Killzone 3 Review: The Madness Has Begun.

Oye, right reviews. Why are these always so difficult to start? How about this

Killzone 3 you ask? Yea it's pretty good. It's a pretty good first person shooter. It's got all things that FPS's need. Cool weapons, badass superman like characters, vehicles (I'll talk about those later...), these sort of things are what we have come to expect about first person shooters.

Killzone received some criticism from media type people for being really colorless. I was actually really impressed with how deliberately artistic the color was implemented. Most of the time, the colors were very muted, but occasionally certain things were brought out. The Helghasts masks, Petrucite, blood (sometimes) the blue of the ISA, and then, in one of my favorite settings of the game, the plant life and vegetation shown in a jungle through which the player travels. So to answer these criticisms, I disagree. The colors are indeed muted, but it is intentional, not lazy. When most things are gray brown black and beige, the moment color appears, the players eye will see it, and create a certain visual tension. Add this to something the game wants the player to see, and you have created an immersive moment for your gamer. Good work.

My blogmate, Chris, brought up a good point I wanted to also bring to my readers. Is it better than Call of Duty? Well, that is a good question, and of course like any good question, the answer is not just yes or no. If you will remember, in the CoD campaign, as you did the whole fps mission thing (basically killing everything), a lot of the level consisted of sprinting from checkpoint to checkpoint. You were forced to run spray and pray because the enemies will not stop spawning! Like all those relatives you don't know (and hate) they will just keep coming, no matter how many you kill, until you just run away. That is really stupid and it makes me turbo pissy. Luckily for me, Killzone doesn't do that. Killzone throws a certain number of baddies at you, you kill those chumps, laugh at their misfortune, tea bag every singe one of their corpses if you desire, pick up their ammo, and run on your merry way. Thank God. It's not *nearly* as satisfying when you cannot gloat over the piles of fallen nubs that lie in the wake of your wrath and destruction. So that's good.

Multiplayer? Not better than CoD. Well.. mostly the same as CoD. LMG's are OP, "skilled players" only use rifles, you die instantly, so I hope you saw that guy before he saw you, and campers abound. It entertained me for about 2 hours before I realized I really don't like CoD type multiplayers. It's really cookie cutter, so if that's what you like, good for you. Don't expect to be surprised, they were fairly conservative with the implementation.

Bringing up the vehicles again I want to complain a little. Conceptually the machines you pilot are really cool. They look pretty sweet, and you watch in envy as NPC's get to run into battle with these ISA war machines (and usually just explode, because the NPC's are about as intelligent as your average poo flinging poo monkey).  When you finally reach your first chance to pilot a vehicle you are giddy with blood rage. Then you realize that the vehicles are not very intuitive at all. The one vehicle you actually get to control (excluding the jet pack) is this neato walker. Unfortunately, every time you take a step, the whole bloody screen shakes like a seizure. I think this is the part where I make a joke about Micheal J Fox holding my TV, but he is really cool, so instead I'll say go watch Back to the Future. So, the only way you can "accurately" shoot is to be either motionless, or be running at full speed. Neither are conducive to survival AND killing.

The other "vehicle" you control is this jetpack, which in reality is just a jump pack. You jump and hover for while, using the most complicated control scheme in existence. In order to Jump (hover) use the speed boost to avoid bullets, steer and shoot all at once, you are holding L2 hover, holding L1 if you want to zoom in, pressing X anytime you want to boost, steering with the LS, aiming with the RS, and shooting with R1. So, you can imagine the learning curve to do all of those things in parallel is pretty big. Too bad you don't get much time to practice before you have to fight huge hordes of Helghast. Don't worry, you can use your really cool jump pack to dodge bullets. Ignore the fact that the AI doesn't miss on Hard, and you won't even need cover (sarcastic font engaged)! So, I really hope you are good at pressing a billion buttons, steering, jumping, flying, aiming, and shooting all without cover against enemies that don't miss.

thanks IGN

Maybe that is too harsh. It was kind of cool, but I felt the whole time, like I should have received some sort of health bonus while piloting the pack, like you do with any other vehicle. Speaking of the other vehicles, I really love rail shooter! That's kind of true, but as much as I love running on a rail to kill zombies or aliens, when I am behind the wheel of a huge jeep, or piloting a space fighter I WANT TO FREAKING CONTROL IT!! Instead, you get to shoot and hope to god that your pilot is good enough to stay alive long enough for you to kill everything. Vehicles, eh.

Your characters in the game are everything you would expect from an action packed "kill the bad guys with a small group of good guys". The main character Sechenko is a badass. His buddy Rico is an asshole, a rebel the semi comedic relief, and also a badass. The random girl in the game Jammer, is the computer whiz or something. Also badass. Your captain, Narville, is just an asshole. Stick it to the man, screw his authority!!
The story progresses oddly. It obviously continues almost right after KZ2, but paces it self poorly. You would expect the end of the game to be the climax, with most excitement happening towards the end. The whole games does a very good job at building up to the end, however, the end happens so ridiculously fast, when you are done you are not entirely sure what happened. It left me a little unfulfilled, and mostly confused. Lots of explosions and tons of action, really cool, but afterwards I thought: Oh wait... what? A couple of odd story holes and moments in the game that made me think, "Wait.. why... what?!" added to the bizarre nature of the pacing. When a control panel that doesn't work suddenly starts working when all the bad guys are dead, it doesn't make sense to me. Oh, well all those guys are dead, the power is on now. Right....

Petrucite Guns are AWESOME.

Overall, its a fun fps. If Sony wants to take this game on as their signature fps, to combat with CoD or Halo, they have some work to do. It's a good game, well developed and the guys did really really good work. That being said, the mechanics are neither surprising nor overly impressive. The game feels very much like any other fps you have played, without the things that made that fps special.

7 out 10.