It’s not ugly so much as bleakly unadventurous: Killzone 2’s world is an elision of space marine cliché and desaturated World War II grit, lacking Halo’s flamboyance, Gears Of War’s steroidal absurdity or Call Of Duty’s moral consternation. But if Killzone 2’s setting and aesthetic initially seems like something only its mother could love, then actually playing it throws up quite a different point of view.

Somehow, the lens through which Guerrilla permits you to view this fascist-flavoured world of crumbling concrete performs a spectacularly transformative act. The subtle combination of exactingly realized visual effects – grainy filters and depth-offield blurring – along with the sense of weight and momentum suggested by your lumbering movement, roots you firmly in this world. Suddenly a greying, bullet-scarred warehouse, even one scattered with the hoary tradition of explosive barrels, is rendered fresh. From the trailers, Killzone 2 may seem like a muesli made of other games’ offcuts, but it feels quite another thing entirely: solid, heavy, tactile. Your movements – building up to a sprint, drawing a bead on an enemy, switching a weapon or tossing a grenade – are all paced to create a sense of heft and tension.

The sequence we play is an unremarkable succession of tightly controlled urban battles, moving from narrow streets into warehouses and across gantries. There are the staple set pieces whose over-familiarity voids any importance the game attempts to place upon them – protecting a colleague as he tries to open a door; fending off an ambush upon a slow moving caravan; racing to protect survivors of a downed troop transport.
Nonetheless, from moment to moment, the palpable chunkiness of the environments and the tense, meaty combat keeps the grips of our DualShock sweaty. We see and do little in the way of flanking – the environments rarely seem to allow it, although use of cover is vital. Once, we spot a Helghan soldier retreat from his sniping position when under heavy fire, but, most of the time, enemies exhibit little discretion.

It raises something of a question over the AI’s competence in online play, where developers say bots will use all the tactics and tools a real player would. This isn’t a matter dispelled during our multiplayer session, which sees the Dutch dev team fill out the empty spaces. What is clear is that Guerrilla has built a truly formidable multiplayer experience – even when considered alongside the offering of other platforms. Structurally, it borrows from the best, with customisation options, ranking, matchmaking and more (see ‘Halo, old buddy’) while adding its own ideas: unlocking new game modes of increasing complexity as you play more, and introducing a gametype which randomly gives out varying objectives in succession, keeping players wary of the need to suddenly change tactics.

Our time with the multiplayer is too short to develop an appreciation for the balance of the six classes, let alone the ability to mix and match their various attributes. Nonetheless, we leave believing that underneath Killzone 2’s po-faced showdown between gung-ho marines and space Nazis there is a deftly crafted shooter, expertly employing visual effects to conjure a world that is really tangible – a much weightier affair than its tawdry premise would suggest.