned the corner, frantically hammering the L1 button to bludgeon them until they just about went down first.
And breathe.
In sequences like that, it’s easy to see what Killzone 2 gets right. Its action is smooth, fast and clearly delineated. All your enemies – the Helghast – have glowing red visors over their eyes, so they’re very easy to pick out from any distance. They move around in reasonably intelligent ways, but not so much so as to not present you with clear opportunities to shoot them. Taking cover and leaning out from it to shoot is handled with a slick grace. Obvious inspiration is taken from some of the best bits of Gears of War and Halo, and high fidelity recreations are presented. All of Killzone 2’s mechanics are executed with impressive precision. That leaves just one problem, which is that it has a gaping void in place of personality.
When I wrote about Army of Two’s two-character military setup, I said that “as well as being engaging on a moment-to-moment action level, the set up should theoretically lend itself to something that says something interesting about a relationship between two characters. I say theoretically because Army of Two barely even tries”. I now realise that this was a foolish assertion made from a position of unfamiliarity with the genre. To say that Army of Two barely even tries leaves far too little room on the scale for a world which contains Killzone 2. Army of Two’s Salem and Rios, with their joint hunger to get paid and their contrasting paranoia/gullibility axis, had actual character traits. It would be a long and painful search to find any such things in Killzone 2 and its military ciphers.
Generally when I’m playing games for Super Chart Island I find myself mentally noting down possible quotes for the title as I go. In Killzone 2 there was only ever one which I even remembered, and even that didn’t really have a personality of its own going for it, just the fact that if you squint then “get in the tank, Sev” looks like an Evangelion meme.
The lack of personality goes beyond the characters and extends through the setting and plot. Killzone 2 takes place in a future where humans across two planets are at war. The only memorably distinctive things are the particularly awkward insertions of the PS3’s Sixaxis motion controls to turn wheels and such. You are the Vektans invading the Helghast, in revenge for their own invasion in the original Killzone.
So you’re here on this drab planet with no connection to the real world, but also nothing which is particularly beautiful or futuristic or interesting, a world which feels built for precision shooter gameplay and little else. The facts of an invasion are presented as inherently interesting and compelling without any need for personal stakes or anything recognisable to grab onto. The rejection of humanity would be fascinating if it ever felt complete or deliberate enough to be saying something. Instead the impression left is that Guerrilla’s ideal would be to create a game which said nothing at all.
The worst part is that they don’t even manage that. Its polished grey shell, in hacking out all of this soft surrounding stuff from its obvious inspirations, Killzone 2 doesn’t even manage to remove their worst implications. There is no real world or pseudo-real world to cling onto recognition of, but the core remains one of not just killing but invasion being presented as good and right.
Top of the charts for week ending 28 February 2009:
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