No time travel required

May 22, 2009 07:17 GMT  ·  By

Sony, the publisher, and developer Guerrilla Games have announced the second pack of downloadable content for their Killzone 2 shooter, which was released in February this year. The Flash and Thunder pack is, of course, exclusive to the PlayStation 3, as is the game, and will arrive on the PlayStation Store on June 11. The price point has not been announced yet.

The big question on the minds of fans of Killzone 2 is what they are getting as part of this second DLC installment. There are two new maps that can be enjoyed in multiplayer and they're literally brought in from the past.

Both the Beach Head map and the Southern Hills map were featured in the initial Killzone, which was released for the PlayStation 2, and have been much loved and played by those who got that game. Guerrilla Games has taken them, reworked them, adapted them to take advantage of the new features in Killzone 2 and the computing power of the PlayStation 3 and decided to re-release them as part of a new map pack.

Beach Head is quite a small map, where the forces of the ISA are fighting to keep superior Helghast forces from establishing a foothold on a beach. The tactics involve a mix of close quarters combat and sneaking around. Southern Hills is a bigger map with the ISA assaulting the Heghast that are fortified on top of a hill.

Sony is certainly hoping that the release of this new piece of DLC, even if comprised of re-used maps, will revitalize the fortunes of Killzone 2, which at the moment is quickly slowing down in sales, moving just 58,000 units in April. Still, Sony is pretty happy with the numbers posted by the videogame until now, selling more than 1 million worldwide and becoming the fastest PS3 title to reach 500,000 copies sold in the United States.