Killzone 3 Review (Playstation 3): One of the best shooters gets even better

Killzone 3 is not going to change your mind about the franchise.  If you were one of the many people who saw the amazing E3 trailer of Killzone 2 from 2005 and believed that was gameplay footage and felt subsequently burned by it, Killzone 3 is not going to convert you.  If you were one of the many people who saw the same trailer and loved it and defend the series to irrational heights, this game only fuels that love even more.  But the middle ground is going to see Killzone 3 for what it is: one of the Playstation 3’s best exclusives that deserve to be in the conversation of top-tier console shooters.

(Check out the sceenshots of Killzone 3 here)

Having never played any of the previous Killzone games, I searched youtube for walkthroughs of the game to get a better feel for the story and hoopla surrounding the franchise.  With Killzone 2 held in high regard by most critics, I wanted to know if I was missing out on a monumental release.  After seeing the videos and reading the reviews, I realized that while I was probably going to enjoy the game, I would have somewhat forced myself to play through the drab and grimy environments.  Obviously, war is going to be drab and grimy, but Guerilla Games may have gone a little too extreme with the grey tones. 

The feedback about Killzone 2’s aesthetic was clearly taken to heart.  Killzone 3 shows that there’s more to the world of Helghan besides steel corridors and rusted steel corridors.  A nuclear wasteland for a planet is still going to have its areas of drab and grime, but interspersed among them are a snow-capped mountain setting which doubles as a base of the Helghast and a jungle environment that looks like the level designers took the deadliest plants from Avatar and turned them into a stealth showcase.  When you get to the later levels, the game turns up the “just how big can these enemies get” meter and the surrounding chaos is just a joy to watch.  I admittedly was smiling as I was blasting my way through the penultimate large-scale battle and enjoying the theater of war that was going on around me.

Although the actual overarching plot of Killzone is interesting (the “good guys” fighting an enemy they created in a roundabout way), the actual implementation of it in the game has never been the strong suit of the series.  The story continues right after the events of Killzone 2, with SA stalwarts Sev and Rico taking a lot justified grief from their by-the-numbers Captain for their “handling” of series antagonist Scolar Vasari as they try to escape from Helghan.  On the Helghast side, there is a power struggle among the elite jockeying for position, with the central focus being the conflict between Admiral Orlock (Ray Winstone) and weapons maven Jordan Stahl (Malcom McDowell).  There is a concerted effort to give the audience a reason to root for and/or against these characters, but the predictability of the story ruins the momentum it could have had moving forward.

Making the characters more relatable also means doing away with most of the profanity and knucklehead dialogue that populated the previous game.  In other words, not every problem or conversation is resolved with a flurry of expletives.  Sev and Rico are fine in their roles as protagonists, but nobody will be talking about them in reverent tones.  Rico ditches almost of all of his dudebro attitude and is replaced with an almost sedated “annoying sidekick with a heart” vibe.  In a weird fourth wall breaking moment, if you happen to play split-screen co-op, the second player takes on the role of a silent third character (Natko) that fights alongside Sev and Rico but never appears in any cut scene.

Following in the great tradition of most popular fiction that gets turned into a trilogy, Killzone 3 brings the gadgets, the over-the-top weapons, and stunning set pieces to turn your brain into mush.  Fans will be pleased to know that the ISA can now carry two primary guns into battle along with their secondary pistol.  One of the best weapons in the game is the WASP, which is a homing shot that blows up your selected target in a rain of rockets.  The vehicle sequences with Sev manning a turret or a WASP do a nice job of breaking up the regular action and getting you from one storyline point to the next.  The mechs that were in the sequel make their return for a brief period, but you also get a chance to hop on a weaponzied jetpack, which controls like a mix of Gunvalkyrie and Metroid Prime.  Killzone 3 does control and feel just a tad slower than what I would want in a shooter and the empowerment you feel when you get on the jetpack and using the temporary boosts are evidence of that.  It’s almost like getting on a Kuribo’s Shoe and never getting it back once the level is over.

Killzone 3 also succeeds in making me do the one thing I have never done in shooters: think.   With such large environments, enemies can come at you in every angle and they’re pretty good with their stop and pop tactics.  Whenever I got myself into a situation where I would normally go in guns blazing, particularly in the urban areas with snipers, I was dying constantly.  When a sniper spotted me, it turned the pressure on for me to either hide to a new spot or aim quickly and take them out first just in case they missed.  Not having such a quick turn radius in this case was better for me because I rarely found myself in a situation where I stared and shot at the ceiling because I felt I went too far with my head turns.  So for once, a shooter makes me think about using the cover mechanic to avoid being spotted and to use stealth when possible so I could do one of the many brutal up-close kills, which are appropriately titled brutal kills.  Rather than going in for the typical melee attack, you can now press L1 to trigger a scene that has you killing Helghast in pretty malicious ways.  Hope you like eye gouging.

Most experienced shooter fans will be able to power their way through Killzone 3 in 10 to 12 hours with the default setting.  The multiplayer that was so heavily regarded in Killzone 2 returns with a few tweaks to the character classes.  The class-based structure seems to have been streamlined with a fewer actual classes but more emphasis on skills.  While Guerilla Warfare is your standard team deathmatch setup, Warzone and Operations are modes I would love to get to more hours in.   Warzone pits you in one big battle with varying match types every few minutes to break the monotony.  Operations almost plays out like a story mode mission complete with cut scenes as you try to either successfully defend against (Helghast) or infiltrate (ISA) the opposing team.  A neat touch was having the top players on each team be the stars of the cut scenes after the session ends.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get in plenty of multiplayer online match time to fully make a definitive assessment.  Such is the nature of reviewing a game pre-release, but if playing with bots and the multiplayer beta with the same game modes a few months back was any indication of the final product, Killzone 3 should enjoy a robust online community blasting away months after release.

It would be a bit pretentious to say that Killzone 3 makes Killzone 2 obsolete having never played it, but I don’t see any reason why PS3 shooter fans shouldn’t move up.  Would I praise this game more or less if I had played the predecessor?  It's hard to say, but Guerilla has always managed to come back with a better critically received iteration of the battle between ISA and the Helghast each time, and Killzone 3 is another step forward for the series.  Now if they could only get me to care about the dreary inhabitants of this (now) colorful world.

This review is based on code sent to us by Sony. I played the single-player campaign to completion on the Recruit (easy) and Trooper (default) difficulties with a few hours of split-screen co-op.  We also participated in some online multiplayer sessions hosted by Sony. Also be sure to check out fellow Examiners Miguel Concepcion and Matt Furtado  later today and in the coming weeks for their take on Killzone 3.