In Killzone 2, you play a midget on a rampage.

Okay, you might not technically be a midget, but you are pretty short. It took a while before I wasn't frequently thinking I'd somehow toggled crouch. Your eye level seems to line up with your squadmates' nipples. The other guys are good about not teasing you. They're a talkative bunch, always cussing and expositioning and saying things like "Get up on that tank and mow down those Higs with that em-gee!", but they don't ever bring up your height.

I don't know if being Napoleon-esque is unique to the special review build Sony sent games writers about a month ago. Maybe among the final touches is the main character's growth spurt. But all I've got to go on is what I've been given. Sony's even okay with reviews coming out nearly a month before the game's February 27 release, which means I can talk about much more than their sensitivity to midgets by making a game with a midget lead character.

So are you ready for a full review? Well, I'm not, so you'll have to go somewhere else.

However, after the jump, I will tell you why Killzone 2 probably isn't worth playing.

I'm not really inclined to any sort of formal review for a couple of reasons. Partly because the multiplayer is a long-term affair based on earning experience and spending it to unlock different classes and gadgets. It may very well be pretty good, as anyone who played the beta can tell you. But, since the game isn't out yet, there's no way to try multiplayer in earnest yet. I can set up faux multiplayer games with bots, which is normally fine by me. But there's no way to earn xp fighting bots, so they get all these cool toys like drones and spawn grenades and the resurrection zapper and whatnot. Having earned no xp, I get to choose between the two lousy "spray and pray" rifles.

But mainly I'm not interested in writing any sort of formal review because I haven't finished the game yet, and I wouldn't dream of passing judgment on Killzone 2 until I've seen the gay Norwegian celebrity hairdresser final boss. That's how it was described in a review on the Norwegian site Gamer.no, according to a friend of mine who knows how to read Norwegian.

However, getting to that boss is going to be a problem, since I have no desire to continue playing. I'm near the end, and I just finished a train mission in which the train never left the tunnel. Part of the appeal of putting train missions in videogames is seeing the landscape going by. You can even have bad guys on motorcycles come riding up alongside the train. Or maybe even another train. It's one of the basic tenets of train level design: make the train drive past cool stuff. But this train simply whizzed along through concrete walls for twenty minutes.

It's indicative of how there's nothing creative or engaging or even moderately interesting in Killzone 2. Yeah, sure, it's a great looking game with a hefty combat feel, an intuitive cover system, and lots of blood spatters on the lens to show you're hurt (although the effect is less of being wounded and more of needing windshield wipers). This is an impressive engine and the graphics are - I think I'm prepared to go ahead and say this - the most technically impressive I've seen on the Playstation 3.

But it just kills my interest level that the developers haven't done anything interesting with this wonderful engine. Killzone 2 consist of hemmed in shantytowns, sewers, streets, an industrial area, a bridge, a crane, and even a brief Matrix-inspired lobby. In other words, nothing I haven't seen before. It's atmospheric, with swirling wind, clouds overhead, and lots of smoke and dust, but it's otherwise static, soulless, and entirely uninteresting, the setting for prosaic Call of Duty firefight after prosaic Call of Duty firefight. Exploding barrels and out-of-place exploding electro-spiders are as dynamic as these levels get. I go all the way to a whole other planet, and this is what I find? Retreads of the same places I've been fighting on Earth all along?

The writing is terrible. Godawful terrible. It's slightly better than Too Human and slightly worse than Gears of War 2, which is saying a lot because Gears of War 2 was laughably bad. The Sixaxis gimmicks are just stupid. Stop, Sony. Just stop. You're making the Sixaxis a joke when I have to use it as a pair of grasping hands turning a valve during a firefight. It's even more of a joke when I have to do it after the firefight's over.

Maybe the game gets better. Maybe my midget links up with a bunch of other midgets and we have a giant battle with the gay Norwegian celebrity hairdresser voiced by Brian Cox while riding unicorns in an underwater city inspired by the works of Salvador Dali and then Gandalf comes skipping in from the direction of the rising sun and it turns into a rhythm game that supports the instruments from Rock Band. If that happens, I will come back here and write a full review to set the record straight. Until then, Killzone 2 may very well be as spectacular a disappointment as you'll play all year.