As far as how you’ll play, or should I say who you will play will depend on your rank.  Staring off, you’ll be a mere grunt with only two choices of weapon, a standard issue ISA rifle with a laser sight, or the Helgast battle rifle.  The difference between the two is that the ISA rifle has a slower fire rate, but is more accurate. As you progress, you’ll first unlock the shotgun and SMG, which are both great close quarter options, especially the shotgun.  The first class you’ll unlock is the medic class.  For the record, it took me about four hours of online play to unlock the medic, which, to me at least, is too long.  After that is the Engineer and so on and so forth. The classes have unique characteristics, but also have draw backs like a lack of variety of weapons to choose from. For instance, the medic can only pick standard battle rifles.

Before getting into what was good and not so good so far, I do want to point out how full featured the MP system is.  It has true clan support, with the ability to check stats and challenge other clans in game.  You also can play any MP map against bots to practice or learn your way around, which is a huge plus for the hardcore. In my opinion, it is one of the most full featured MP games you can buy right now.  Kudos Guerrilla Games.  It’s about time.

What’s good about it? 32 players with no lag is pretty sweet. The visuals are stunning.  The weapons have a nice heft and kick. Different classes and things to earn keep you wanting to play more.

Furthermore the actual game mode is brilliant.  Five minute segments is perfect and the constantly changing game types keep you on your toes and your head in the game.

Spawn protection.  There are automated turrets to keep dirty rotten spawn campers away from spawn points. Kudos to Guerrilla Games for doing it right.

Finally, it is fun as hell.

What isn’t so good. Voice communication is garbled, has low fidelity or, just doesn’t work half the time. Even with my PS3 head set, there were times where I would be talking and my mic just wasn’t on or wasn’t transmitting.  I dunno if that’s a game issue, but it was somewhat constant for me during my game time.

The Engineer class…  This class allows you to build AS MANY (up to four)  robot turrets as you want. To me, this is totally unbalanced. I’ve been in games where you’ll run into an area where an engineer has built a ton of turrets.  It’s ridiculous.  They’re allowed to turret spam a map and they don’t go away when the engineer dies.  I hope they fix this, because it’s total BS.

The kill draws.  Where you kill an opponent and he kills you at the same time. I’ve played for about 4 plus hours in MP.  I stopped counting after I would get kill draws at least two or three times in a round. There has got to be a way to fix this.

Finally, having to rank up just to be a particular class is just foreign to me.  Not much of a fan of it, but most games don’t allow people with widely disparate ranks to play one another, so it hasn’t been a problem yet.  As a corporal, you won’t be playing with people that have achieved a general rank… Yes those people exist even though the game has only been out for three friggin’ days.  Get a life people. I hate you because I want to be you…

Anyway, the bottom line is that I’m really digging the Killzone 2 multiplayer right now.  Yes, I do have minor gripes, but it pales in comparison to this very well done multiplayer experience.

Check out our full review next week!

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