Killzone: Liberation Hands-On Impressions
Killzone: Liberation kinda took me by surprise.
I was anticipating it, but mostly because the idea of putting Killzone onto the Playstation Portable as anything but a straight first-person shooter port sounded interesting.
I had no idea.
The game, which is played from a third-person isometric point of view, is a handful of hotness. It manages to blend action, stealth and a tiny bit of puzzle into something you can play in the sort of bite size chunks meant to be on a portable. Which is to say, it's one of those few Playstation Portable titles that make the whole system really seem worth it. This is a game designed for the portable, not one stuffed into it.
Sure, there are problems. The aiming system, which is a sort of loose lock-on that requires you to aim in the general direction of your target, is mostly solid but can get quite sloppy at times. And some of the specialty weapons, like the Crossbow and Sniper rifle, really need to have a different aiming mechanism. But all in all Liberation is my new steady.
I've been playing it pretty much non-stop since I got it and have managed to work my way through 14 or 15 of the game's 16 levels. The level design is mostly brilliant both when taken separately and as a whole. The developers, Guerilla, found just the right difficulty level to make the game border on hand-clenchingly difficult but still be addictively fun to play. But it's the range of things you are doing from level-to-level that make this such a pleasure to play. There are levels where you really need to sneak through, defusing laser trip bombs, avoiding mines, slipping past guard, and there are levels where you just have to load up and take out the trash. You even get to drive vehicles like a tank and hovercraft. The game has a freaking jetpack. A jetpack man!
Gameplay mechanics are probably the game's Achilles heel, while it is not so bad as to distract, it was the one thing I found at times frustrating. The occasional sloppy aiming got me killed a few times, and taking out a sniper with a sniper rifle of your own that doesn't have a zoom can be annoying.
Fortunately the movement is concise and quick to respond and the automatically controlled camera angle is exceptional.
The game, due out on Halloween, does feel a bit short, but it supports in-room multiplayer and, sometime after launch Sony promises to release a free add-on that will make online WiFi multiplay possible, something I heard is just this side of addictive.
If the Playstation Portable's games keep shaping up like this I think there's a very good chance that Sony might be able to turn this portable around. And I hear Lumines II makes buying the PSP worthwhile all over again.
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