So I just sunk the better part of four days into playing Killzone on my PS2. It, like all other kill or be killed video games has two faults – the AI is not so smart, and the go-here-do-this excuse for a story that makes you hit check-points and accomplish “missions”. Neither of which would be an issue if all you were doing was playing death matches with your buddies. (At that point, my game playing inadequacies would outweigh any defects in the game itself.)
My gripe is that the AI in games like these haven’t seemed to get any better since Doom. There has to be a way to make the computer play better against people, but not play so well that the people can’t win. (Giving the AI bots grenade launchers doesn’t count – it just makes me mad.) The cut scenes in Killzone have clearly been influenced by movies – Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, for instance – but the actual game environment isn’t much better than the SOCOM series.
Where are the really interesting bots, particularly in the sci-fi genre? Where are the FPS analogs to the scarabs in the Mummy movies? Or the gravity defying bots like coat-checker’s in the Matrix Revolution? Or the dismembered body parts, like in zombie movies? Just wondering.
If we can’t have smarter bad guys, then at least make the terrain “live” so that when the ambush comes we aren’t trapped in the kill zone taking rounds because the plants are actually impassable, or because there isn’t a “jump” button in the game. I guess confining terrain is better for the bots with the grenade launchers.
And why is it that in the future Earth forces have developed weak ass weapons that all use different ammo, when we have kick ass weapons that share the same kind of ammo today? I mean, what’s a guy got to do to get some sniper rounds?
Killzone – addictive, glad I played, glad I rented. Not worth $50