Surgency Games

The narrative force of the game, is, if taken at face value, absolutely ridiculous. Little sense or logic is to be found here, either in the dialogue or plotting. There is a great forward momentum at play; it is always clear where you’re going and why you’re going there. The single slices of plot, taken on their own, are easy to understand. Easy to follow. When pieced together to form something bigger, problems begin to arise. I think this speaks mostly to the progression system, and it’s possible some liberties were taken with the narrative, to make the act of simply playing the game, come to the forefront. I can accept this.

The acting, an integral part of telling any character-based story, is difficult to take seriously. Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar, the protagonists, speak with almost no middle inflection. Everything they say is either whispered or shouted. This is the best the game has to offer. One villain speaks with a high-pitched, Brooklyn accent, that is more grating than frightening. Another gains and loses a vaguely British accent, depending on the scene, possibly on the time of day. Any drama to be found within the story and within the cutscenes of the game is completely undermined by the voice acting. The heroes are ciphers of heroic action with no soul; the villains are in no way threatening.

Bad acting has always been a “choice” that the Resident Evil franchise employs. It speaks to the B-Movie feel. But what’s on display here (and in past games) is supposed to be taken seriously. This is where the horror of these games comes from. The deadly serious nature of the events and the horrible situations the characters are put into. When the first Resident Evil was released, finding good voice talent to work in the field was difficult, if not outright impossible. Today though, it’s easy. Today, one of the most successful franchises of the last ten years should be able to afford and hire the best possible talent to voice their characters. When they don’t, as evidenced here, it destroys the credibility of the story, it devalues the drama and it hurts the overall experience.

Another holdover from past games is the inability to move and shoot at the time. In title’s past, this gameplay restriction made sense. The controllers were limited. The technology was limited. Resident Evil 5 is built on some of the best technology I’ve ever seen in a video game and it can be played on what I consider to be the two best controllers ever made by the industry. The inability to shoot and move at the same time makes no sense, from any perspective.

Within the game, logically, this makes no sense. Chris Redfield is a big badass. He’s been sent halfway around the world as an agent of a powerful government, and the guy doesn’t know how to shoot and walk at the same time? Outside the game, from a more meta perspective, it limits player choice. There is only one way to engage enemies, and that way is stop moving, plant your feet and ready your weapon and fire. Outside of the fact that the timing of all these animations is way too long and drawn out, it simply makes for boring play. There is little choice except where to run and stand your ground. It makes it difficult to prioritize targets and it makes it frustrating to deal with a large number of enemies in a 3D space.

It was a choice on the part of the developer. It was a bad choice. It in no way adds to the horror of the game; it in no way adds to the complete feeling of helplessness the franchise has always been so good at presenting. Dead Space lets you move and shoot at the time; it’s one of the scariest games I’ve ever played. Let it be said again, it was a bad choice.

But… It is executed extremely well. The controls are tight (if a bit heavy) and every time you fire a weapon in the game, it feels dangerous. It has crunch and weight and it is more satisfying than 90% of the other games out there. If you can get past the controls, if you can meet them half way, the game can be a blast to play.

The progression is more arcade than narrative. Even before you’ve finished the game the first time, you can go back and replay any level, in any order, with any accrued money, items and weapons you may have found. In fact, your inventory is always present; find something in the game, you will have access to it for the rest of the time you play, regardless of the level or the mode. I like this progression quite a bit. It lends itself well to the dual economy in the game. You use money to buy weapons and items, which is earned through exploration and killing zombies. You use points to unlock bonus content, which are earned through finishing levels or completing challenges in the other game modes.

The game ensures that you’ll always have something new to buy or work your way towards, and this extends out beyond the first time you play through the game. The experience is just about the right length for a playthrough, although I felt it went on a bit too long towards the end. With all of the unlockable content and bonus modes to play (including online co-op), the game can last you a very long time, especially if you’re a top end gamer that loves to explore and uncover every nook and cranny the game has to offer.

Now for the small things I mentioned earlier. On their own, they detract little from the game. Added together, they started to compound and overshadow my enjoyment. I believe that the more you’re able to look past these faults (if you even consider them faults) the more likely you’d be to enjoy the game. As a point of reference, I was able to get over them, and when all is said and done, found myself pleasantly entertained.

The partner AI for Sheva is, at times really good, and at times awful. It doesn’t necessarily impact the game too much, but on multiple occasions, the AI got itself killed, which, in essence, counts a death and forces you to restart at the last checkpoints. The enemy AI isn’t much better. Yes, I know, they are zombies. But they never feel right. It feels like you’re fighting against a simulation of zombies. Resident Evil games have never had this problem before, I wonder what happened.

While the checkpoints are good, they are not saved between play sessions. What this means is that you must finish a level before turning off the game, or be forced to start from the beginning when you come back. Any money and items found are kept, but having to play a level in one sitting can sometimes be difficult, especially considering some chapters can take upwards of an hour to complete.

Some weapons are obviously better than others. Again, because you can’t move and shoot, the differentiation of a lot of weapons goes out the window. Why would you ever want to use the lesser machine gun once you have a better version. In games like Call of Duty and Gears of War and Killzone 2, every gun has its advantages and drawbacks. The progression of weapons in Resident Evil 5 didn’t feel as robust.

The bosses are, with one shining exception, boring. They are altogether too easy, but at the same time too long. You can figure out how to kill a boss quickly (which is good) but then to actually defeat, you often have to repeat the same task far too many times. Also, the bosses are visually unremarkable. Especially towards the end of the game, as they all start to look like rejects from a Final Fantasy tentacle porn.

Later in the game, a basic cover system is introduced. It is, for lack of a better word, wonky. It’s too hard to get in and out of cover, and only one character can take a piece of cover at once. This is Resident Evil, and cover shouldn’t matter for the most part, but some later levels really require it to be used, which only leads to frustration.

The game isn’t very scary. Resident Evil 4 had a palpable sense of impending dread. It was never really clear what was going to happen next, and the gameplay twisted in on itself so often, there was a great sense of relief in between levels, when you’d just get a minute to take a breath. This is not the case in Resident Evil 5. In fact, the game tends more towards action than survival-horror, although scarcity of ammunition (a mechanic that I say defines the genre) is present and forces a lot of tactical decisions as you try to outfit yourself in between levels.

The inventory system is good while standing still, but cumbersome to use while fighting enemies. I guess that might be the point. Whatever. It isn’t fun to struggle with an inventory while fighting hordes of zombies, something that happens quite often.

Resident Evil 5 is a good game. It has high production values, fun (if frustrating) core combat mechanics and a terrible narrative that really has no place in this franchise. Looking past its faults and minor inconsistencies, there’s good entertainment to be had. It add co-op and online play to the mix, which is nice to see and a big step forward for the future of the survival-horror genre.  As much as Resident Evil 4 was a “back to the drawing board” revitalization, I think it’s already time to, once again, figure out the franchise. Because while a shitty storyline and terrible controls might have been acceptable this time, the franchise deserves better. The fans deserve better.

At the beginning of this year, Nintendo filed a patent for a game mechanic that would allow the player to relinquish control of their character over to the game. This would allow the user to bypass difficult sections of the game after becoming stuck or unsure of where to go next. In essence, this allows the player to see the entire experience the game has to offer, to “get their money’s worth” and not risk running into frustration or a shelf level event.

In my time working within the industry, I had heard this idea pitched numerous times by numerous companies, going back as far as three or four years ago; just around the time everyone realized games were no longer just for the hardcore. This idea, at the time, was reviled. It was laughed out of the room, so to speak. That Nintendo has taken the reigns of this idea most recently, only serves to highlight the company’s mad dash to get as far away from the core video game consumer as possible.

Having the ability to suddenly stop playing a game, in order to progress forward, in order to bypass challenge, is the first step in undermining the fundamentals of what it means to be a game. Imagine chess. Imagine, during a game of chess, you could simply stop playing and let a grand master computer simulation decide your next move. The game would be meaningless. Every move you made would be more worthless than the last. You would not be learning how to play chess. The mechanics that form the core of what we (as Man) find to be so intrinsically satisfying in playing games would simply disappear.

There is a difference between chess and Mario, granted. There’s also a difference between challenge and difficulty. What Nintendo aims to do, if this patent does go through and they do start using at the core of their games, is to excise challenge. Difficulty leads to frustration and shelf level events. Challenge leads to good game design. Which one should we really be trying to get rid of in gaming?

Humans learn from play. Even the youngest of children play games; games they have created within their own mind as they go about their daily routines. As we age, games are an integral part to our learning experiences. Through challenges and obstacles, we learn how to succeed. Games teach us logic, reasoning, decision-making and whole list of other advanced abilities that have a considerable worth in the real world. Video games are slowly becoming a part of culture, taking over the traditional board game night the average family enjoys.  Interactive games will become the best method of play for humans within the next one hundred years. Maybe sooner.

Removing challenge from games is the death of the medium. As soon as games begin to coddle and hold hands and make it so that nothing you do in the game has consequence, the act of play becomes meaningless.

I am all for players getting to the end of the games they buy. Right now, the industry competes, on a daily basis, with some of the best creative culture the world has ever known. Movies, music and books can be delivered instantaneously. Social networking sites have taken over the Internet. Every industry associated with pop culture right now is figuring out the best possible ways to separate consumers from their disposable income.

Games have to be able to compete. Someone who buys a game wants to get their money’s worth. They don’t want to be cheated out of an ending they deserve and they don’t want to be endlessly frustrated. They want to have fun. They want to be entertained.

Back to where we started: the future of games can be found (although briefly, and not fully explored) in Dead Space and Fable 2. Both games offer the player a built-in GPS system, displayed within the game world, which points them to their next objective. In Dead Space, the GPS was optional; you pushed a button, it appeared as a line drawn along the ground, and it disappeared a few seconds later. In Fable, it was always present. You could turn it off in the menu, but that defeats the purpose of the mechanic. I prefer how Dead Space handled it; Fable 2 sold a lot more copies.

Games like GTA have been using GPS systems for years. What I like about Dead Space is that it is built into the fiction. There is no abstract UI element in the corner of the screen. If you want to use it, you can; if you don’t, then don’t. This is similar to the idea Nintendo has: it is an opt-in, user-based decision to activate the mechanic.

Dead Space and Fable both realized that the fun and challenge in the game was not in navigating from Point A to Point B.  It was in the journey. It was in the excitement of the worlds. It was in surviving to get from Point A to Point B. Dead Space is the first survival horror game I can remember playing where I never once was at a loss of where to go, or what to do. I finished the game. Same with Fable 2.

The GPS in Dead Space came from necessity. The rooms in the space ship on which the game takes place all look very similar to one another. I imagine, at one point, play testers got lost, frustrated and eventually gave up on the game. I bet some low-level designer offered the suggestion of a built-in GPS system. I bet he was laughed at. I bet everyone told him the game wouldn’t be difficult to play if the user always knew where to go next.

I bet, when the GPS was finally implemented, everyone looked at that kid like the genius that he was. Either that, or the guys who made Dead Space are just plain smart, and knew going into the game, that challenge comes mastering mechanics and learning how to become better at the game. Difficulty comes from everything else.

The idea of a built-in “path” in every game is ridiculous on the face of it. This is but a stepping stone. Helping players understand what to do next, where to go and how to do it is what “the path” represents.

In Call of Duty 4 most friendly characters can be seen running in the direction of the player’s next objective, or shooting in the general vicinity of the player’s largest threat. This is a path of sorts.

In Mario Galaxy, the player mostly needs to run forward. The camera always points towards your next objective, or the level design is so smart, the largest, brightest piece of the environment is where you need to head next.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is both a challenging game (in that the best way to be successful is to learn the fighting mechanics and make tactical choices, albeit very quickly, as to how to overcome the situation at hand) and a difficult game (because objectives are never clear, the camera makes it hard to perform combo moves and certain enemies do not have their weaknesses explained until after they kill you).

The Path in Dead Space can teach us a lot. Make the game about what the game is about. Find the challenge in mechanics, not in the abstraction or obfuscation of rules, goals or limitations. Find challenge in teaching the user how to play and in assigning them tasks that require logical, progressive thought. Decrease challenge through adaptive AI, puzzle hints, subtle suggestion towards success, followed by obvious suggestions toward success.

Never remove the controller from the player’s hands. If you do, they will never learn. Games can be as easy we want them to be or as challenging as we want them to be. But never, ever, take the controller from the player’s hands.

Nintendo, in the last two years, has been wildly successful. They seem to be smart enough to know exactly what the public wants or smooth enough to tell the public what it wants. But this patent is ridiculous on the face of it. It makes games into not-games. Into nothing more than interactive movies. The type of experience where nothing is learned, where little fun is to be had and difficult choices are frowned upon.

Look at The Path instead. It has real answers.

For me it is. I’m all about first impressions. Games that start good and get progressively worse hold much more interest for me in both my head and my heart than games that start bad and get progressively better. I may have a short attention span, but if you can’t entertain me within a small amount of time, honestly, I have better things to do. There are books to read, shows to watch and, most importantly, other games to play.

X-Blades opens with a cutscene that I didn’t hate: Ayumi, a scrappy, obnoxiously over-sexualized anime girl walks through some generic ruins and talks about how she’s looking for some long lost relic that’s meant to contain the power of a god. I’m not a fan of exposition and this intro is aggressively interested in getting to the game as quick as possible without explaining too much. Job well done. Outside of the annoying character and the voice acting, this set-up works pretty well.

The first room in the game where you fight some enemies is rather bland. The enemies are… Also bland. And also annoying. If they stand near you, they hurt you. If their attacks were actually animated, I missed it. If you’re taking damage, you can’t attack. So you jump out of the group, turn back to the enemies, get in a few more hits, then you’re surrounded again and you have to jump out of the group to get your bearings and be able to attack again.

Oddly, you have a hit counter tracking the number of consecutive hits you get in an attack sequence. The higher you check up the number, the more SOULS you’ll get after the fight is over. The more SOULS you get, the more crap you can unlock for your anime girl. Abilities like FIREBALL, EARTHQUAKE and other such shit is available right from the start. Spend some SOULS, buy an ability, assign it to a face button in a minimalist menu that looks like it should be placeholder and you’ll be good to go.

The game taught me, by way of tutorial text that was too small to read from the comfort of couch, to buy EARTHQUAKE. Then, when I build up RAGE by attacking enemies I can cast EARTHQUAKE in a slow-motion frenzy of half-made particle effects. Every enemy I fought in the game – save the boss – could be killed with a single EARTHQUAKE. I renamed the ability (and the Y Button which I had assigned it to) the “I Win” skill. I continued to collect SOULS but didn’t spend them. What was the point. I cast EARTHQUAKE and I won.

But then, the rub. I come to a hallway filled with ICE ELEMENTALS who can only be killed by FIREBALLS. Ah ha! The game was forcing me to buy new abilities to fight specific types of enemies. That’s interesting. I guess. Not as interesting as if each ability had a strength and weakness in its use and that I (the player, the gamer, the interactor) got to choose what to use based off of the situation. But still. Two points for trying, right?

So, I assign my FIREBALL to the B Button; a face button, the button I use by pressing it with my right thumb. And I cast my first FIREBALL and the ICE ELEMENTAL dies. I do this three more times. Three more ICE ELEMENTALS die. But now, it appears I’m out of RAGE and when I press the B Button, Ayumi glows, looks like she’s charging up some sort of “bitchin’-awesome” attack and then does nothing. I press the B Button again and she casts a FIREBALL but it doesn’t hit the ICE ELEMENTAL.

Try again.

So I do. And again I fail. And again. And again. I was stuck in this hall with no way to build my RAGE outside of holding the B Button, which I think is what I’m supposed to do, but not quite sure because the game never told me. So then I try to lock-on to the ICE ELEMENTAL, but this can only be done by aligning the center of the camera up with the enemy and as soon as it moves, I’m not targeting it anymore. So in order to do what I need to do, I need to manipulate the right analogue stick and the B Button… Simultaneously! Something I have yet to figure out to do.

Perhaps this is a personal failing.

X-Blades has a cool central character with an annoying voice. (If you’re in to over-sexed, perhaps-not-yet-eighteen anime characters.) The character is obviously lovingly crafted and executed at a high level of detail that has the potential to excite and engage a very large segment of gamers.

It seems like once the character was made, nothing else mattered. The sword-play is too fast and has no heft to it. The gun-play is simply a rip-off of Devil May Cry (not inherently a bad thing) but much slower and much less cool to watch (definitely a bad thing). The enemy and level design is bland and is nowhere near as imaginative as the main character and the core interactions with the title, the way you fight and move and explore and bypass challenges, are poorly thought out and in no way aligned with the expectations of the genre.

There were better hack-and-slash games last generation. Rygar. Devil May Cry. God of War.

There’s too much missing here. The entertainment value will be low for anyone who has picked up an XBOX 360 or PlayStation 3 game in the last three years. The artistry is focused too much on one character and not enough on a world or enemies that are interesting and interactive.

I played X-Blades for thirty minutes on the XBOX 360 right after lunch.

Is this a fair assessment? Perhaps not. But the game offers little proof that it is deserving of more.

Post Script: All proper nouns from the game (save Ayumi) have been capitalized here for the best possible reading experience. When reading these words, imagine a large bodybuilder, standing right over your shoulder, shouting things such as EARTHQUAKE and SOULS. That doesn’t happen in the game, but it could potentially make it more exciting.

One could argue that games within certain genres, are, by nature, complicated, and always require a tutorial that goes “back to the basics” because the basics are complicated on purpose. The RTS genre is one such exception. I’m not saying we should get rid of “how-to” tutorials in gaming, but rather that the how needs to be supported by the why, and when game tutorials miss this component, you can run the risk of frustrating and alienating a large section of your player base, mostly those who are not familiar with the genre.

Two examples have come up recently: MLB 09 The Show and Street Fighter IV. I don’t mean to pick on these titles exclusively (as I have a great fondness for both of them) but they are games I am currently playing, and both games help showcase the point.

In MLB, there are a number of tutorials and training sessions the player has access to, teaching them nearly every aspect of the game of baseball. Or rather, teaching them how to perform every action within the game of baseball by using their PS3 controller. Context for these actions, instructions as to why one pitch is better than another within a certain situation, or why you should always try to steal a base when the count is 3-2 or why it’s better to try and hit a sacrifice fly with one out and one man on, is never made clear.

Unless you know the game of baseball, know its strategies intimately, you’ll never be able learn through the game, because it simply isn’t present in the game. You need to go outside of the game and learn how the game is played, only so that you can come back and successfully play an abstraction of the game. Luckily, MLB has a number of difficulty sliders and settings that can be tweaked and adjusted to the player’s liking, which gives users who have never played baseball before a fighting chance against the AI. The problem is, because the game is lacking in proper instruction (and by this I mean the why) players will never grow into the higher levels of difficulty, unless they attempt to learn outside of the game. To me, this is flawed design.

I happen to know quite a lot about the game baseball, so, for me, MLB holds much interest. But it makes me think. It makes me think about all the sports I don’t know how to play in real life, whose strategies I don’t understand. Football. Basketball. Hockey. Through my gaming career, I’ve found titles in nearly every genre that I can play and enjoy. Except football games, basketball games, and hockey games. I don’t know why one play is better than any another in Madden. I always choose one at random from the playbook. Often, at anything other than the lowest difficulty, I am crushed.

Is it really so hard to include basic strategy within these games? A simple tutorial that explains why it’s better to execute a running play instead of a passing play? A tutorial that offers an explanation as to why the defensive line is moving around, what that signifies and how best to counter it? Why should I call an audible? Why should I do anything?

The simulation genre would seem to have it the worst. Aspects of real life, represented in video game form, which we are not intimately familiar with, can be confusing when presented without change or interpretation within the confines of a video game. In shooters, you inherently understand why getting shot is bad; you inherently understand that shooting someone in the head is better for your survival than shooting someone in the legs. In simulation racing, it probably doesn’t need to be explained why you brake when you enter into a corner, but it might help to know why you shouldn’t try to steer the car at the same you press the brake.

In Street Fighter IV, the basics of the game are simple. Press a button, watch your guy on screen do something. The next layer takes a bit of work. You might learn that if you make quarter-circle turn and press a punch button, Ryu will throw a fireball across the screen. You can look at a “character sheet” from the pause menu and learn (by memorization) all of Ryu’s special attacks. You might have to pause the game every few minutes for a refresher course. Eventually, you know what Ryu can do. You’ve learned it all (by rote memorization; not the best, but still…) and you’re ready to play.

You begin a match on the Medium difficulty setting. You get your ass kicked.

If you’re new to the Street Fighter franchise, you’ve hit a wall that will be difficult to bypass. You’ll be stuck playing on the most basic difficulty level against AI that makes the game not fun in the other direction.

I’ve personally always loved the Street Fighter series. I admire its artistry and respect how much of an influence it had on modern fighting games and the video game industry as a whole. But the truth is I suck at Street Fighter, always have, likely always will. This fine tradition continues with Street Fighter IV. Mainly because, the game, while almost forceful in teaching me how to play the game (near endless challenge modes, bright, easy to read moves lists, etc.) it never teaches me why, at any given moment, one move is better than another.

Perhaps some of the fun in the game is learning this on your own. OK, I buy that. But there are still basic Street Fighter tenets that I obviously don’t understand. Countering, attack timing, movement speeds and animation priority. How should I learn about these mechanics? How can I compete with players who have been at this series for nearly fifteen years? I’m not talking about skill here; I imagine I couldn’t compete on that level anyway. I’m talking about explaining fundamental concepts behind the game in a way that teaches me why one fireball is preferred over another, depending on the distance of my opponent. This seems like valuable stuff to know. I took the next-gen pastiche of Street Fighter IV to mean I might finally be able to learn all of this stuff. I thought the game would finally want to teach me the reasoning behind the combat.

The why is important. To me, it’s more important than the how. Games executing on a good tutorial that teach both concepts are already light-years ahead of the competition.  As an example, take the tutorial level from Call of Duty 4. In it, you are taught how to fire a gun, how to look down its sights, how to reload, how to snap to a target, and on and on. After all of this, you are taught you have a pistol. You are taught how to fire it. You are taught that it is nowhere near as powerful as your main weapon.

A question pops into your head: Why would you ever want to use the pistol instead of your main weapon?

The game answers this question almost immediately: Switching to the pistol will always be faster than reloading your main weapon.

This mechanic is great design, allowing for a more robust interplay between weapons. And it is explained to the player why they would want to use their pistol and in what situation it might be better to use the pistol.

I have, as far as I can remember, never killed more enemies with a pistol, than in Call of Duty 4.

How to compare a racing game to a shooter? How to compare arcade sports to simulation sports? For that matter, how to compare an RPG developed in the West to an RPG developed in Japan?

I certainly feel that there are games that come out every year whose importance to the genre could be easily quantified. Or the industry in general. Or pop-culture broadly.

Burnout Paradise is the type of game I would have no qualms about taking to a desert island. I’ve played it numerous times on both the XBOX and the PS3. I’ve made sure to download every new update and game-changing add-on the day of release. It’s on my (non-numbered) list of favorite games from last year. Besides World of Warcraft, I spent more time playing Burnout last year than any other game.

As a note, to signify the importance of this statement, let me just say the average time I spend playing a game is usually ten hours. The game clock on my Burnout Paradise save currently reads ninety-six hours.

Burnout Paradise is a very important game to the racing genre. And to console games in general. And to online functionality broadly. The game is fun and easy to play; it offers what I would consider to be an extreme emphasis on pick-up-and-play mechanics. Even when you crash your car, the event is presented in such a way so that you don’t feel bad. In fact, you feel pumped; you feel ready to go. You feel excited to keep racing, but at the same time, you’re excited to see the next crash.

Failing in racing games has never been fun before Burnout.

The game is immensely entertaining and offers the exact type of experience that its log line promises: fast cars, cool locales and awesome crashes. And most importantly, it’s a racing game not built around menus or ladder matches or abstraction. Everything you do, you do in the game. Drive up to an intersection, jam on the gas and brake simultaneously and you’re now racing in an event. Drive through a paint shop to change the color of your car. Crash into AI racers to add their ride to your garage.

Of course, this is all built around a very specific, very designed progression that is easy to see when you look for it. But taking the game at face value, all the stupid things that have made racing games of the past not quite games have all been ditched in Burnout. Play the game how you want to, in the order that you want to. Completionists will eventually see everything anyway. Casual gamers (the majority of the audience) will only see what they want to see. They will get out of the game exactly what they want, no more, no less.

As a piece of entertainment, Burnout Paradise is near perfect. Navigation is tricky if you don’t learn the roadways, and learning the roadways is a matter of trial and error, something that is never quite fun. The ability to restart a race you’re losing has only been added to the game recently, more than a year after the game was originally released. There was much complaining, and some justifiable reasons from the developer for doing so, but again, not being able to restart a race you’re about to lose isn’t ever fun.

These are niggling details. Worth little when compared to the whole.

Burnout Paradise sings as a piece of exciting, spectacular, entertainment. It jumps over most every other racing game out there by simply ensuring that every single second of the game is fun and engaging. Even if you’re frustrated with the game, the cars are brutally fast and they control like a dream. Just driving around for the hell of it has never been better in the genre. There are numerous details and hidden gems to find in the game. Most important though, it can be played and enjoyed by casual players, as well as hardcore racing fanatics.

The title, developed by Guerilla Games, gets a lot of things right. Really right. The look of the world – dirty, lived in and, at times, oddly beautiful – recalls early James Cameron sci-fi epics. It all feels real and looks real, even though it is about as far from our own conceptual reality as you can get before aliens and ogres and hobbits start making appearances. If this is not our world (which it isn’t) it’s close enough that we inherently understand the parallels between the game and ourselves. We get what they’re going for.

Characters move exceptionally well, and it’s these little details that really sell the world and sell the fiction as believable. What’s on display here is a lot more satisfying – visually, instinctually – than in other titles within a similar narrative genre. Bullets kick up dirt, explosions have a weight to them you don’t normally see and the lighting always feels just right. I have trouble remembering a single moment in the game where I turned a corner and found myself thinking “That doesn’t look right…”

Thrills are to be found here. There are moments of extreme action and amazing forward momentum where the game truly shines. Where everything clicks and you start moving through the levels at an interesting pace and you’re making choices on the fly as to what to do next and where to go and what enemies need to be taken out first because they are the most threatening to your continued existence. When the game works, it is smooth and easy and consumable and, most importantly, fun. Engaging. Worthwhile.

The majority of the time, the game does not flow this easily. You get stuck on a collision, like one of you're fumbling teammates. You’re shot through an object that – logically – you should not be able to get shot through. You’re sidekick is killed (through no fault of your own) and you must backtrack to revive him. You shoot through a dozen guys, spinning and shooting and somehow perservering against all odds; and then, from somewhere else, a badguy you can't see gets one lucky shot, you’re killed and the moment that started out at satisfying, becomes frustrating.

Kinks, runs and holes in the fabric of the game become apparent quickly. Holding the L2 button can be used to press up against cover, and then using the analogue stick, you are able to pop out, fire on some enemies and then duck back down into cover. A great concept. In fact, in my opinion, a mandatory system for most every shooter released after Gears of War. Unfortunately, you have to hold the button down to stay in cover. I like cover. I love cover. I want to use cover when it is available to me. But to hold down the L2 button on the PS3 controller for anything longer than thirty seconds is an exercise in arthritis. There is no option to change this feature. You’re either holding down the L2 button, or you’re not in cover.

This leads to some other problems. You lose a finger to interact with the game while in cover. You are unable to use cover and zoom in or out with a sniper at the same time. If you want to duck instead of snapping to cover, you must not be anywhere near an environmental object, otherwise you'll take cover instead, which may not be helpful at that moment in time. The need for this (to duck without taking cover) rarely comes up, though I died more than half a dozen times throughout the campaign because of this. A death that is not my fault, and can obviously be blamed on the game undermines the integrity of the experience.

The campaign follows the exploits of a single squad of characters during their invasion of another world. I’m not up on my Killzone lore, so if I’ve left out any details, I apologize. The analogies between the game and the current Iraq conflict are easy to spot, but the game has little, if anything, important to say about war, the effects of war or the underlying psychological effects war can have on individuals. The game ends with the realization that war never ends and that the characters who thought they were fighting for something quickly understand they fight for no other reason than just because.

This “theme” is developed and presented within a single cutscene at the end of the game, with almost no set-up or character development throughout the piece to offer glimpses or foreshadowing of what is to come. The end feels like a final bit of irony for the sake of irony, doing little to offer a compelling or cathartic release to the game. I guess this is to be expected. The game starts at climax (the war of the future presented viscerally and intensely) and continues forward towards ever-increasing, ever-expanding climaxes. There is no way the game could possibly provide anything other than anti-climax at the end.

The shooting in the game is fun, especially in a level where you equip a lightning-gun that can cause serious damage to dozens of enemies simultaneously. The world looks great and the details really shine. But as an experience, the single-player campaign is hollow. It has no narrative resonance, and shallow, uninteresting characters that like to curse a lot and speak only in jingoistic turns of phrase. There are a number of potholes in the moment-to-moment gameplay that, depending on how many you run into, can severely impact your impressions and overall satisfaction with the title.

Killzone 2 is entertaining as a distraction, frustrating in large doses and infuriating when thought about for an extended period of time. Even as I write this, my ire for the game I experienced grows.