Killzone (PlayStation 2 R16)

By Russell Baillie

Say this for Killzone, its baddies are satisfyingly evil. For they are the Helghast, Nazi aliens who were once human but have gone a bit bald, green around the gills and froggy of throat since they colonised the planet Helghan.

No wonder they're angry and hell-bent on invading Vekta, the part of the galaxy your branch of humankind must defend.

It looks a lot like Earth, only more grim. The 11 levels give you trenches, beaches, swamps, industrial wastelands to defend against the Helghast hordes and it's pretty easy to get lost in its expansive environments.

And that is basically it for story in this sci-fi first-person shooter, which is widely considered Sony's answer to Micro-soft's Halo 2.

However, it does have some character development that many might recognise as action movie cliches among the four characters you can choose to play as.

The stoic Captain Templar once had a thing with female sniper Luger, while Rico the machine-gun carrying grunt can't cope with being in the same squad with Hakha, the half-Helghast special operative.

Predictably, which one you pick can affect the game's
tactics and objectives, with Luger and Hakha able to penetrate some areas the others can't as the quartet seemingly cover a good deal of Vekta on foot. It's a rigorous blaster allowing for a mix of stealth or full-frontal assault in your tactics.

And the game's multiplayer options allow for up to 16 players online in various modes.

But for all that, Killzone doesn't feel like a great leap forward for this sort of thing. In some environments it's as if the action is taking place on Planet Vietnam or as if it's the near-future edition of Medal of Honor and the action is often repetitive in its unimaginative kill-'em-all missions.

It manages great swathes of atmosphere but its graphics aren't great in the detail, the frame rate is sometimes a little slow for the quick-draw stuff, and the sniper targeting functions are fiddly and frustrating. And sometimes you can just hear the PS2 working overtime to get it all on screen.

But at least those baddies aren't stupid. They are worryingly sentient beings, especially when you think you can get away with lobbing a grenade towards a bunch of them, or in how they tend to take advantage of your shortcomings, such as forgetting to reload before storming a position.

Killzone does enough to induce much trigger-happiness but not quite enough to make it a new calibre of first-person shooter for the PS2.

$109.90