One pre-rendered trailer, 135 developers, 40 million dollars, a typhoon of internet abuse later and Guerrilla have finally done it - they've proven to the world that Killzone on PlayStation 3 not only exists in playable form, but looks just as good as the 'target footage' shown at E3 2005. At an exclusive unveiling in Los Angeles, we were treated to a live 30-minute demo of the game in action, with director Mathijs De Jonge and producer Steven Ter Heide playing a level in real-time, with a Sixaxis, on PS3.
 
The rest, as they say, is history. From the instantly gripping descent on the Vektan dropship - tinged with the fear that somehow this might still be all pre-rendered footage - to the frenzied landing and shiver-of-relief comprehension that, no, this is real, as bullets rain in with terrifying intensity; to the rifle's jaw-dropping HDR and zoom effects, to the dazzling rain-lashed rooftop where we're unnaturally thrilled at the sight of windswept wires: we were gripped in our seats, absolutely, honestly, astonished - and, well, more than a bit relieved. The E3 2005 trailer was a lie, but PS3's power, and potential, is faith re-affirmingly real.
 
As we shuffle out of the theatre, we find ourselves drawn to Sony Worldwide software boss, Phil Harrison, and - despite our default inclination to cynicism and crap British reserve - find ourselves garbling, "That was incredible, seriously," leaving Phil standing there like a proud dad, softly - and, we think earnestly - whispering "Thanks". Outside the demo theatre - think the trailer looks good on a PC monitor? Wait until you see it on a 15-foot projector screen in 7.1 Dolby Surround - we're dismayed to hear one or two journalists muttering indifferently or lamenting the lack of 'set-pieces'. So much so, we start poking one magazine editor in the chest and bark "If you don't like games, stop writing about them," before a colleague tells us to calm down.  
 
And we know we've gone a little bit mad. But it doesn't really matter. Because if a game, however briefly, makes you think that the medium - the passion to which you dedicate a large part of your life - is capable of experiences, of new worlds, of visuals you never thought possible, then surely it's worth dropping the cruddy natural cynicism and just revelling in the frontier of possibility. Inner child - give me five.
 
Highlights? Watch it. In fact, watch Gundam: Target in Sight first, then Killzone 2. Are they really running on the same machine? The demo begins in the realistic, intricately-rendered clouds high above Helghan, the home planet of the evil Helghast army. You and your squad, a troop of ISA Special Forces soldiers called The Legion, are flying towards the planet's surface on the back of a Vektan cruiser. The scene is almost identical to the one shown in the 2005 trailer and it looks absolutely incredible. The soldiers are particularly impressive, with detailed clothing textures and expressive facial animations. You can actually see them psyche themselves up for the battle ahead and, according to the developers, a single character model has the same amount of polygons as a level in the first Killzone.
 
 
Calm before the storm
But of course, this being a war game, the peace doesn't last. Suddenly one of the cruisers flying alongside you is struck by a lightning bolt and explodes, evaporating the soldiers on board. Your squad springs to life and the clouds below you part to reveal the Helghan capital city of Pyrrhus and its war-torn streets. It's an imposing sprawl of burned-out buildings, storm clouds, explosions and smoke stretching endlessly into the distance. And while all of this is happening, your team prime their weapons and prepare to land. It's like Saving Private Ryan meets Blade Runner.
 
When your cruiser hits terra firma the level begins proper. The transition is seamless and the game looks just as good from a first-person perspective as it does in the intro. The Legion charge into battle, running down a wide road scattered with debris, dodging gunfire from entrenched Helghast troops. A vehicle explodes and its driver spills out engulfed in flames and lightning bolts tear through the sky. It's utterly chaotic, and the game's 7.1 surround sound support makes it overwhelming not only for your eyes, but your ears as well.
 
 
Less haste, more speed
It's here that we begin to understand how Killzone 2 works. The player cautiously makes his way up the street, taking cover behind anything, slowly but surely making his way towards a commander up ahead to receive his orders. He safely makes it behind a barricade and 'objective completed' flashes at the top of the screen, confirming that this is in-game, real-time, and with zero lull in intensity when you're being given orders by lavishly animated comrades. You find the commander crouched over a map. He orders you to push ahead and take out an anti-aircraft gun called an 'Arc Tower' that's blasting ISA cruisers out of the air before they have a chance to land. It's familiar first-person shooter fare, but the atmosphere and visuals make it a lot more interesting than another gloomy trudge through wartime Normandy.
 
Cover me
You break your cover and continue, only to be immediately confronted by a Helghast hopping over a wall. The animation is scarily realistic; with motion-captured movements so natural, you almost can't believe he can be shot. But, as dazzling as it is, you have to ventilate the masked swine with your M-82 assault rifle. Zooming through the rifle's emerald-tinged sights, the depth of field effects are amazing. Everything around the reticule blurs and it mimics the behaviour of the human eyeball remarkably well. Fire the rifle and the muzzle flash lights up the walls around you, sending the Helghast tumbling backwards in a macabre dance of death, blood exploding from his chest. It's some of the most vivid and intense FPS action we've ever seen. From what we've seen, there are dozens of different Helghast types, ranging from the familiar black-helmeted variety to enormous heavy duty chaingun-toting guys whose hefty armour seems impossible to penetrate.
 
 
The next level
It's instantly clear how different Killzone 2 is from most other first-person shooters. Not in terms of concept or gameplay, but in that it's so robust and dynamic. Surfaces shatter and crumble when your bullets hit them, characters move realistically through the environment with weighty animations and the levels are densely packed with detail and spot effects like power lines wobbling in the wind. While a lot of the set-pieces in Resistance and Call Of Duty 3 were amazing, it felt like more like you were a spectator rather than actually taking part. Killzone 2 changes all of this.
 
Guerrilla aren't focusing entirely on flashy visuals - they've also released details about Killzone 2's story. Not only will heavy weapons expert Rico Velasquez be returning, but special ops lady Lugar and Evelyn from Killzone: Liberation also show their faces. The plot focuses on the ISA taking the battle to the Helghast's front door after weakening them in the first game. You could also hear Scolar Visari's rousing speech from the first Killzone's intro movie blaring through speakers on the streets. He's the Helghast's evil dictator and we'd be very surprised if he doesn't return to cause us more bother in KZ2.
 
The beady-eyed Helghast are more inventive than the ISA could've anticipated. Somehow, they've managed to harness Helghan's atmosphere and, amazingly, use it as a weapon against invaders. Those Arc Towers we mentioned earlier play a key role. They use them to, we think, pull storm clouds from the sky, absorb their power and use the collected lightning energy like a laser beam. At the end of the demo we watched the developers destroy one of the towers. First, they fought their way through lines of Helghast to reach it, again showcasing the fluid animation and muzzle flash effects. When they reach the Arc Tower they push a button to open hatches on its side. This exposes a glowing red core, which is fired upon resulting in the tower's epic, fiery destruction. And then nothing. The demo... ends.
 
 
Setting the standard
Killzone 2 was almost everything we'd hoped for, and miles ahead of what we secretly feared - not bad, for a relatively tame third level. The primary emotion, relief, was soon replaced with a tingling delight that Sony had lived up to the standards of that E3 2005 trailer. In 30 minutes, Sony transformed the perception of PS3 from an overpriced extravagance populated by me-too Xbox 360 ports, one of the most exciting, important consoles in the world. It doesn't have any gimmicks - time travel, performance-enhancing drugs, or gravity guns. Its 'novelty' is good looks, intensity, and how it single-handedly shames absolutely almost everything rival consoles had to offer. That said, it's the second time a Killzone 2 trailer has ruined E3 - this time for making almost every other game look so terrifyingly ordinary.

When they restart the game, Mathijs walks us through Sev's new cover-based combat techniques. Now, players can approach cover and press one of the right shoulder buttons to latch onto the object. From here Sev can blindly fire by hitting the shoot button, pop out with a press of the joystick and break off the defensive maneuver with another button tap. The enemies and NPCs will use the same techniques, which brings up a good point -- the opposing forces aren't dumb in Killzone 2.
 
If a Helghastians is pressed up against a concrete pillar or wooden crate and you've punched enough holes in the obstacle to make it useless, don't expect the bad guy to sit there and take it. These guys will react and move in tactical, group dynamics.

After the detailed breakdown was over, Mathijs surrendered the controller to IGN. This game plays well. From the moment we picked it up and began using it's double analog control scheme, everything felt natural. We blew away some guards, hurled a few grenades and tried out the brand new jump function. Jumping was left out of the original game in an effort to keep it based in reality, but even here it's being grounded -- you can't fire while in the air and can oly leap over small obstacles.
 
 
So, yeah. We walked and ran through the levels, picked up weapons and basically had a ball. Our shots tore up tables, put holes in the wall and ran as smoothly as everyone's been expecting them to.
 
 
Once Mathijs and Steven opened up the floor to questions, the specs of Sony's golden game started to come into focus. Killzone 2 will run at a steady 30 fps in 720p. On the gameplay side, the duo said Sixaixis will be implemented in the game but weren't allowed to elaborate, and although the team couldn't talk about multiplayer, they said the medic gun would be in there for players to help each other and described the mode as a "considerable" component that would use Home and Killzone.com.

After sitting through a short and familiar presentation of Killzone 2 at the Games Convention last week I was finally given a chance to play the game.
Before handing over the controller, the developers explained that in the game you play as Sef, a legionnaire called in to help quell the resistance on the Helghast home world of Helghan as the regular army fights to topple the Helghast leader.
The pointed out the various filters used in the game to give the world a darker, more realistic look and talked a bit about the game's new first-person lean and peek system which allows you to stick to walls and then pop-out to shoot, without ever leaving the first-person perspective.
Killzone 2 is ever bit as visually stunning while playing it as I remembered it being while watching the E3 demonstration. The lighting is moody and atmospheric, there's a level of detail in the game that is very reminiscent of Resistance: Fall of Man. Effects, plenty of interesting effects, abound. The end of your gun, for instance, is slightly blurred. Lightning, on the level we were shown, constantly rips through the air above and none of it appears pre-canned. And that attention to detail didn't come cheap. The single level shown at the Games Convention, the same shown during E3, sucked up 2GB of space on the Blu-ray disc.  
The controls were very tight. I had no trouble targeting head-shots and popping off rounds at enemy troopers and then ducking back behind columns or walls. The movements in the game also felt fairly solid, I never seemed to get stuck anywhere and was able to dance around in fire fights with no trouble at all. The death animations for the bad guys were a bit over the top, but not so bad as to be distracting.  
While the game seems to have enormous potential, mostly because of it's over-the-top look and solid mechanics, I was very disappointed in Killzone 2's artificial intelligence system. The team said they knew that AI was a problem in the original Killzone, so they did a lot of work on it. They said they now operate in groups, can recognize destructible environments and respond to fire, but it didn't seem that way to me.
As I watched someone else play the game, I saw bad guys doing things like standing in the middle of an open door exchanging rapid-fire shots with the player, never bothering to move or get out of the way. Then I gave the game a hand and found enemies standing around, standing with their sides to me as I walked up to them. In one case, there were two bad guys standing next to each other. I walked up to them from the side, shot the first guy several times to kill him and then shot the second guy a single time. He didn't respond. I shot him again, nothing. So I killed him.
I asked the team what the game's difficultly was set on and they said medium to hard. After an awkward pause, one of the developers added, "but it's very early and we're still working on the AI."
I'm not saying that the game is deeply flawed, just that the AI is. Fortunately, they've got plenty of time to work on that and I suspect up until now their top priority has been graphics. Now that they've got that pretty polished I suspect they'll move on to AI.