Sony should be ashamed of the Killzone 3 review event.
Today, the European arm of Sony invited all the UK journalists down to an area in London to review the multiplayer component of Killzone 3. This is fairly standard practice for bigger games (in the interests of open discourse, I attended similar events for Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach last year) and our reviewer was all primed and ready to spend the best part of 9 hours bashing away at the game.
Until it was made apparent that, actually, he would actually have just under thirty minutes to play the game. Just in case thats not clear: Sony expect UK games journalists to review the entire multiplayer component of Killzone 3 with less than thirty minutes of play.
It actually gets worse, if you can believe it. When questioned about playing more (you know, for review), a Sony representative told everyone that they could access the open beta, which launches in the UK tomorrow.
The whole situation is ridiculous.
Compare it to the review event Activision ran for Call of Duty: Black Ops. It was a 2 day event, with journalists staying overnight in a hotel. We were set-up with 360′s and copies of the game in our rooms for the single-player campaign and downstairs there was a large multiplayer area that you could drop in and out of for the duration of the event. There was never a moment where there wasnt at least two games going on, either.
We were also given USB sticks with individual profiles on, so we could accrue XP and spend CoD Points like you would in the real game a nice touch, and one that Ive never seen elsewhere. I felt that Activisions Black Ops event gave me everything I needed to get the time I needed with the game, although I did only get about two hours of sleep that night.
Im not really here to discuss review events, however. Other places have gone into great detail about these before.
What Im trying to say is that Sonys Killzone 3 multiplayer review event is a shambles. Weve had debug code in our office, so thankfully weve given the single-player a thorough bashing, but were not going to be able to approach the multiplayer side of the game at all if we want to get a review up for when the embargo lifts.
Which we do, obviously. But were going to have to just review the game as a single-player game and leave the multiplayer until we can actually get some proper time with it which probably wont be until the game launches.
It completely boggles the mind. Multiplayer is considered by many to be Killzone 2′s saving grace (I was never fond of the campaign) and I honestly cant think of a sensible reason why Sony wouldnt want the UK gaming press to be able to play it before writing their reviews.
I honestly find the whole thing insulting, to be honest. Theres a large contingent of the internet who dont trust games journalists to begin with, and actions like this only go to muddy the water and make life more difficult for everybody.
