Killzone 2 Breakdown: Part One

And so Digital Foundry kicks off its exhaustive coverage of Killzone 2. We've had the game a few weeks now, and with Indian and Middle Eastern retailers leaking this astonishing release early, we thought we'd better get our arses into gear and unleash the heavy wad we've been building up.

Split into three parts, we'll be releasing high quality videos (streaming and HD) showing excerpts of action from all the single-player campaigns. You'll find frame rate analysis running at all times, and combined with that is on-screen commentary detailing gameplay features, but really concentrating on technical performance, with a range of expert contributions from Alex Goh, a regular on the excellent Beyond3D community and our new friend at Digital Foundry.

This series of features is all about discussing the technical decisions made by Guerilla Games in producing one of the most visually distinctive and exciting looking games ever produced. If you just want to enjoy the game and aren't that interested in the magic behind the illusion, then you'll find terabytes of Killzone 2 info more tailored to your tastes elsewhere.

So onto the videos, with annotations provided by Alex Goh with additional contributions from Richard Leadbetter.

Our mammoth Killzone 2 coverage kicks off with this nine minute dissection of the first campaign... the demo levels, and beyond.

In the second campaign, the gameplay works well in presenting exciting looking environments to you, and has some intriguing challenges from the Helghast. However, if you're looking for new and innovative uses of this amazing technology, Killzone 2 doesn't quite up its game until much later on in the single-player experience.

The third campaign is probably our least favourite set of levels in the game. Killzone 2 does an excellent job of distributing weapons though, always giving you something decent to look forward to, but more than that, the older guns remain viable for Helghast-slaying too, right up to the final tenth campaign. However, by this point we were beginning to wonder whether Killzone 2 would be a game that's technically astonishing but with few gameplay surprises. While the third campaign made us think it would be the former, thankfully the pace is upped considerably a little later on with a far greater variety of tasks to complete.

Coming up in part two: three more campaigns are analysed. Plus, deferred rendering. GTA IV uses a version of it. So does Crackdown, but Killzone 2 takes it to a whole new level. But what is it and how is it applied in this game? Go there now.