Though rather short, Killzone 2 looks awesome and make up for its lack of story and length with intensity and excitement
I never played Killzone 1, and perhaps if I had I would have some clue what was going on in this game. It starts off with you invading this planet presumably because they started a war with your home planet. The point I'm trying to make is that the story is fairly vague, and the parts that are well defined are fairly cliché missions on pace to your ultimate goal of arresting their leader. This is also true for the scenes between missions which don't really make the story really intriguing, but are visually stunning.
But who cares about story? This is a first person shooter after all so what matters more is the actual gameplay, and Killzone 2 delivers. Now, I'm not going to tell you that Killzone 2 rewrites the book on FPS games, but I will say that it has probably has the best graphics on the PS3 that I've seen thus far. Not only do the characters look great (which one would expect at least the enemies to look great since they only had to design like 3 skins for the entire game), but the guns look fantastic and the background and sky effects will blow you away. Levels with a powerful storm overhead add to the intensity of the battling and will have you marveling at the realistic effects.
The AI leaves something to be desired however. Now, they're not stupid enough to stand there as you throw grenades at them, but its 2009 so I hope that's a given nowadays like power windows and locks in cars. Enemies don't show any real strategy other than hide and shoot, but most depressingly the game suffers from the classical problem where if you shoot an enemy' exposed limb as they hide behind a wall, they will not move away and will instead stand there and allow you to slowly kill them the cheap way.
I'm not going to spoil when the game ends, but I will say that it ended about 2 minutes after I got really excited about the gameplay at what I would consider the climax of the game. Now, I'm not saying that a game shouldn't end on a high note like that; I'm just saying that I wasn't expecting it to end since I was only 9 hours into the game. That 9-hour figure is at my pace, and I would consider myself, honestly, quite bad at FPS games. That is on the medium difficultly however, so more hardcore FPS players should probably step it up right away.
What Killzone 2 truly lacks is a co-op mode. There are several main characters that a 2nd player could control, and the online multiplayer doesn't deliver the same visual punch that the one-player campaign does.
Worth playing, even if you're not a diehard FPS fan, but get it on a 5-day rental and don't rush.