Now that the dust has settled around the widely anticipated and highly touted launch of Killzone 2, it's worth taking some time to look deeper at the game's multiplayer component. Sony's big gun, as it were, boasts one of the most capable, impressive, and fully-featured online multiplayer components that a PS3 game has seen thus far, but it's only after spending almost a month with the game's online experience that one can truly appreciate what works and what doesn't with Guerrilla's latest title.

Surprisingly, I've found myself enjoying the multiplayer side of Killzone 2 less and less the more I play it. My gameplay habits have changed a bit recently, and I've been playing almost nothing but Killzone 2 since the game launched. Initially, the multiplayer had me wowed as it did the critics and masses alike. Though I still held to some of my original criticisms, I was for the most part captured by the overwhelming and relentlessly frenetic feel of the game's multiplayer.

But while the game's recent patch did manage to take care of a few of the game's bugs and tighten up the much-discussed controls (which Guerrilla clearly was in the wrong about from the outset, as evidenced by the game's frustrating final boss, who is neither slow nor tactical), there are a few key issues which some hardcore gamers may come to loathe as time goes on.

When the game shines, it shines brightly. When two coordinated teams are doing battle with one another and all of the game's classes are being used properly, the multiplayer of Killzone 2 can truly be a symphony in motion—and what a bloody symphony it is. When opposing spawn points are next to each other and in the immediate vicinity of a gameplay objective, forget about it: the unending cascade of bodies and bloodshed will have even the most grizzled first-person shooter veterans sweating and sitting on the edge of their seats. PC-only gamers, this is a multiplayer shooter worth being jealous about when it's at its best.

Even at its best, though, Killzone 2 still suffers from a few huge issues, the foremost of which is the poorly-conceived squad system which forces players to actually get out of the action to manage one of the most important elements of the game. With 16 other players on a single team, multiple spawn points rammed up next to each other, and a seemingly impossible-to-complete objective given the unending waves of enemy players, it's frustratingly difficult to bring order to the chaos.

What makes this all the more noticeable are the design concessions that Guerrilla made in an attempt to make the game appeal first and foremost to the clan audience. I'm not sure if the company intended from the outset to neglect Joe Gamer and strive to have Killzone take second seat to Halo at scarcely legitimate MLG tournaments, but the company's bullish and forceful shaping of the game as a clan-centric experience will test the patience of all but the most casual and most clan-involved players.

Nothing proves my point more than an unforeseen problem with its admittedly-innovative class systems. As you surely know by now, players can select "badges" that correspond to player classes. These badges are unlocked as players progress. Each badge has two potential special abilities, and abilities can be mixed across classes. For example, the Medic gains the primary ability to revive a teammate once every minute or so, as well as a secondary Med pack ability which allows the Medic to toss out a Med pack approximately every 20 seconds. While during the first week or so after launch the rooms were full of mostly soldiers (the beginner class) and medics, the game is now full of all the other classes.

This was, of course, to be expected. Sadly, with so many Tacticians and Engineers running around, one of the strangest and most troubling design decisions has only now made itself known. Both Tacticians and Engineers have special abilities which are "consumable items" much like the Medic. Tacticians can throw down special grenades which add spawn points to the match and summon flying drones that act as air support, while Engineers can place and repair turrets.

Unfortunately for players playing these two classes, the amount of spawn grenades, drones, and turrets that can be summoned in a match is a tied to a limited pool shared across the whole team. This means that a team of 16 can only have a maximum of 4 or so turrets up simultaneously. While this makes sense from a balance perspective—you wouldn't want an entire team of 16 to each have 2 turrets up, or would you?—it makes for one of the most frustrating casual, semi-casual, and even hardcore lone-wolf and small-group play experiences in such a high-profile shooter. Your play experience is in every way made or broken by the other players on your team, which is a huge regression from the welcome advent of lone wolf and party modes made a genre norm by Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4—especially when combined with the complete absence of a party system.

Because the team shares a pool of these special items, it's trivially easy for your job of choice to be rendered useless. Want to play Tactician because you like the class and you're good at it? You'd better hope that there aren't any other poor Tacticians on your team wasting the limited supply of spawn grenades.

While in clan play this creates the need for an amazing amount of coordination and talent, the likes of which truly serves as an excellent measure of clan skill, it's an exercise in infuriating frustration when it comes to all nonclan matches. Organizing and communicating with other players in a normal match is virtually impossible most of the time (and it is of course exacerbated by the all-but-useless squad system). This means that you'll more often than not wind up playing a class that you don't necessarily want to just to be productive, which runs contrary to the game's custom class design and ranking system which requires players to sink much time and effort into unlocking all of the abilities and upgrades for a single class.

I'm all for supporting clans in multiplayer games, but I can't help but feel that Guerilla made some serious missteps with the multiplayer experience that are only becoming apparent as the game gets older; it feels like the developers focused on the clan side of the game at the cost of enjoyment for the rest of us.

The core action is fast, frenetic, and addictive in a way that is tough to describe and awe-inspiring to behold, but hardcore players will likely find themselves frustrated in the long run by a system designed from its foundation to be excruciatingly punishing to uncoordinated teams. Not every hardcore player wants to get involved in clan life, and truly enjoying Killzone 2's multiplayer in a competitive and hardcore way all but requires it.

Whether that's something you really want is up to you. But as a gamer that loves to get down and dirty with just a few friends and play a multiplayer shooter long into the night, I find Killzone 2 to be an increasingly-frustrating game that has me saying "I wish this was different" much more often than "I wish I could play all night long."