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You can scarcely travel to a gaming site, forum or news spot without finding a legion of articles on the ever anticipated killzone sequel. The game has received quite a rave from the PS3 fan sites, and the hype has boiled over into all aspects of the gaming community. The amount of attraction this game has amounted seems to be getting borderline "Halo like", with fans climbing out of every crack and crevice with information pertaining to this game.
This is kind of an awkward situation for me because when I think of killzone I think of that mediocre shooter back on the PS2 that got its name as a "Halo Killer". So when I start reading an article on how great the game is going to be, I start wondering what I missed. How could a game that received such disappointing reviews, come back again as a flagship for Sony? I was utterly confused, because 98% of the time the sequel is always RELATIVELY worse than the original (with exceptions like COD4).
So now fully intrigued by this odd production choice, I decided to check out the footage for this new game (a thing I like to avoid unless necessary, for I feel it can ruin a game if done in excess). After shifting through some cinematic videos with no actual gameplay, I found a mother-load of live action footage of the first few levels. After viewing this I was absolutely blown out of the water by the visuals. Now that my appetite was wetted with this information I headed over to N4G.com (a gaming news site) to see if I could find any movies of the latest builds. While shifting through the pages of articles I found one article that was explaining how KZ2 was a ?Halo Killer?. For the sheer Irony in the title I Continued to read, and the very biased article tried to conjure up how Killzone was better than Halo in every way.
While I normally turn my head and laugh at these pointless arguments, to claim the same thing your predecessor tried years ago, and failed at, is something to be noticed. Satisfied that this was most likely the ranting of some blogger who wanted more traffic, I moved on. It wasn?t long before I bumped into another article with an uncanny likeness to the first. This trend of finding a video, then finding a few rants continued until I met one very prominent article. This one compared the two and left me thinking that killzone was a gift sent from God.
This was definitely the last straw; I was no longer interested in this game, but excited.
All this hype coupled with stellar graphics caught me in the crosshairs, and I started reading IGN articles, and watch GT movies like I was looking for duke nuk-em forever.
After a night of catching up on the Killzone 2 craze, and after briefly explaining to him how it was going to crush halo, resistance, and any other shooter under its mighty helgan boot, I decided to show a friend of mine the footage. I started off by showing a few of the best movies, and trailers, but I noticed something as I watched more and more of the gameplay videos, I was getting less and less impressed.
You see, the normal way I work is that the more of a game I see the more hyped I get. Right now Ive watched the ?Dawn of WAR? trailer about 7 or 8 times and I still can?t get enough. Unlike that, the more I watch killzone the more flaws I start to see.
With the sudden crash of reality, my perception and better judgment also return. Allowing me to analyze, the Perceived similarities and differences of the HALO and KILLZONE games
The game, while great looking, is grey. -It?s almost the polar opposite of the brightly colored bloom landscapes of halo.
The weapons are generic, and from what I?ve heard, the most exotic weapon is a sort of ?Tesla Gun?. An odd layout for a game going up against the exotic layout of Halo 3, but hay who am I to judge.
The games style looks nothing like halo. I see little or no jumping around, firing without aiming, or lack of cover. In fact The game flow Is based more around the well built cover mechanic then the Robo-cop style charging found in halo.
Character variations are much different. While one aspect of killzone was to have a large variation of troops, from what I see they are all fairly similar except for a few ?heavy? enemies, or drone-like opponents. This is a farcry from the many vastly different opponents in halo, with each having many different variations on them. So while Killzone opts for realism, it strays further away from Halo.
Story-wise they are incredibly different. One deals with odd looking aliens attacking earth with the intentions to destroy it, the other is sci-fi look at WW2 where the Germans are replaced with an outside invasion force, that can?t breath air.
The only real similarities (beside them both being FPS) is the main characters. Master chief and Sev are both rugged, tough, and unnaturally quite soldiers, who somehow have the ?Know how? to use anything that could be a weapon. They also have the same qualities as a roman god, in that they can?t seem to be killed with conventional means. The only difference here is that Master chief has a Badass suit of armor, while Sev just has?umm?.well I don?t think there?s a real explanation.
The odd thing that I have noticed is that while everyone has been labeling it as a Halo killer, I made a slightly more valid find.
See any similarities? I do. I propose that Killzone isn?t going to kill halo, but Call of Duty.
I still really like how Killzone is looking and I will probably buy it, and I can?t say anything definitive about it until I do. But If I were to wager my bets, I would say it isn?t even dealing with the same gameplay elements as halo, so I doubt there is really any franchise attacking going on.
This is just my 2 cents, so tell me what you think about the upcoming Killzone.
(this is my first large scale post, so any pointers would be much obliged)
Edit: Spelling mistake corrected
