Killzone 2: A Multiplayer Retrospective

It’s been nine years since the release of Killzone 2 and it’s still one of my favorite games of all time. I spent countless afternoons playing Warzone in hectic 32 player servers, chucking grenades and blasting away at Helghast and ISA alike with my trusty M82 rifle. And when Killzone 3 was announced in May of 2010, I was thrilled. The series had nowhere to go but up.

With its very first entry into the then current console generation, Guerilla Games had seemingly perfected the gritty action shooter formula popularized by Call of Duty 4 just two years earlier. Boasting action packed gameplay and impressive visuals and sounds, Guerilla’s 2009 installment offered a considerable improvement over its clunkier PS2 predecessor. Despite the game’s below average sales in its opening months, Killzone 2 went on to be a success, allowing the studio another chance to improve upon its sci-fi masterpiece.

When fans got their first look at Killzone 3 during E3 2010, a significant shift in tone was immediately clear. Gone were the urban jungles and sandy wastelands of Killzone 2, in came snowy vistas and alien forests. The change in scenery was both refreshing and a little disappointing. Grittiness, once the staple of Killzone, suddenly seemed to be gone. Had Guerilla already forgotten what had made Killzone special? Still, it was easier to be wowed by the game’s impressive new visuals than to see this as the warning it was. When Killzone 3 finally released in February of 2011, the results were… less than thrilling.

Killzone hadn’t just received a facelift, it had received a whole new body. Gone was the weightiness of the weapons and characters. Gone too were sprawling and memorable multiplayer maps, the cramped city slums and industrial refineries which had been the sites of many frantic 32 player gun battles. Killzone 3, with its increased emphasis on quick reaction times and smaller scale matches, had taken a turn that was already becoming far too familiar. But to understand exactly why Killzone 3 didn’t quite live up to its 2009 predecessor, we have to break things down.

Responsiveness & Pace

One of the biggest trademarks of Killzone 2 was the weight of its controls. Player characters were imbued with a distinct heaviness that caused them to turn, crouch, jump and do just about everything at a slower rate than many other shooters of the time. The game received both praise and criticism for this lack of responsiveness, which was actually a product of input lag, a delay between a button press on a controller and the corresponding action it triggers in game. Although it probably sounds strange to praise something that is generally considered to be a technical issue, Killzone 2’s input lag was actually one of its most distinguishing features. The inaccuracy and vulnerability caused both by intentional game mechanics and unintentional (some fans claim otherwise) input lag meant that players would need to be cautious as well as work together in order to overcome their individual weaknesses. There was simply no room for the lone wolves and one man armies so common to other shooters of the decade. And though Killzone risked becoming an overly slow, clunky and all around boring shooter because of its controls, it wasn’t. Short spawn times threw players back into the action quickly, the tactician class could deploy spawn points for their team almost anywhere on the map, and ammo boxes scattered throughout the battlefield helped keep intense firefights fueled.

Killzone 3 changed nearly all of this. The game’s responsiveness was completely revised with Guerilla dropping the weighty sensation almost entirely in favor of a safer, floatier one. As a result, lone wolves were once more free to run and gun at breakneck speeds throughout the map, with skilled players dominating the scoreboards and making the experience of everyone else an all around frustrating one.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Guerilla Games producer Steven ter Heide explained the game’s transformation:

“We felt that the original Killzone was aimed at the hardcore, a little too much, and it should be opened up a lot more so that everyone can enjoy it.”

Heide went on to claim that with new changes present in Killzone 3, the game’s audience could widen:

“whether you’re run-and-gun or a more tactical player, however you want to play it, you can find that in Killzone.”

But whether or not it was actually possible to strike a balance between tactical and mindless, Killzone 3 did not succeed, its loyalties clearly lying with the new generation of instant gratification shooters.

Map Design & Mechanics

For fans of Killzone 2, maps like Radec Academy and Salamun Market are about as iconic as Counter-Strike’s Dust 2 or Halo’s Blood Gulch. They have long been remembered for their unique setting, cinematic visuals, and dynamic gameplay, so much so that they were eventually reintroduced multiple times as DLC in Killzone 3, Killzone: Mercenary, and Killzone: Shadow Fall. But what exactly made Killzone 2’s maps so captivating compared to the series’ more recent designs? The answer is verticality. While verticality is a fairly standard aspect of map design, Killzone 2 made extensive and effective use of it in nearly all of its maps. Corinth Crossing, which takes place on, above, and below a large bridge, was perhaps the epitome of Killzone 2’s emphasis on vertical gameplay, offering players unorthodox but exciting multi-level action which encouraged clever thinking and plenty of unexpected encounters. Other maps like Helghan Industries and Pyrrhus Rise also demonstrated a keen eye for the dynamics created by multi-story map design, featuring uphill battles, multiple vantage points, and risky but rewarding shortcuts.

Verticality, though still present in Killzone 3, was toned down considerably as Guerilla attempted placed a greater focus on more simplified and supposedly quicker gameplay. But with the vertical scale of the maps significantly reduced they became too simple, and the increased amount of visual clutter (e.g. foliage and debris) which now scattered maps caused the pace of the game to slow down rather than speed up, with players spending more time wandering throughout the battlefield than actually shooting things.

The removal of spawn grenades in favor of pre-placed “Tactical Spawn Areas” as well as the reduction of the max player count from 32 to 24 only furthered Killzone 3’s pacing issues. With new maze-like maps, reduced freedom of choice, and game features no one had actually asked for like jetpacks and exo-suits, Killzone 3 was anything but the coherent shooter Guerilla wanted it to be.

Art Direction

Much like its controls, Killzone 2’s art direction received mixed responses. Released less than a year after Gears of War 2 and the same year as Resident Evil 5, Killzone 2 seemed to be joining in on the strange new trend of monochromatic games. Though it received a fair amount of flack for what some dubbed laziness or unoriginality, many fans and reviewers applauded the game’s dreary visuals for their gritty feel. Featuring gloomy skies, dramatic lighting, and impressive particle and post processing effects, Killzone 2 presented a visual war experience that simply couldn’t be matched at the time of its release.

Two years later, Guerilla’s increased familiarity with the PS3 hardware allowed them to improve upon the series’ visuals even further. When Killzone 3 released in early 2011, it boasted a slew of impressive graphical improvements like high resolution textures and better antialiasing. But even though Killzone 3 offered a vast technological improvement over the previous game, something about it was strangely sterile. Guerilla had moved on from the grungy cities of Killzone 2 and into the snowy mountains, sci-fi facilities, and untamed forests of planet Helghan, and that was okay, but in the process the series had lost some of its most defining features. The exaggerated lighting, smoggy skies, dark alleys, and foreboding concrete architecture of Killzone 2 had perfectly evoked the hopelessness and hostility of the Helghast home planet. With nearly all of those features now gone, the dark tone so characteristic of the series had shifted entirely. Killzone was no longer a soldier’s tale á la Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, but something more akin to a John Wayne action movie.

A one-hit wonder

By the time Guerilla Games released Killzone: Shadow Fall for the PS4 in late 2013, the studio still hadn’t learned from its mistakes. For any fans who still hoped the series would return to its roots, Shadow Fall was the final nail in the coffin, but whether or not Guerilla actually had done so might not have mattered. Killzone had already lost its identity, an erosion that first began with the release of Killzone 3 and progressed to complete collapse with Shadow Fall’s first media release in early 2013. What fans like myself now saw was no longer Killzone, but a generic sci-fi shooter trying and failing to masquerade as it.

The series has had its time and though I wish I could tell you to go out right now and pick up a PS3 and a copy of Killzone 2, Guerilla Games finally shut down the multiplayer servers of both Killzone 2 and Killzone 3 earlier this year. I am very sorry for everyone who did not have the chance to experience this amazing game, and for those of you who did, you already know how great it was.