Let's get ready to rumble!When you've beaten the single-player campaign once (or a couple of times if you're trying to farm trophies), there's an extensive multiplayer component waiting for you, which is an awesome experience to play through. Not only is it incredibly deep, but there's a ton of things for newcomers and experienced veterans, which will ensure that people will play this game for many months to come. Multiplayer is broken into two segments: Skirmish and Warzone. Skirmish is the offline component of multiplayer, and is effectively a practice arena where you can take on up to 15 bots in multiplayer matches. You can pick all of your criteria for your rounds and test yourself against the bots, which all react to you based on the difficulty level that you set for them (again, going off the game's four difficulty settings). You'll also decide the match types you want to play, many of which are familiar to multiplayer veterans. Body Count is Team Deathmatch; Search and Retrieve is essentially Capture the Flag; and Capture and Hold is a zone-based mode.
Search and Destroy tasks one team with trying to blow up a location with two explosives before time runs out, while the other side attempts to defend that target and defuse any placed explosives. Assassination marks one player for death, and that player has to avoid being killed by rivals to score. What's great about the Skirmish mode is that it allows newcomers to get a sense of the maps that will be played within the online space, as well as the various classes and abilities granted within the multiplayer component of Killzone 2. Veterans can also get some skill as well, testing themselves against the stronger elite bots. While I still wish that the bots in Skirmish used their abilities or reviving beams more, it's at least refreshing to feel as though you're not going to instantly be a sitting duck.
Man down, people -- Man down!Warzone, on the other hand, is where things get interesting, and much more than the simple fact that your objectives constantly change to keep you on your toes. Players initially start out as a soldier, who can equip a limited amount of weapons and has one grenade and very little else to sustain him. However, just about anything that you do within a Warzone match, from placing a bomb during a Search and Destroy round to helping hold a checkpoint and destroying enemy turrets (along with killing your opponents), gives you points. The more you play, the more points you earn, and if your side happens to win the round, you get a 1.5x multiplier for your points. These go towards earning one of 12 ranks, which allows you to progress from a lowly private to a masterful general once you get to 2,800 points of online service. On top of these ranks, however, are additional player classes that you'll unlock, each of which carries its own kind of abilities and specialties.
There are six classes in all, ranging from medics that can revive players to Saboteurs that can disguise themselves to look like their enemies for stealth kills. While choosing a particular class allows you to do specific things on the battlefield, if you want to unlock the true potential of that class, you're going to need to acquire ribbons and medals, which are progress-based rewards for doing specific actions. For example, if you're a tactician, and you manage to place five spawn points in a round, you earn a ribbon. If you earn eight of those ribbons, you then earn a Spawn point medal, which unlocks the ability to create air support robots. This then starts you on a new ribbon/medal path, which will eventually lead you to be able to combine your skills with another class. This means that you could essentially create a death dealing medic that places sentry turrets behind him to cover his tracks, or an Assault Saboteur that can run through enemy lines and drop proximity mines that blow up whenever an enemy nears them. The fact that you can match so many different combinations and that it's based solely on medals will definitely keep people playing for a long time.
The real battle for Helghan starts when Multiplayer begins.The eight maps that are selected for multiplayer are really designed to amplify the amount of chaos that goes on within an online map, and considering that you can have up to 32 players in one round (which can include bots as well if you don't have enough people), the destruction can quickly ramp up. Helping out in this respect is the inclusion of a Squad feature, which allows one player to be a squad leader for his friends. This automatically gives all members a dedicated channel for communication of tactics. It also allows players to instantly spawn back in on the Squad Leader's position, providing instant reinforcements during a Capture and Hold round or extra soldiers during an Assassination attempt.
Originally Posted by SpoOkie
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