I guess one of the most controversial moments during the development of the PS3 was the famous E305 when Sony showed a few trailers of forthcoming PS3 titles. With the PS3 still more than one year away, everybody was expecting some announcements and of course a good reason why the PS3 should be the better console in the next generation of consoles.
It was one of those moments then when Guerrilla played the first Killzone 2 trailer that was breathtaking at that time and was hard to believe an actual game footage. Now, almost 4 years later we all know that this was actually not the case and seriously, it couldn't have been as at that time Guerrilla just started with the development of the game. What the trailer actually was suppose to be was an idea of what the final game should look like - a target render as developers use to call this.
Finally holding the game in my hands, it's time to check if Guerrilla / Sony were actually cheating at this press conference 4 years ago or not. This is not suppose to be a review, so please don't mind if I am not going down to the smallest detail here. Anyway, what becomes clear as soon as you start the game is the fact that Guerrilla delivered a master piece of a game that does almost everything right. No need to complain about missing coop modes or minor things like the additional weapon slot.
Killzone 2 is so close to a perfect game as a game can be at a time. The whole presentation, the gameplay, the sound, the visuals, just perfect. Talking about the visuals it it simply amazing what Guerrilla achieved during the last couple of years. Is the game matching the target render from E305? It's not just matching, it's even better than this if you look at some of the visual qualities. What the game achieves in terms of the lighting has not yet been seen in any console game and not being a PC gamer myself I don't think that there are equivalent PC games out there.
One could argue that the game doesn't offer to much variety sure, but I rather like to play a game that focuses on what it can do best instead of a game that tries to do everything but not succeeding in any way. There are more than enough examples of that.
On the technical side Guerrilla showed all of those screwed up developers what it looks like to develop a high quality game on the PS3 platform. Not enough memory? A too slow Bluray drive? Endless installation? Forget about it. Those things simply do not exist for Guerrilla and I hope that what the studio has achieved (together with other Sony studios) will be beneficial for other games still being developed.
