F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Vs. Killzone 2

Photo by Dan Siney

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. Click to enlarge.

SHOOTER SEQUEL SHOOT-OUT: F.E.A.R. 2 VS. KILLZONE 2

A short time ago, I noticed something odd: Many reviews of

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

seemed to boil down to “It’s a great shooter but not much more,” while many reviews of

Killzone 2

said, “It’s not much more than a shooter, but it’s a great one!” The former is collecting middling review scores; the latter, high ones—at least by the standards of review scores, where six is now abject failure and by extension seven is barely playable.

Now that

, I thought to myself,

is interesting

. I should note this occurred to me before I’d played either game. I honestly had no answer in mind when the question struck me—is

Killzone 2

really a better just-plain-shooter than

F.E.A.R. 2

, or is the reception difference a function of external factors?

Investigating this more closely, I came upon a tangential and altogether more interesting issue: While I wasn’t paying attention, the single-player first-person shooter seems to have split into two distinct genres. I blame

Saving Private Ryan

. But before I get into that, let’s look at the two games under discussion.

Both

F.E.A.R. 2

and

Killzone 2

are the newest of first-person shooters. Graphics-wise, both are very good-looking, using head bob, motion blur, limited anti-aliasing, and a variety of graphic filters to supplement the normal array of detailed models, textures, et al.

F.E.A.R. 2

can’t really compete with

Killzone 2

in graphics, because

Killzone 2

has some of the prettiest, most detailed visuals I’ve ever seen in a video game, an order of magnitude beyond what’s come before, but if I hadn’t just played

Killzone 2

I’d be prepared to call

F.E.A.R. 2

the most attractive FPS of this generation. If

F.E.A.R. 2

has a visual failing, it’s the way it follows the

Halo

model of rendering human skin like shiny plastic, so all the characters without face-concealing helmets look like Barbie or Ken.

Killzone 2

doesn’t do that—it may not be photorealistic, but at least it has virtual people and not virtual dolls.

Killzone 2

is a flagship, exclusive product for the PlayStation 3. Sony couldn’t afford another embarrassment after the debacle of the first

Killzone

, which was sold as a “

Halo

-killer” and allegedly sucked ass.

F.E.A.R. 2

isn’t a flagship anything; it’s available on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. Moreover, the first

F.E.A.R

. was a critical and commercial success, so everyone will judge the sequel against its predecessor. (

F.E.A.R.

was actually the first Xbox 360 game I ever played, and one of the last games ever to scare me before I completely desensitized myself to horror games in the name of finishing

Resident Evil 4

.) Critics have motive to look for

Killzone 2

’s positive qualities—and not just PS3 fans. Of course PS3 fans want to love it and Xbox 360 fans want to dismiss it, but people who hate mindless fanboyism have to give it a fair shake lest they feel like pro–Xbox 360 partisans themselves. Nobody has that sort of ulterior motive evaluating

F.E.A.R. 2

… except, awkwardly enough, me writing this column, because pitting a huge blockbuster against a mediocre performer I have motive not to end it on an anticlimactic “Yeah, turns out the review scores are right!” note. Urgh. Stupid unavoidable conflict of interest!

F.E.A.R. 2

’s multiplayer is functional but unambitious. The maps are small, the modes are few, and it feels perfunctory. It’s just one multiplayer FPS among many and it probably won’t ever develop much in the way of a devoted community.

Killzone 2

’s multiplayer, on the other hand, is ambitious, seeks primacy among PS3 FPS multiplayer in the same way

Halo 3

dominates Xbox 360 FPS multiplayer, and at the moment is

broken

. It’s based on earning points to unlock new classes, each of which has two special abilities, and you’ll need to play for a long time to see all of it—but it’s unstable, and a crash can lose you the points you should have earned for a match. It’s not designed very well for social gaming—it can be difficult to situate yourself on the same team as a friend you want to play with. It needs work. Perhaps with some patching it could be all it promises to be, but for now its reach exceeds its grasp.

F.E.A.R. 2

has sharper controls. It’s easier to hit targets in

F.E.A.R. 2

, and not just because there’s a slow-motion gimmick. But

Killzone 2

’s controls feel heavier, and its guns more weighty. Things feel more solid and real. The quality of a fake thing appearing real is called verisimilitude, by the way, and “verisimilitude” is one of my favorite words when discussing game design. One can make a solid argument that asking for realism in games or any type of fiction is ridiculous, because fiction is not real. But asking for verisimilitude is entirely reasonable.

Killzone 2. Click to enlarge.

Now’s the time to start talking about that genre split, because

F.E.A.R. 2

is what I’ll be calling (for the purpose of this column) a corridor shooter, while

Killzone 2

is a war shooter. In July 1998, everyone saw Tom Hanks storm Omaha Beach, and it redefined the popular conception of war action scenes. In November 1999, Electronic Arts published

Medal of Honor

for the PS1, which led to

Call of Duty

in 2003, and I wasn’t paying attention because I was and still am subtly uncomfortable about playing a video game based on real historical violence. But my reviewing duties at

Vice

have brought me into contact with a few WWII shooters, and I’ve noticed they’re built from a different set of assumptions than the shooters I’m used to.

Corridor shooters have science-fiction-y plots and tend to resemble puzzle games. They devote a lot of attention to making sure the player has data on his or her environment—positioning and knowledge of enemy movement is vital. In a corridor shooter, if the player dies, it’s because he made a mistake in judging an enemy’s position. Guns tend to be strongly differentiated—you have the Pistol, the Machine Gun, the Shotgun, the Grenade Launcher, the Weird Energy Weapon, etc. Allies are few; the protagonist is usually on his own. Traditionally, corridor shooters also use health and armor power-ups to let the player character recover from injury. Not every corridor shooter has all these traits, but they tend to clump together.

War shooters resemble movie action scenes. They devote a lot of attention to making sure the player feels like he or she is one of many participants on a vast, chaotic battlefield. AI-controlled allies are many, and in my experience a player character can easily die because of the behavior of AI-controlled allies the player has no influence over, or because of an enemy inhabiting a portion of the map the player can’t easily see. Guns tend to be weakly differentiated—there are

lots

of pistols and machine guns and shotguns, with subtle performance differences, and it’s not immediately obvious which gun is best for any given situation. The games also tend to have recharging health instead of med kits. Up until very recently, almost all dedicated war shooters were historical shooters.

Killzone 2

demonstrates they don’t have to be married to historical settings, but not very well, because

Killzone 2

’s science-fiction-y setting is so obviously drawn from WWII that I can’t think of the enemy Helghast as anything other than Space Nazis.

(

Halo

is a bridge, demonstrating that the two genres aren’t completely separate yet and may never be, if they keep feeding on each other.)

Id software released

Wolfenstein 3D

, the first corridor shooter, in 1992. Electronic Arts released

Medal of Honor

, arguably the ancestor of the war shooter, in 1999. The corridor shooter is almost a decade older as a genre than the war shooter.

No wonder

Killzone 2

receives more praise for being just a solid example of its genre than

F.E.A.R. 2

does! War shooters have had seven fewer years to mature. A game in a young genre needs to innovate much less in order to impress!

Being more impressive isn’t quite the same as being a better game. I prefer

F.E.A.R. 2

to

Killzone 2

because I prefer corridor shooters to war shooters. I like the feeling of environmental mastery and fights that resemble spatial puzzles, and I prefer tight controls to verisimilar ones. I prefer strongly differentiated guns, and I prefer the way

F.E.A.R. 2

lets me carry four different weapons around, unlike

Killzone 2

, which only allows the protagonist two guns, one of which is always a pistol. But being the game I like more isn’t the same as being a better game either.

Leaving aside the issue of graphics,

Killzone 2

shows more promise. Its multiplayer, broken and in need of development, already eclipses the minor-footnote multiplayer of

F.E.A.R. 2

. It’s a shining example of a game genre only now breaking out of the ghetto of a World War II setting and its attendant slavish devotion to historical gun porn. I’m not convinced it deserves higher ratings in an absolute sense, but I know why it’s getting them, and I don’t think the answer is just “Sony’s PR machine.”

Lea has a new show called

The Gaming Hour

. Go watch it now on

Motherboard

on

VBS.TV.

Thanks.

PRINNY: CAN I REALLY BE THE HERO?

Platform: PSP

Publisher: Nippon Ichi

Prinny

is probably the most difficult 2D platformer I’ve played, an effect achieved by its controls, which masterfully accomplish exactly what they set out to do: make you realize, again and again, that you’ve just made a mistake and will be dead in a split second and there’s nothing you can do about it. Nippon Ichi Software, in designing this game, were very

mean

, which is part of the joke because

Prinny

is also probably the

funniest

2D platformer I’ve played.

Prinny

is a spin-off of NIS’s popular

Disgaea

series of isometric turn-based strategic battle games, set in hell (well, “the Netherworld”) and featuring conflicts between an assortment of demons, angels, and Power Ranger parodies with ridiculous motives and mannerisms. Every

Disgaea

game features as one of its minion types the lowly prinnies, best described as stab-happy exploding demon penguins. In

Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?

, you play a series of 1,000 prinnies all tasked by the demon lord Etna to retrieve the ingredients for the fabled Ultra Dessert. Etna makes it clear early on that she doesn’t really want the Ultra Dessert; she just wants to see if the prinnies can get it for her or if they’ll all die trying, because, y’know, that’d be funny.

The key to

Prinny

’s difficulty is this: You cannot steer the protagonist midjump, although you can double-jump to change your trajectory. I would say the controls are awkward, but they’re not, really; every time I die it’s my own damn fault for not planning my jumps correctly. Winning is possible—just unreasonably, hilariously hard. The game takes its own difficulty into account by providing the player with 1,000 lives, though it’s easy to burn through 100 prinnies on a single boss.

I love

Prinny: Can I Really Be the Hero?

, even though for me, the answer is very likely no, I can’t be the hero. It’s too hard. I may never beat it. The only things I

don’t

love about it are 1) no Japanese-language track, and 2) there’s a downloadable extra level that costs five bucks, and I bought it, and now I can’t access it. I bet Nippon Ichi Software thought it’d be funny if you could only access the downloadable content by beating the game.

RESIDENT EVIL 5

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Capcom

Resident Evil 5

is a great game and a worthy follow-up to the nigh-perfect

Resident Evil 4

, but something feels off about it. It feels like one game that was two-thirds finished and then redesigned into another game. Its foundations literally don’t fit the edifice Capcom has constructed on them.

The game is a “survival-action” title, where the player takes the role of Chris Redfield, one of the two protagonists of the first

Resident Evil

game, in a quest to save Africa from evil pharmaceutical companies testing horrible flesh-eating monsters. Chris is accompanied on his quest by his new partner, Sheva Alomar, who can be an AI bot during single-player mode or piloted by another human for multiplayer (split-screen or over Live). Graphics and audio are great, but the gameplay is controversial because it sticks with

Resident Evil

’s traditional movement limit—to shoot, you must bring your equipped weapon to bear, and when your weapon is up you can’t move. Having played a lot of

RE4,

I can say that

RE5

’s control scheme is

fine

. The game is action-horror, and the control scheme makes you feel vulnerable and forces you to plan your movement. The designers could have implemented a more

Gears of War

or

Dead Space

control scheme but didn’t because it wouldn’t have served the style of play they wanted to foster. People who want a more

Dead Space

-y game can play

Dead Space

.

The game’s problem is, it feels like it was designed as a single-player game and then made into a co-op game halfway through. Each episode is set up like an arena, and you can always play through every episode you’ve beaten, keeping your current inventory. On the plus side, this makes grinding for money, ammo, and items convenient… on the minus side, this makes grinding for money, ammo, and items convenient. Survival-horror games are traditionally built around an economy, where you can tell if you’re winning by whether you’re accumulating resources faster than the combat makes you spend them.

RE5

’s structure doesn’t allow for that, so instead it comes across as a kind of shooting gallery in a survival-horror environment. It took me a while to adjust.

Nevertheless, it’s a solid title. I had a lot of fun with it.

STREET FIGHTER IV

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Capcom

Gone is the heyday of the 2D fighter, when kids easily impressed by gore and spectacle crowded around

Mortal Kombat

while people of taste who appreciated depth in their gameplay pursued innumerable

Street Fighter II

remixes or the classic SNK fighters of yore. I was a member of the former group; I liked

Mortal Kombat

for its ninjas and plot. I never really appreciated

Street Fighter

until now—I dismissed it for looking too cartoony—and I am glad Capcom has given me a chance to reconsider.

Street Fighter IV

, despite its shiny, gorgeous 3D graphics, is a classic 2D brawler, built on a solid foundation of

Street Fighter II

gameplay. Playing it feels a lot like being 14.

The special-move inputs are more forgiving than

SFII

, and the pace is a bit slower. I’m convinced the slowed pace is to reduce the impact of lag on the online multiplayer, which is

awesome

—at any point in time, you can tell the game to accept player or ranked matches, then set up a fight with the AI, and you’ll average a quarter of a match against the computer before “A New Challenger Appears!” and you’re plunged into a fight with another human

theoretically

tailored to your skill level. (It doesn’t always work, but what’s a few humiliating losses in the grand scheme of things?) Of the several dozen online matches I’ve fought, I only noticed lag on one of them. It’s not quite like hanging out in the arcade, but if you can’t stand face-to-face with your opponent, at least there are no lines and you’ll never run out of quarters. Plus, the Trial Challenges, while not perfect, taught me the special moves and the basics of the combo system, and I am

hoping

that repeated ass kickings will teach me when and how to use them. It feels like there’s a lot of depth here, and I’m ready to leap in headfirst.

Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 controller isn’t up to it. With the crappy D-pad (or slightly less bad analog stick) for movement, and with heavy punch and kick mapped to the right bumper and trigger, there just isn’t as much precision as needed. I’m planning on grabbing a custom fight pad, but there’s (unsurprisingly) a run on the things right now, so it could be awhile.

I never expected to like

SFIV

. I was not a

Street Fighter

guy. But it’s great. It’s everything I never realized I was missing about 2D fighting games, and it makes me wish I’d chosen

Street Fighter II

over

Mortal Kombat

way back when.