PS5 Killzone: Liberation Review

The PSP was many things to many people, a delightful little slice of hardware that ended up with a pretty stellar library of ports and new games — but one thing you could never say about it was that it had a second analogue stick. That sole little control nub on its left had to do a heck of a lot of heavy lifting, and Killzone: Liberation is and was a perfect example of how developers worked around it.

In making a spin-off from its successful first Killzone game ahead of dropping Killzone 2 on the PS3, Guerrilla worked with the PSP's limitations to make Liberation, a top-down strategic shooter that you can now pick up emulated on the PS5 and PS4. Playing it in 2024 makes for a bit of a nostalgia overdose.

If that sounds both good and bad, that's exactly our intention: Liberation is a frustrating mixture of bright ideas and implementation that sometimes feels achingly annoying to play on a modern system, which shouldn't be a surprise. It drops players into the middle of the ongoing conflict between the dastardly Helghast and the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance. We reprise the role of Templar from the first game as he hunts down some Helghast bigwigs over the course of four acts, each comprising five missions.


Each of these stages runs to around 10 minutes long, making for a pretty modest runtime, although the game is padded out by single player challenges that see you drop back into missions with specific objectives in the hopes of unlocking upgrades for your character. There are difficulty options to explore, too, although as we'll cover later they're not exactly welcoming.

You control Templar from a top-down perspective, moving him with your left analogue stick and aiming with the same. You can free-shoot while moving, but the real intention is for you to take cover by holding R1, then pop up while static to free-aim a laser sight at enemies. There's some gentle lock-on here, but it would be too generous to describe it as feeling great. Rather, Templar's accuracy is piecemeal, and it's all too easy to get stuck in a long-range fight that takes 30 seconds to resolve because almost all your bullets miss the target. Throwing grenades, meanwhile, is an exercise in crossing your fingers.


As you progress, discovering briefcases of money will help you unlock new weapons over time, and they'll also be dotted around levels. From machine pistols and shotguns to explosive crossbows, these are all good fun to experiment with, even if many of them are fairly useless. Prioritising weapons that hit harder is essential since the game's difficulty can get frustrating at times; enemy soldiers rinse your health very rapidly, while their own sponginess is a point of contention.

You'll encounter a few different enemy types, from cover-hugging snipers to onrushing shotgunners and mobile grenadiers. These will ensure you have to react to the battlefield around you, although you needn't expect any grand surprises. That mission-based structure means that each stage in the game boils down to almost an obstacle course: you'll have a base, stretch of swamp, or mountainous path to get through, with Helghast spilling out of closed doors or dropships to stop you.

Indeed, levels all too often rely on the same structure: push through a section to a blocked path, backtrack to find some C4, then push through again to detonate the blockage and proceed. Along the way, you'll also find supply caches that give you health refills, new weapons, and explosives, but each has a finite stock. At points, you'll be concentrating hard on resource management, with these supply boxes becoming slightly unfortunate crutches in more difficult moments, ones that you'll trudge slowly backwards to find when necessary.


You'll also sometimes have a buddy along with you in missions, who can be ordered around through a decent command screen, directing them at specific enemies or cover points, or simply telling them to follow you around (as is easiest most of the time). In these moments the game feels a little more bombastic, and less like a weird Metal Gear Solid spin-off that abandoned any pretence at stealth (even though Liberation does have barely-used awareness states for its soldiers).

In the second half of the game, this cadence is interrupted by some of the most painfully difficult boss fights we've encountered in ages. A fight against a spider tank had us questioning our will to live thanks to shonky targeting and Templar's painfully slow movement speed, and we can't imagine we'll be the only ones to jump down to Easy mode simply to squeak through.

Liberation is a also perfect reminder of how addicted to muted palettes we were back in 2006 - it's almost unremittingly brown, dropping that colour only to shift to grey at times, and while its washed-out look felt gritty and realistic on the PSP's display, it's a little less handsome blown up on a modern display. The level of detail was great for the time, but you'll now have to do a lot of imagining to fill in the gaps in its grubby animations and low-poly models.


Still, the game is smooth and crisp in its new upressed presentation, and the addition of both quick Save/Load functions and a rewind feature are life savers. They completely eliminate potential frustrations when Liberation throws you into situations where trial and error might be the only way out.


If you owned Killzone: Liberation back in the day and want to go down memory lane, then $9.99/£7.99 is a low enough price to demand a revisit. However, if you have no nostalgia for this handheld adaptation, there's not much here to draw you in, especially given the sheer number of more accomplished modern twin-stick or top-down shooters that are available on the PS Store these days.