Killzone : Shadow Fall was a conundrum to review. The game is a mix of overwhelming excitement for a launch title and for the game vs. logic and odd pacing. You begin the game as Kellan Lucas, a child who is escaping from the Helghast side of your home planet. Your father dies during the escape and an ISA commander who forges you into the ultimate killing machine adopts you.
The game speed took a wavy approach from standard point-and-shoot to intensely challenging, in a way that almost caused rage quitting. The second mission that involved open combat against the Helghast with very minimal cover was one of the most challenging parts of the game, that much challenge early on made it difficult to want to continue. However, the easy flow through the next few levels kept me engaged. Next, an open free-fall towards the end of the game proved to be one of the most challenging pieces of a game I’ve played in years. It is so challenging in fact that gamers globally are calling for a patch to make it easier. For the record, I finished it after 1.5 hours of repeated attempts.
Photo: Dead Soldier, cuz I’m awesome.
It goes without saying that the game is gorgeous, giving console gamers a beautiful view into the current graphics processing. Looking over cliffs, flying over a wall, an crawling through sewers to hide looks absolutely phenomenal, and the game responds beautifully to controls. The integration with the touch pad on front to control your robotic companion was incredibly accessible, and your bot wasn’t completely worthless in many missions. At times it did however, get lost or decide not to respond to commands. Occasionally this lack of responsiveness led to my death and the inevitable frat-boy style celebration from the enemy.
Geurilla could have had a field day posting the thousands of photos that the Helghast brohans took of my dead body strewn across the game.
Photo: Heading over the wall.
Multiplayer puts you and your squad of either Helghast or Vektan against the enemy in multiple objectives ranging from hacking specific locations to simply collecting the highest kill count. Although losing was my strong suit, I definitely had a blast running through the different scenarios, and the game responded perfectly. That is once I turned up sensitivity on my controller.
The story was well written and for the most part I found myself interested in the characters. The relationship between Kellan and Sinclair was convincing enough, and it is clear that Kellan is a pawn from the get go. The story was a little predictable towards the end, but did provide a couple of really shocking revelations and some pretty handy misdirection from the crew at Guerilla games. The relationship between Kellan and Echo was fun to watch grow, and the best missions were the ones that the two of them were working together. The game itself took me close to 16 hours to get through on hard which is another sign of hard work from Guerilla, even some of my favorite shooters end in closer to 12 hours. On easy I expect you could finish the story in 12 or so with this one, the extra difficulty just gave cause for heavier strategizing and numerous repeats. The story does spend a little too much time trying to get the player to feel for the plight of the Helghast. I realize that their planet was destroyed and the non-soldier types are living in slums and cargo containers. They are, however, the first race that invaded. If 2013 has been anything its been the year of asking us to understand the enemy. Granted the Vektan and Helghast soldiers both act with the same frat house temperance, we should all be friends right?
The Helghast soldiers are 1 beer short of a toga party
As a whole Shadow fall is worth every penny, and though it may not be the best shooter to come out this year it gives a promising start to the PS4s life cycle. If you aren’t into online multi-player you may want to attempt to snag it on sale.