Games Beaten 2024 - Page 37 (2025)

Partridge Senpai's 2024 Beaten Games:
Previously: 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
* indicates a repeat

1~50

51. Adventures of Lolo (Famicom)
52. Adventures of Lolo 2 (NES)
53. Adventures of Lolo II (Famicom)
54. Adventures of Lolo 3 (NES)
55. Kickle Cubicle (NES)
56. Adventures of Lolo (GB)
57. Cocoron (Famicom)
58. The Darkness (PS3)
59. Haze (PS3)
60. Animaniacs (GB)
61. Lair (PS3)
62. Bionic Commando (PS3)
63. Donkey Kong Land (GB)
64. Darkwing Duck (NES)
65. Donkey Kong Land III (GBC)
66. Donkey Kong Land 2 (GB)
67. Metroid II (GB) *
68. Pokemon: Brilliant Diamond (Switch)
69. Eggerland (FDS)
70. Eggerland: Meikyuu no Fukkatsu (Famicom)
71. Eggerland: Souzou he no Tabidachi (FDS)
72. Marvelous: Mouhitotsu no Takarajima (SFC)
73. Legendary Starfy (GBA) *
74. Legendary Starfy 2 (GBA)
75. Tales of the Abyss (PS2) *
76. Tales of the Tempest (DS)
77. Tales of Eternia (PS1)
78. Nier: Replicant (PS3)
79. Tales of Symphonia (PS3) *
80. Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (PS3)
81. Tales of Zestiria (PS3)
82. Tales of Berseria (PS3)
83. Gargoyle's Quest II (Famicom)
84. Bionic Commando: Rearmed (Steam)
85. Resistance: Fall of Man (PS3)
86. Resistance 2 (PS3)

87. Killzone 2 (PS3)

Continuing on from the two Resistance games I played previously, I decided to play through the last of the three big PS3 FPS games my friends got for me. Killzone is another series I had basically no exposure to beyond Col. Radec being a playable character in PlayStation All-Stars, so I really didn't know what to expect with this game beyond "probably a good shooter," and boy was I surprised with what I ultimately got XD. It took me about 6.5 hours to beat the game on normal mode on real hardware.

Killzone 2 follows a soldier named Sev, a member of Alpha team during the invasion of the Helghast's home planet of Helghan. The Interplanetary Strategic Alliance is taking the fight to them(?), and going after their leader Emperor Visari. Outside of that, we don't get much story or setup at all. On its surface, Killzone 2's story is an incredibly shallow one even for the time (in my experience, anyhow). Not just is everyone, from our heroes to our villains, extremely flat and boring characters, but they don't even bother to set up the story in any way. Unless you've played Killzone 1 already, you'd have virtually no idea that this is all part of a counterattack after the Helghast attempted to invade the ISA's home planet in the previous game or really that the Helghast are bad people at all. The game seems to completely forget to actually portray the Helghast as evil or bad in the context of *this* story, and the aggression towards them feels wildly baseless as a result.

A lot of shooters from this time period get portrayed as grotesque, racist power fantasies, but I was frankly *shocked* at just how deeply Killzone 2 earns that description. The sheer degree to which the people of Helghan are both universally painted as evil (?) soldiers simply because they dress scary and are part of the opposing side is somewhere between comical and horrifying. You're simply meant to blindly accept that these people who dress different & scary and are natives of this desert planet for which you have no context are evil just by the nature of your role as the protagonist, and it's *very* hard to ignore just how much that feels familiar to propaganda against the people of the Middle East of the time in conflicts like the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Our protagonists themselves are also very overtly racist a LOT towards the people of Helghan. They even have some in-universe racial slurs for them (the most common being "hig", I'm not kidding) that our main characters disdainfully shout a LOT over the course of the story. This is all while they dump lavish praise on you for every little thing you do, and that got to the point that it was making me actively uncomfortable with just the degree that the game thinks the player's ego needs to be coddled ^^;. I've gotta give credit to the voice actors, frankly, because the sheer disgust that they shout things like "fuckin' hig" as they walk past dead soldiers with is truly uncannily similar to how *real life* Neo-Nazis and racists say a *very* similar real world racial slur. In short, this game's writing is a revolting fascist propaganda piece. It is a giant screed glorifying racial violence and other-ing of people different than you, and the whole thing feels like a massive excuse to give white people a racial slur that they can say without feeling bad because it's directed towards a real life racial group.

Ironically, people like Col. Radec and Emperor Visari wind up feeling downright sympathetic by the end of the game. Their home world is being destroyed and their people slaughtered by an army that's morally no better than them but thinks themselves on a universally higher moral ground. The Helghast battle barks of "Death to the invaders!" feels incredibly justified given that that is precisely what you, the player, are, even though the game is far too un-self aware to actually do anything with that narratively. There's frankly a huge opportunity here to make a compelling story about now neo-liberal military action sees itself, and how actions of things like the U.S. military (which the ISA is so clearly styled after) are so clearly unjustified acts of slaughter, but this story is completely uninterested in even approaching topics as radical and left-wing as even the remotest anti-military sentiments. This game gave me a profound disrespect and honest contempt for the writing team at Guerrilla Games, because they're people who should feel deeply, deeply ashamed for having the gall to publish something that glorifies and celebrates racial hatred and xenophobia to this degree.

Mechanically, the game is an alright first-person cover shooter when it's not getting bogged down in its strange button layout problems. You've got an array of guns that feel pretty good to shoot and are balanced quite well, though there's nothing nearly as flashy or cool as you'd see in a Halo or Resistance game. They do make the very odd choice to make this not a two-gun game (like Call of Duty or Halo), but a 1 gun + crappy pistol game. Needing to choose one main gun and stick with it isn't an unforgivable crime, but I just don't think it's a gameplay style I find very fun. Frankly, for me, personally, I don't think I'm a huge fan of the whole concept of a first-person cover shooter in the first place, as it makes the action flow way too slowly compared to games whose concept of cover is just "duck or stand behind something". The idea of holding L2 to either crouch or hug into cover mechanically is a neat idea, but even having crouch bound to the same button as duck is often very annoying because you'd obviously want to do crouch without locking into cover at least *sometimes*.

The game has a fair few weird button choices like that, with the weirdest one being that, if you're holding down the aim-down-sights button, you actually *cannot* reload or throw a grenade until you let go of the ADS button. Maybe this is down to how ADS is a toggle, not a hold down, by default, and I played with it turned to a hold down action, but that in and of itself is a gross oversight of design towards the way so SO many shooters played by 2009. The level design is fine and the enemy design is to, though the hell gauntlet of the final level and the dogshit final boss are certainly exceptions to that. It's certainly not perfect design, but it's fine for what it is at the very least.

The last issue I really had is with the way the game is put together is the way it runs. Compared directly against the first two Resistance games (the second of which came out only a few months before this), this game runs quite badly despite being a game made solely for the PS3 hardware. Loading screen barriers that freeze the action solid, sometimes for so long that I worried the game had crashed, populate the game quite heavily despite never doing so in a lot of other shooters at the time. The game is at least very pretty graphically for the time (despite the low color palette), but it pays for this in not infrequent framerate plummets as well as a *terribly* low FOV. I'm generally not even one to care about framerate or FOV, but it was so frequently *so* hard to see what I was doing just because the FOV was so small that I can't not mention it here. Overall, Killzone 2 is a competently enough put together shooter that I can easily believe was pretty fun in multiplayer, but the campaign at least really failed to impress even against my relatively low sample size of other shooters of the time.

Aesthetically, the game does look quite nice for a very grey & beige-colored FPS of the time (of which there is no shortage). It doesn't look quite as hideously aged as Resistance 1 or Haze with low textured environments, but the bad FOV and framerate do get in the way of enjoying the good texture work. The music is quite good, I will say, and there were several moments that I actually stopped to think just how well done the orchestral score was (which is a real rarity for me in a game like this). The voice acting, however, is much more subpar. While there are some well executed jokes and banter (and racial epithets :/ ) here and there among your crew, a LOT of the main cast's VA work just sounds really phoned in like they don't even care. There was no shortage of instances where I thought, "Really? THAT was the take you decided to keep for that line?" for voice lines with a really shocking lack of emotional energy behind them. Col. Radec, however, really knocks it out of the park. It's no surprise he was picked for PlayStation All-Stars, frankly, as (aside from the other characters just being intensely unmemorable and generic) his voice performance is really the only one that feels that has any nuance behind it.

Verdict: Not Recommended. If you got to this point and thought the verdict would be any different than it is, then you may want to check your reading comprehension skills XD. Mechanically, Killzone 2 is a fine shooter, but nothing truly special that something newer or older can't pretty easily surpass (It's very much a "We have Halo at home"-type affair). Narratively, however, Killzone 2 is a truly wretched piece of literature. Unless you want a really good window into the racial/military politics of the late Bush-era, this narrative is good for nothing but leaving in the dustbin of history, and it'll do nothing but make you feel disgusted and filthy for taking part in such joyful racial violence. Your time and emotional energy are worth far better than this, and it's a small blessing that these games have never been ported to more modern hardware.