To understand the massive rift between the old school FPS games and the relatively newer breed of war shooters, one needs to understand the cultural divide that endears them to an equally diverse fan base. The FPS genre was birthed by id software with an equal blend of John Carmack's technology and the design and gameplay genius of John Romero (Deathmatch) / American McGee (Alice) / Tom Hall (Anachronox and Duke Nukem 3D).
This genre reflects the technicality of the hardcore PC gaming demographic that revels in the finer nuances of gameplay, level design and game/weapon balance. The PC gaming community was largely restricted to geeks who modded the readily available source codes of id's games and that would be reflected in the fixation of the old school FPS shooters in basic building blocks of game design. What they missed was a cinematic feel that the casual consoles demographic were used to.
Games like the Final Fantasy series have their gameplay as an excuse built around grandiose cinematics. Such was the way of the consoles. With successes like N64's Goldeneye and the countless Doom console ports, FPS games finally got a taste of the console treatment. The complexities entailed by a seamless keyboard mouse interface made way for the gameplay simplification needed to make the FPS titles amenable to the consoles.
As the AI became increasingly devious with Quake III on the PC front, the console side of the gaming spectrum was further dumbed down to help the sluggish gamepad controls of the early console war shooters like Medal of Honour. But the console gamers weren't in for the gameplay or design brilliance, they were in for the unexplored vistas of cinematic war shooters that captured the grittiness of war
The best way to explain this phenomenon are movies; namely Michael Bay's The Rock or John Woo's Hard Target - both of which are guilty pleasures devoid of any technical merit, but they are a form of cinematic Viagra that you just cannot ignore.
War shooters, much in the same way, use the strength of the narrative and the cinematic glory to make you forget the technicalities of gameplay and enjoy the adrenaline pumped experience for what it is worth. But what happens when you take a war shooter and strip it off the brilliant storyline and cinematic grandeur? What you get, my dear readers, is Killzone 3.
Many seasoned game developers consider it more prudent to ignore bickering fanboys; for a good reason too. Killzone 3 is a perfect case study why it is wise to do so. I really enjoyed the awesomely grim storyline involving ruthless space Nazis that ran across Killzone, its sequel and Liberations for the PSP. But after heeding the wishes of fans clamoring for a light-hearted storyline, what we have here is a mangled excuse for a plot that's interspersed with bickering saas-bahu sequences of the formerly badass Helghan generals, to a backdrop of the inconsequential escapades of an emo captain, a typical angry young hero, a dumb sidekick and a perfunctory hot chick. It doesn't get more hackneyed than this.
But the billion odd sales of every single Call of Duty (CoD) franchise effectively demonstrate that fact that being hackneyed isn't an issue. CoD: Black Ops employed the much abused amnesiac protagonist trope, but it did it with pin-point precision through a tight, well paced, and more importantly, interesting narrative that had you glued to the seat. The Modern Warfare series is as generic as being generic can get, but it pioneered a unique cinematic technique that employed POV cameras and death of the protagonists. It developed a brilliant chemistry between McTavish and Captain Price. It has some singularly awesome moments like the sniper sequences and aircraft dropping from the skies that make your jaw drop to the floor.
The key point being, as hackneyed as it was, Call of Duty franchise is simply well executed. Like any of the aforementioned films. The same elements in Killzone 3 simply reek of, for a lack of better word, ineptitude. Unfortunately, as you have already seen, these elements collectively form the very heart and soul of war shooters. That's bad news for Killzone 3.
Killzone 3 takes place right after the events of Killzone 2, where the protagonist 'Sev' Sevchenko has defeated Radec and his bumbling sidekick has managed to kill the Helghast dictator Visari. This leads to a power struggle between the Helghan factions that form a backdrop to the beleaguered ISA agents, now trapped on the enemy planet, and on the run from approaching Helghast.
The principle thing wrong with this new direction is how the formerly ruthless Helghast, who hitherto had the singular motivation of crushing the ISA, have now been reduced to a bickering bunch of undisciplined fools. The dread and respect of fighting a highly motivated breed of heartless killers just isn't there. You now know that the Helghast are weak, they can be defeated. The mystique of the Helghast is gone. It's all hopelessly emo now.
The first thing that seasoned Killzone players will notice is the feel of the game. Gone is the typical heaviness that was prevalent in the previous titles. Killzone 3 feels much lighter now, and this adds a fair bit of manoeuvrability to the gameplay, making the action much more frantic. But this isn't necessarily a good thing. The lack of the same heavy handed familiarity may put off the fans, and the agility of the combat still isn't as good as the competition.
Killzone 3 therefore is nestled in an unfamiliar ground and seems confused as to who it's catering to. Having said that, the added speed does make the multiplayer mode and the bot populated offline multiplayer mode all the more fun.
The sound design, on the other hand, is just as you'd expect from a war shooter - frantic and filled with good classical instrumental pieces. Killzone 3 won't disappoint you, as long as you don't expect the sound effects in the order of the recent Medal of Honor.
When Killzone 2 was released, the Guerilla was quick to boast that they had pushed the very limits of the PS3, and then Uncharted 2 spoiled their party and had them eat their own words. Not surprisingly, although Killzone 3 looks definitely better than Killzone 2, we don't see any such rhetoric from the developer. That's mainly because while it may look good, it's still not any more spectacular than its contemporaries.
Some of the Helghan military base levels look mind-bendingly awesome due to the amazing lighting effects, but despite the well executed particle and shader effects, the uninspired level design doesn't do enough justice to the coders' efforts. While Killzone 2 was blamed to have the same rust themed look, Killzone 3 has varied locales with a more generous colour palette. You have most of the levels depicting post-apocalyptic aftermath of nuclear detonation, to snow based environs, an alien jungle in all its glory, to a level based on a moving leviathan factory.
However, despite the variety, the levels are quite uninspiring - the Helghan jungle levels being a prime example of the design ineptitude. The level manages to look drab despite its varied colour palette. The same goes for the rest of the levels as well, which you can because cover based war shooters, due to their very design are a curated experience, where a developer can leverage clever cover placement to give desired direction to the levels. The haphazard and uninvolving firefights across Killzone 3's levels make it quite clear that not a lot of thought has gone into the level design.
The lack of design ingenuity is also reflected in the jetpack implementation, which is lifted straight off from the one found in Halo: Reach. This is clearly a bad carbon copy of an equally bad original. I mean, jetpacks were perfected way back in the '60s. Military scientists had managed to get sustained flight out of the jetpacks, but scrapped the project because it essentially turned the soldiers into flying ducks. So when an advanced military race develops jetpacks that can only jump for short bursts, it evinces a lack of imagination and pure laziness on the part of the developers. Ditto for the weapons, which are just regular military weapons like the M4 carbine and the FAMAS assault rifle decked up to look futuristic alien guns. Having said that, the new WASPS rocket launcher with its drunk-missiles pwns everything else.
Killzone 3 does have its moments, in the form of the fun levels featuring Exoskeletons, which is just another name for Mechs. The epic battle with a 900 ft juggernaut decked with missiles and death rays dubbed MAWLR is also long and entertaining. However, it all is let down by the FMV sequences, which break the pace with the pointless abruptness. These cinematics have been perfunctorily placed in between the action just for the heck of it. The fact that they neither serve any purpose nor are they even close to awesome, makes you go wtf by the end of it.
These boring interludes try so hard at being dramatic that they end up being hilarious by the virtue of their ineptitude. This is a transgression of the highest order in this genre, and ruins the experience for me. The fact that the game ends rather abruptly, makes the single player campaign that lasts roughly eight hours feel rather unsatisfying.
As depressing as the single player campaign is, it's mitigated by a multiplayer campaign that's fairly entertaining, much thanks to the game's newfound agility. Killzone 3 offers split screen offline cooperative campaign, which is always a fun proposition, but it's marred by a noticeable drop in frame rates. Online co-op is sorely missing though. An interesting addition is the Botzone, which is an offline multiplayer mode that populates the maps with AI players, Quake II style. It's fun for the time when your Internet connectivity is down, which makes it tailor-made for Indian conditions in retrospect.
The online multiplayer mode has eight maps that incorporate all the varied terrains within the game. It gets a tactical spin with different character classes thrown in the mix like Marksman, Engineer, Field Medic, Tactician, and Infiltrator, with each class having its own skills and weapons. Seasoned Team Fortress nuts may have guessed what these specialities are, namely an invisibility cloak for the Marksman or a clever disguise for the Infiltrator. You know how the routine works. Winning battles nets points, which can then be spent to upgrade abilities or buy new weapons. Overall, the multiplayer mode is fun as long as you don't expect a Team Fortress out of it.
Summing up Killzone 3 is rather easy. If you are a fanboy, reading the review is moot, because you're going to buy and wank all over about its awesomeness irrespective of its merit anyway. Seasoned Killzone players, who still have the ability to think objectively, will not appreciate the turn the franchise has taken. Those who are new and migrating from other war shooters will see it for what it really is - a very mediocre effort. As large as the franchise is, the single player campaign doesn't warrant a purchase unless you are in it only for the graphics or the multiplayer experience.
This genre reflects the technicality of the hardcore PC gaming demographic that revels in the finer nuances of gameplay, level design and game/weapon balance. The PC gaming community was largely restricted to geeks who modded the readily available source codes of id's games and that would be reflected in the fixation of the old school FPS shooters in basic building blocks of game design. What they missed was a cinematic feel that the casual consoles demographic were used to.
Games like the Final Fantasy series have their gameplay as an excuse built around grandiose cinematics. Such was the way of the consoles. With successes like N64's Goldeneye and the countless Doom console ports, FPS games finally got a taste of the console treatment. The complexities entailed by a seamless keyboard mouse interface made way for the gameplay simplification needed to make the FPS titles amenable to the consoles.
As the AI became increasingly devious with Quake III on the PC front, the console side of the gaming spectrum was further dumbed down to help the sluggish gamepad controls of the early console war shooters like Medal of Honour. But the console gamers weren't in for the gameplay or design brilliance, they were in for the unexplored vistas of cinematic war shooters that captured the grittiness of war
The best way to explain this phenomenon are movies; namely Michael Bay's The Rock or John Woo's Hard Target - both of which are guilty pleasures devoid of any technical merit, but they are a form of cinematic Viagra that you just cannot ignore.
War shooters, much in the same way, use the strength of the narrative and the cinematic glory to make you forget the technicalities of gameplay and enjoy the adrenaline pumped experience for what it is worth. But what happens when you take a war shooter and strip it off the brilliant storyline and cinematic grandeur? What you get, my dear readers, is Killzone 3.
Many seasoned game developers consider it more prudent to ignore bickering fanboys; for a good reason too. Killzone 3 is a perfect case study why it is wise to do so. I really enjoyed the awesomely grim storyline involving ruthless space Nazis that ran across Killzone, its sequel and Liberations for the PSP. But after heeding the wishes of fans clamoring for a light-hearted storyline, what we have here is a mangled excuse for a plot that's interspersed with bickering saas-bahu sequences of the formerly badass Helghan generals, to a backdrop of the inconsequential escapades of an emo captain, a typical angry young hero, a dumb sidekick and a perfunctory hot chick. It doesn't get more hackneyed than this.
But the billion odd sales of every single Call of Duty (CoD) franchise effectively demonstrate that fact that being hackneyed isn't an issue. CoD: Black Ops employed the much abused amnesiac protagonist trope, but it did it with pin-point precision through a tight, well paced, and more importantly, interesting narrative that had you glued to the seat. The Modern Warfare series is as generic as being generic can get, but it pioneered a unique cinematic technique that employed POV cameras and death of the protagonists. It developed a brilliant chemistry between McTavish and Captain Price. It has some singularly awesome moments like the sniper sequences and aircraft dropping from the skies that make your jaw drop to the floor.
The key point being, as hackneyed as it was, Call of Duty franchise is simply well executed. Like any of the aforementioned films. The same elements in Killzone 3 simply reek of, for a lack of better word, ineptitude. Unfortunately, as you have already seen, these elements collectively form the very heart and soul of war shooters. That's bad news for Killzone 3.
Killzone 3 takes place right after the events of Killzone 2, where the protagonist 'Sev' Sevchenko has defeated Radec and his bumbling sidekick has managed to kill the Helghast dictator Visari. This leads to a power struggle between the Helghan factions that form a backdrop to the beleaguered ISA agents, now trapped on the enemy planet, and on the run from approaching Helghast.
The principle thing wrong with this new direction is how the formerly ruthless Helghast, who hitherto had the singular motivation of crushing the ISA, have now been reduced to a bickering bunch of undisciplined fools. The dread and respect of fighting a highly motivated breed of heartless killers just isn't there. You now know that the Helghast are weak, they can be defeated. The mystique of the Helghast is gone. It's all hopelessly emo now.
The first thing that seasoned Killzone players will notice is the feel of the game. Gone is the typical heaviness that was prevalent in the previous titles. Killzone 3 feels much lighter now, and this adds a fair bit of manoeuvrability to the gameplay, making the action much more frantic. But this isn't necessarily a good thing. The lack of the same heavy handed familiarity may put off the fans, and the agility of the combat still isn't as good as the competition.
Killzone 3 therefore is nestled in an unfamiliar ground and seems confused as to who it's catering to. Having said that, the added speed does make the multiplayer mode and the bot populated offline multiplayer mode all the more fun.
The sound design, on the other hand, is just as you'd expect from a war shooter - frantic and filled with good classical instrumental pieces. Killzone 3 won't disappoint you, as long as you don't expect the sound effects in the order of the recent Medal of Honor.
When Killzone 2 was released, the Guerilla was quick to boast that they had pushed the very limits of the PS3, and then Uncharted 2 spoiled their party and had them eat their own words. Not surprisingly, although Killzone 3 looks definitely better than Killzone 2, we don't see any such rhetoric from the developer. That's mainly because while it may look good, it's still not any more spectacular than its contemporaries.
Some of the Helghan military base levels look mind-bendingly awesome due to the amazing lighting effects, but despite the well executed particle and shader effects, the uninspired level design doesn't do enough justice to the coders' efforts. While Killzone 2 was blamed to have the same rust themed look, Killzone 3 has varied locales with a more generous colour palette. You have most of the levels depicting post-apocalyptic aftermath of nuclear detonation, to snow based environs, an alien jungle in all its glory, to a level based on a moving leviathan factory.
However, despite the variety, the levels are quite uninspiring - the Helghan jungle levels being a prime example of the design ineptitude. The level manages to look drab despite its varied colour palette. The same goes for the rest of the levels as well, which you can because cover based war shooters, due to their very design are a curated experience, where a developer can leverage clever cover placement to give desired direction to the levels. The haphazard and uninvolving firefights across Killzone 3's levels make it quite clear that not a lot of thought has gone into the level design.
The lack of design ingenuity is also reflected in the jetpack implementation, which is lifted straight off from the one found in Halo: Reach. This is clearly a bad carbon copy of an equally bad original. I mean, jetpacks were perfected way back in the '60s. Military scientists had managed to get sustained flight out of the jetpacks, but scrapped the project because it essentially turned the soldiers into flying ducks. So when an advanced military race develops jetpacks that can only jump for short bursts, it evinces a lack of imagination and pure laziness on the part of the developers. Ditto for the weapons, which are just regular military weapons like the M4 carbine and the FAMAS assault rifle decked up to look futuristic alien guns. Having said that, the new WASPS rocket launcher with its drunk-missiles pwns everything else.
Killzone 3 does have its moments, in the form of the fun levels featuring Exoskeletons, which is just another name for Mechs. The epic battle with a 900 ft juggernaut decked with missiles and death rays dubbed MAWLR is also long and entertaining. However, it all is let down by the FMV sequences, which break the pace with the pointless abruptness. These cinematics have been perfunctorily placed in between the action just for the heck of it. The fact that they neither serve any purpose nor are they even close to awesome, makes you go wtf by the end of it.
These boring interludes try so hard at being dramatic that they end up being hilarious by the virtue of their ineptitude. This is a transgression of the highest order in this genre, and ruins the experience for me. The fact that the game ends rather abruptly, makes the single player campaign that lasts roughly eight hours feel rather unsatisfying.
As depressing as the single player campaign is, it's mitigated by a multiplayer campaign that's fairly entertaining, much thanks to the game's newfound agility. Killzone 3 offers split screen offline cooperative campaign, which is always a fun proposition, but it's marred by a noticeable drop in frame rates. Online co-op is sorely missing though. An interesting addition is the Botzone, which is an offline multiplayer mode that populates the maps with AI players, Quake II style. It's fun for the time when your Internet connectivity is down, which makes it tailor-made for Indian conditions in retrospect.
The online multiplayer mode has eight maps that incorporate all the varied terrains within the game. It gets a tactical spin with different character classes thrown in the mix like Marksman, Engineer, Field Medic, Tactician, and Infiltrator, with each class having its own skills and weapons. Seasoned Team Fortress nuts may have guessed what these specialities are, namely an invisibility cloak for the Marksman or a clever disguise for the Infiltrator. You know how the routine works. Winning battles nets points, which can then be spent to upgrade abilities or buy new weapons. Overall, the multiplayer mode is fun as long as you don't expect a Team Fortress out of it.
Summing up Killzone 3 is rather easy. If you are a fanboy, reading the review is moot, because you're going to buy and wank all over about its awesomeness irrespective of its merit anyway. Seasoned Killzone players, who still have the ability to think objectively, will not appreciate the turn the franchise has taken. Those who are new and migrating from other war shooters will see it for what it really is - a very mediocre effort. As large as the franchise is, the single player campaign doesn't warrant a purchase unless you are in it only for the graphics or the multiplayer experience.
