Giant Bomb Review
123 CommentsKillzone 3 Review
4- PS3
by Jeff Gerstmann on
Killzone 3 delivers an experience that's a little too similar to its predecessor in spots, but it still has plenty explosive moments to see both online and off.
After some quick tutorializing, the game drops you back into the boots of Tomas "Sev" Sevchenko of the ISA. You've just witnessed the death of the Helghast leader and it's time to get the heck out of there. But the evacuation process goes completely sideways and Sev, Rico, and a group of other ISA soldiers are stranded. The bulk of Killzone 3 deals with the marooned troops biding their time and waiting for the right time to pick up the fight and escape the enemy's planet. Most of the actions you take are very standard first-person-shooter goals. You'll attempt to secure a convoy, you'll take to high ground to defend ground-based troops with a sniper rifle, you'll destroy enemy installations, and so on. And, for the most part, it's fine, if a bit rote. The game's pacing is very stuttery as the game jumps from action to cutscene to action a little too often, and occasionally the story doesn't slow down to explain itself, like one portion of the game where you go from an on-foot cutscene to suddenly manning the turret in a vehicle that seems like it just kind of came out of nowhere. The game has a few of these turret sequences, and some of the game's biggest climactic moments are, unfortunately, seen from behind the controls of a mounted weapon. Add to that a real punch-out kind of "big explosion followed immediately by end credits" ending and it's easy to find disappointment in the campaign.
That's not to say that the action is bad. The battlefields that you'll cross while playing through the campaign look great, and the enemies are usually reasonably fun to kill. The weapon loadout has changed a bit this time around, allowing you to carry a heavy weapon while still carrying an assault rifle or shotgun, making heavy weapons more useful. So you'll grab light machine guns, snap turrets off of their mounts, and find rocket launchers, boltguns, and other military hardware that helps keep the combat exciting. It's just annoying that Killzone 3's campaign doesn't seem to care about continuity or finding interesting ways to tell its story. One of the coolest moments--the game opens with you controlling a man in Helghast armor and ends with a climactic moment before giving you a "six months earlier" cut back to where the story actually begins--is undercut when you revisit that same moment later on in the story and it unfolds completely differently than it did when you were there the first time. With the developers not bothering to care enough about their fiction to create what could have been a cool moment the second time around, it instead comes off as if a few people working on the levels didn't communicate well enough to synch up the action.
And then there's the multiplayer. It's real, proper multiplayer for up to 24 players online, though you can also play all of the modes and maps with bots by yourself, if you like. The "botzone" is also useful because it lets you see and try all of the various gear that you can unlock for the different classes in Killzone 3. Since you'll earn one unlock point for each level of experience gained when playing online, and later weapons cost three points to open up, it's worth spending some time with the bots first, if only to avoid a situation where you're unlocking weapons you won't actually like. That third medic weapon, which is silenced and shoots three-shot bursts, isn't for everyone. Those are points that you could also spend to allow your engineer class to build turrets more quickly or increase the effective range of the infiltrator's disguise ability. Point being, the classes give you a range of different ways to play the game that should fit a variety of play styles. Classes are a little less configurable than they've been in the past, though, as the unlocks are limited to the class they were designed for. You can't mix-and-match badges to form a class that can revive players and rebuild supply points, for example. In-game actions can reward you with ribbons that give you a bonus for the rest of that match, so you can unlock faster aim abilities or double XP on kills by performing specific tasks. The effect is similar to the Call of Duty perk system, but they're completely temporary and usually doled out for good behavior, like completing objectives in a team match or getting a lot of assists.
Killzone 3 gets down to business with three multiplayer modes. Guerilla Warfare is the game's way of saying "Team Deathmatch." Warzone, which rolls a lot of standard objective-based modes into one big game that randomly rotates through objectives every five minutes or so, is still the coolest mode in the game, and it's a great way to keep players on their toes. Operations mode is an attack-and-defend mode where one team is trying to complete various objectives while the other is always on defense. As the objectives are met or failed, cutscenes are played showing the players on both teams engaged in moving a crane or executing prisoners or whatever that specific objective was tied to in the "story" of that match. Those cutscenes make it cooler than the average assault-style mode, but since one team is always attacking and the other is always defending, it doesn't keep players on their toes quite as much as Warzone does.
But the main action is still just as satisfying as it was last time around, with a few new situations to deal with. Some maps contain jet packs, which you can use to boost up into the air and float slowly back down to the ground. Jet packs are also outfitted with heavy machine guns with infinite ammo, making them effective if you want to just turn yourself into a mobile turret. Some maps also contain mechs, which players can get in and pilot. As you might expect, the mechs are a little bulky, but they dish out a ton of damage and can withstand a lot, as well. Both of these things turn up in the single-player campaign for a bit, but are more interesting in multiplayer situations.
The game looks great, with tons of action going on in the backgrounds and skies above you as you make your way through the game. The multiplayer maps also look great, with some locations coming from portions of the campaign. The "British Space Nazi" motif of the Helghast continues unabated with lots of insidious-sounding characters, not the least of which is Jorhan Stahl, one of the bad guys in the campaign. He's voiced by Malcolm McDowell, who does a really great job. The ISA side of things has some good voice work, too, including James Remar as Captain Narville and Andrew Bowen as Sevchenko.
It's great that Killzone 3 supports all of the additional features of the PlayStation 3, though when it comes down to it, I had the most fun with it when I was playing it with a standard controller in two measly dimensions. But a lot of the design is so familiar that it's hard to get as excited for Killzone 3 as you might have last time around. Killzone 2 felt like a landmark event that finally gave the PlayStation 3 a world-class first-person shooter that you couldn't play anywhere else. After two years, Killzone 3 hasn't changed enough to reignite all of those feelings, but it's still a thrilling ride when you're alone and a well-designed multiplayer experience, as well.
