Killzone: Liberation
Guerilla reworks their futuristic FPS into one of the PSP's best shooters. Just watch that difficulty...
Published: December 17, 2006
The difficulty can be offset a little by jumping into the game's Challenge Mode, which tasks you with basic goals like light demo or target practice, all residing in sections of levels you've finished in the main campaign. Broken down into bronze, silver and gold objectives, you'll earn points here that can go toward bumping up the number of items you can hold or weapons. When combined with the money crates found in the game that slowly unlock more powerful and diverse weapons, it can make for a nice sense of progression, though the difficulty is still something of a deterrent later on. Frequent checkpoints help, but if you happen to backtrack, you can get yourself checkpointed in the middle of a firefight, which means you'll die even more than you normally would.
At least when you -- and your foes -- die, it's rather pretty. A basic ragdoll system was thrown in to give explosive kills a little extra oomph. It works, mostly; there's nothing like lobbing a grenade up into a sniper nest only to watch them sail out and crumple to the ground, but frequent glitches in the ragdoll system will have dead enemies shimmying all over the place like they're having a postmortem seizure. It's a little distracting, but really it's the only gripe I had with the visuals.
The top-down presentation lets the rest of the visuals pop through. Animations are wonderfully smooth and varied, from clambering up surfaces to engaging in a little melee combat to just diving into a roll. The environments stick to the usual war-blasted environs, but as you move more through the game, the trenches slowly give way to more industrial and metropolitan locales, which helps keep things fresh.
Like the visuals, the audio has a few minor issues; the soundtrack is a nice mix of driving military themes, but there's too little of it, leading to a bunch of unnecessary loops. Quips from soldiers are also recycled frequently. It's not a huge deal, and the cleanliness and variety in the weapons sounds (it's more than just rat-tat-tat, you'll actually hear some metallic plinking in there too) and bass-heavy explosions will actually balance it all out while giving your headphones a little exercise in range to boot.
Liberation is what it is; a simple, straight-forward top-down shooter that enjoys throwing excessive enemies and odds your way. The lack of a good storyline ultimately isn't as damaging as you would originally think, mainly because the gameplay is so good, but Guerilla has craved a world that I'd actually like to know a little more about. Not having that option is a bit of a bummer, but between killer multiplayer, a solid (if overly-challenging) single-player set of challenges, and some absolutely gorgeous visuals, the game feels like a PSP product rather than something forced onto the system.
Regardless of some nagging technical and balance issues, Liberation manages to carve out a unique niche on the PSP, and Guerilla deserves a serious nod for at least getting the gameplay right. Now if they can just thicken things up with a bit more story, even out that difficulty and get that supposed downloadable content and online multiplayer up and running (the latter two of which are supposedly coming soon), they'll have a serious PSP killer app on their hands.