Since its debut on the Playstation 2, Guerilla Games’ Killzone series has been dogged by high expectations. The original game was labeled a Halo killer, an unfair moniker for any title and one that was impossible to live up to. Its sequel set the visual bar unattainably high by boasting pre-rendered canned visuals as actual in game footage years before the title hit store shelves. Now, Killzone: Shadow Fall, the fourth entry in the series on consoles, headlines the Playstation 4 launch lineup, bearing the weight of being the first-party showcase for the system.
Killzone is a pretty game in more ways than one. It is visually stunning. The vistas have an amazing depth to them and the lighting is dynamic, delivering a true cinematic effect that is a sight to behold. While playing the game, I often found myself looking around to just admire the beautiful world the Guerrilla Games has produced for Shadow Fall. The game is pretty in a few other ways as well though: it is pretty stupid to the point of being insulting, pretty frustrating and pretty much not fun from start to finish.
Killzone: Shadow Fall takes place after the events of Killzone 3. Helghan is a wasteland and as part of a truce, Vekta has agreed to hand over half of its planet to the Helghan refugees. Killzone has always been rooted in a World War II style narrative and this further cements that making Vekta into something akin to Germany after World War II, complete with a wall and Cold War. In theory this sounds like a great setting for a game and at first the game seems to make out the Shadow Marshals to be some sort of covert operative branch, getting my hopes up. Shadow Fall is not that game though.
Despite its heady aspirations, the game’s narrative is moronic from the word go. As the game starts out, I took control of Lucas Kellan, a young boy being displaced by the truce agreement. Why his father waited until after the last possible moment to relocate is beyond me but young Lucas is stuck behind enemy lines trying to cross over the wall as the Helghast lay waste to any lingering Vektans. Lucas and his father sneak around, eventually teaming up with a Shadow Marshal named Sinclair. Along the way Lucas’s father is killed, right in front of him by a Helghan patrol. After seeing his father riddled with bullets he asks something to the effect of, “What’s wrong with him?” Lucas is a very dim bulb.
Core Killzone games have always pitted the player as the Vektan’s against the Helghast empire. The Vektan’s are pretty much just as despicable as the Helghast but we let it slide because the Helghast have glowy eyes and their banners look a bit like those of the Third Reich. I never felt bad for being on the side of the Vektan’s before but, very early on, that changes in Shadow Fall as we learn that Sinclair and company have been performing experiments looking to completely wipe out the Helghan race. Lucas, though, doesn’t really bat an eye at any of this and just continues on course for much of the game. As I said, Lucas is a very dim bulb.
Eventually Lucas is forced into a situation where he needs to make a decision to save or damn both races. He makes the obvious choice but you never actually fight against fellow Vektan’s. Instead, you constantly just shooting the evil glowy eyed Helghast that aren’t really so evil but just want to save their own race before we wipe them out. But those are minor details, shoot, shoot, shoot. If it seems I am being a little harsh it is because as a fan of Killzone, and the world that Guerilla has built, Shadow Fall strikes me as insulting. Kellan is a stupid character and I was forced to continue doing missions for despicable people while he catches up to what I already knew. And even when he does realize it, he doesn’t fully believe it and even at the end I think he doesn’t quite get it. The overtones are heavy handed, making his stupidity all the more enraging. The way the story progresses, I wasn’t angry at the Vektan’s or the Helghast, I was angry at Guerilla Games for treating us like we are as stupid as their characters are.
Insulting narrative aside, the game falters when it comes to core mechanics. The shooting in the game is just not fun. For a game that has prided itself on having weight to its movement and shooting, Shadow Fall is surprisingly unsatisfying. Shooting enemies felt like I was shooting a Nerf dart gun at the Helghast and oftentimes felt just as effective as doing so. The only time I ever felt like my actions were meaningful was when I would melee an enemy. Then and only then did I feel like I was playing the Killzone I had previously enjoyed.
Shooting nerf darts is one thing, but having to do it endlessly because the game does a poor job of telling you your next objective is something else entirely. The encounter design in Shadow Fall ranges from mediocre to wretchedly horrid. More than once I found myself in an endless firefight because either the game failed to tell me what my next objective was, did a poor job of explaining what I was supposed to do, or gave it to me while I was focusing on not dying and then never giving me a reminder of what it was supposed to be.
Naturally this is a frustrating experience, especially when it happens over and over again in the same places. But the game boasts a pair of instances that are even more frustrating. Shadow Fall features a pair of free fall segments that might be some of the worst designed levels in games this year. In the second segment towards the end, I couldn’t even tell what I was supposed to be doing, or where I was going, only that I kept slamming into buildings and outcrops over and over again, forcing me to retry to the tune of 45 minutes and a Dualshock 4 nearly getting tossed out the window. Everything about the campaign was just unfun.
Slightly more fun was the competitive multiplayer. Shadow Fall has drastically overhauled the progression system, to the point that I never quite understood it. Regardless though, the game lives and dies with its Warzone game mode. Blending a mix of different game modes, Warzone sees players pitted against each other for fast paced objective based gaming. Despite having its own issues, namely that the map design is mediocre at best and unbalanced at worst, Warzone is the saving grace of the title doing everything better than its campaign counterpart. Unfortunately, with free-to-play games like Blacklight: Retribution available and big name retail hitters like Call of Duty and Battlefield, Warzone isn’t enough to spin Killzone into something worth getting.
Killzone is a bad game. It is pretty and a graphical showpiece for the PS4 but it is aggressively bad in most situations and a huge letdown. It is a letdown for me as a Killzone fan and a let down for me as a new Playstation 4 owner. And neither are acceptable for its full price retail price point.
About Author
