Killzone 3 Single Player - Impressions

Killzone 2 is among my absolute favorite shooter this entire generation. It had some flaws however, like the minimal mostly uninteresting story, the few glitches here and there - such as hiccups and sometimes really long loading times. On the other hand it remains a fine example of a game being based around a single idea and approaching that idea in an almost perfect manner; the heavy sluggish controls everyone keeps complaining about I considered absolutely brilliant since they did what I think should be done to make first-person shooters on a console relevant - they were slower and slowed down the entire game and as a result we got some really methodic and brutal gameplay that erased the idea of "auto-aim" from a console shooter once and for all. It was a beautiful console game with a great art-direction and it was among the most intense, dark and horrible war experiences since the first Gears of War.

So you could imagine my excitement when I got my hands on Killzone 3 a week ago. I already knew the graphics had been improved but wouldn't impress me as much as last time around because the game is just not as a big of a leap as Killzone 2. I had also seen that the reviews weren't too happy with the story but I didn't pay that much mind since like I said; the previous game didn't exactly win any Writers Guild Awards two years ago. But none of these things disappointed me as much as the so called "gameplay improvements" that had been done to the campaign. I will give them some things which I found had been made better, I liked the slide mechanic, I also really loved the new sounds of guns blasting and some of the locations were exciting visually, but the biggest praise I can give the game is that despite being disappointed in it I ended up having a lot fun during large portions of the game with its basic gameplay.



However the game remains disappointing mainly because it feels like Guerrilla Games lost faith in their own vision - the vision and the world that they so well realized in the second game. I guess my biggest complaint with Killzone 3 is that it feels like a game made by Sony "Suits" and not by the great and passionate developers at Guerrilla Games. It's a game that has listened to all the expert critiques of the world that disliked the previous game, and completely ignored the fanbase of mentioned previous game who loved it and the way it separated from other games in a first-person shooter genre that has become increasing stale lately. We the fans of the second game suddenly got a game that feels more like a sci-fi spin-off Call of Duty game - with faster gameplay and shooting mechanics with auto-aim (on by default), a jumping storyline around different locations, huge set-piece moments every cutscene and a storyline delivered under the serious prolonged impression that it is interesting.

It's basically the definition of a game with an identity crisis and it's really sad that people like me who bought Killzone 2 for the exact reason to avoid twitchy retarded gameplay of a Call of Duty shooter are now being forced to play such a shooter in a Killzone game. I can imagine how the Suits from Sony had a field day with this game because it got put in line to appeal to the Call of Duty mass audience, and many of the other additions feel like pure business decisions made by Sony execs to push the many different hardware projects of theirs - PlayStation Move support, 3D-TV support. I get the distinct feeling that too many chefs were at work behind this game and that the soul of Killzone has been severely harmed by these design decisions. Because we now have a world that feels very inconsistent; the countless on-rain elements (probably for the sake of Move), the fact that Helghan all of a sudden has many different environments, lots of colour and is no longer the industrial hellhole which I learned to love, the fact that the Helghast all of a sudden have the most advanced technology known to man in the blink of an eye when in the previous game they were the sci-fi version of a decaying Soviet Union.



The list can be made long on why this game disappointed me but I think it's sufficient to say that it's just sad that another game was stripped down of the many elements which made it unique and interesting in the first place, and instead we have been delivered another run of the mill shooter with very few things that make it stand out. A big part of me hopes that this experiment fails on the sales front and that Guerrilla Games gets their chance to return to the root of the series with a hellish battlefield gameplay in the future and none of this trendy cinematic hold-your-hand watered down bullshit that's attempting to copy the shitty Hollywood. Oh, and I want to deliver one last complaint, while I loved Uncharted 2 and it was a great game and I can understand why Guerrilla is looking up to their achievement, I still think it's completely inappropriate that a Killzone game sports such a similar main menu theme music as an Uncharted game. It's sad though because the game is still good despite these shortcomings but that only makes it worse somehow; there is just too much lost potential I guess because the game could have been one of the best games this year.