Before slabs of towering concrete were dropped in, the metal twisted into devastated shapes, Killzone 2 clearly banked that it all begins with the simple fun of movement within a space. Because even though they radiate an orange, almost perfectly menacing glow, Helghast eyes don’t constitute a game on their own.

From a weighty run and the lumbering weave of a turn, it’s clear that Guerrilla Games knows the chief tenet of a shooter is its feel. The metal of your gun jolts and shutters, every incoming grenade and overhead blast seeming like a rock to the gut. And instead of fashionably dovetailing Call of Duty 4’s pinpoint control, Guerrilla aptly agitates that comfort for heft: Guns in the truest sense – shivering with each shot.

But all doesn’t flow from feel alone. Developer Guerrilla looks to stand on the shoulders of giants, yet Killzone 2’s campaign misses the forest for the trees.

The harsh, stunningly ashen landscape of Helghan is a testament to tech, and maybe even imagination at times. But after the initial awe wears out – lingering smoke refracting god rays becomes commonplace – there’s a distinct lack of sophistication in commanding that visual blaze.

When gamers and reviewers haphazardly moniker Half-Life 2 or Call of Duty as “cinematic”, what they actually mean to say is that the respective developers of those games hone the power of film within an entirely different form. Guerrilla’s fight is valiant but, when it comes to making use of its hi-tech bombardment, the direction only deals in hand-me-downs.

Moments are cut and paste from the books of nearly every modern shooter, strung together with context so skeletal that it barely comes together with a single sense of character. From shoeing in a replicate Normandy beach invasion to an obligatory nuclear blast, the pace lacks the classiness of something like Valve’s ability to contrast weaponless chase on the rooftops of City 17 with Strider battles that later reform the same space.

Granted, Killzone 2’s forward thrust doesn’t have to be Valve’s, but the timidity with which it refuses to stray away from cold-comforts leads it down a one-note path. It’s when the levels broaden and overflow with Helghast that the game begins to commit the cardinal sin of shooters: an awkward trick of depicting a battle as intense through rendering it endless.

At times, encounters are nicely laid out, with well placed cover points and scattered enemies smartly working off one another in a harmonious, concerted struggle. Though, when the vistas sprawl, Guerrilla gets clumsy.

In levels littered with a host of Helghast, the inundation only ends when you trip the proper invisible wires that put an end to enemy respawns. It’s a messy and cheap tug at changing pace, a circumstance that defines the entire campaign. The experience is filled out to evoke the impressive sense of presence and place of its shooter cousins, but Guerrilla never quite invokes its own voice – rather, easy and ugly genre tropes are celebrated.

And they aren’t limited to mechanics, either. Jingoistic speech litters the game’s scenes, so cheerless and without point that it borders on a Gears of War 2 love-story kind of misstep. The rest fits into predictable place: careless character arcs played up in laughably heavy handed scenes and token glum brutality used for the sake of an easy shooter fit.

It’s no surprise, then, that multiplayer manages to curtail the second-rate campaign and boils the game down to its bare essentials. With the same hulking gun models and bulky ballistics carried over so completely, Killzone 2’s multiplayer starts out will all the advantages of its singleplayer brother minus the self imposed chains.

The evocations here are far more agreeable, synthesizing Team Fortress 2’s class system and a Call of Duty 4 style interface into a single space, while also enacting the necessary twists for a distinctly Killzone formula. From medics to engineers and beyond, online matches are full of each and every class type, proving Guerrilla has balanced and tasked each one to near perfection. Because in most shooters, you’re always missing that nurse.

Rotating objectives, probably the game’s simplest trick, pays off grandly in making use of each map’s every square inch. From Deathmatch to Search and Destroy variants, the multiplayer pace ebbs and flows in intensity. Where similar games are shoehorned into predictability, matches here are constantly flipped and rearranged.

Killzone 2’s campaign adopts a similar methodology, but unfortunate for Guerrilla, loosely combined moments and protracted battles never work beyond the online space. There, circumstance can boil down to “run here and shoot this” with little stretch of the imagination. Yet contrary to that relative bluntness, singleplayer needs context and pace to survive: It needs the power of an evenhanded storyteller.