Killzone Shadow Fall (PS4) Review

Killzone returns yet again with an all-new story and (mostly) new setting for the launch of the PlayStation 4 with a game that’s visually spectacular, but ultimately somewhat stilted and rough around the edges.

I don’t know what it is with Killzone. It just doesn’t seem to have it. You know what I mean, that mythical quality that first-person shooters that are truly triple-A just seem to have. The world that Guerrilla created is solid with some great ideas, the controls are decent enough and the graphics (especially with this installment) are terrific. All that though and the series is mainly known for being two things- touted as a Halo-killer in its disastrous first outing and encapsulating the mediocre ideal.

I think pretty much every installment has been heralded as the best thing since rechargeable batteries and they all befall the same fate more or less. As far as my experiences with the Killzone series go, I thought Killzone 2 was a great game and yet somehow failed to muster up the enthusiasm to pick up K3 when it was released. I really enjoyed Killzone Mercenary on the Vita however, flaws and all… Though, looking back, it may have been an ever so slight case of just having a halfway decent shooter on the Vita to play that made it seem so great.

Having never played Killzone 3, I was a little bit lost as Shadow Fall started up. The game picks up a while after the war between the people of Vekta and the cutthroat Helghast from the neighboring planet of Helgan has ceased… man did it cease. In the final moments of the conflict, a weapon was unleashed on the Helghast that decimated their entire world- a planet-killer that made the world that they were exiled to years before into a dead husk.

It’s a startling moment for someone who hadn’t seen it previously and is just the first of many parts of Killzone Shadow Fall where I, as the player and Vektan Shadow Marshall Lucas Kellan, basically felt a good deal of empathy for the badguys. See the Helghast were relocated to Vekta of all places after their world was annihilated. That was maybe not the greatest idea in the world since the Helghan people hate the Vektans even more post-war and resent them greatly from behind their walled-off sections of the planet. It’s there that their leaders plot to overthrow the Vektan power elite and claim the world for their own.

There are even times where you can listen in on the Helghast and hear them talking about the war, about how some of them really don’t want to be fighting… it’s these moments that add a ton to the storyline of Shadow Fall, but there aren’t nearly enough of them to really have an impact on the game in the way that they should. Hearing a Helghast trooper talking about his family changes nothing for how the following scene will play out- you’ll have to take them all out regardless and in the same fashion. Actually, at times the storyline seems disjointed and spotty in its narrative in general and that’s a real shame considering how cool this all could have been, even with the addition of something as minor as a few choices that you’d have to make here and there during play.

Fortunately, there’s nothing wrong with Killzone Shadow Fall’s looks. This is one of the best looking games I’ve seen this year on any platform and at times is drop-dead gorgeous. Even the interior segments, which won’t knock your socks off, are nonetheless well-crafted and intricately designed. And then there are the outdoor portions. Guerrilla did an extraordinary job with the Vektan capital’s cityscape and there are some sections of relative wilderness that are super different for the series and look really special with skies that seem as real as anything that you’d see outside of the window. Spectacular stuff almost all around.

Likewise the soundtrack is fitting and well-done. The score more often than not sets the stage beautifully and underscores the action and hectic pace of some of the battles in Shadow Fall well. I also have to mention the sound effects here as I personally think they’re some of the best I’ve ever heard in a game. It might not seem like much as you’re reading this, but to hear your boots crunching on a gravelly outcropping and then listening to your gloved hands sliding on a few pebbles as you climb up some jutting stones on a hillside is really, really neat and took me into the experience in a fantastic way.

I wasn’t so crazy about the voice-acting though, although I think that might have more to do with the script. It definitely had its moments, but I thought Shadow Fall missed some golden opportunities to truly expand the franchise and have even more of a questionable air of who’s right and who’s wrong than it does. That’s to say that the narrative does touch on some cool things, but I wanted more. Other than that, the dialog was something of a letdown throughout and subsequently, so was the voice acting. Everybody just kind of felt generic and that’s not great by any means.

Controls in Killzone Shadow Fall are, like the rest of the game, a little mixed. You have all your usual stuff that you’ll find in any modern shooter, but then you also have your echo-location system (which is not all that useful), and your ‘owl’. The owl is a little drone that accompanies you throughout and can do a number of tasks and is actually pretty cool. A combination of button presses and swiping on the control pad’s touchpad can cause it to attack, defend, cast a zip line, revive you if you fall in combat (provided you have adrenaline packs) and hack terminals.

The problem for me was that I thought there were a little too many controls involved with the little guy and would have preferred to have seen the options streamlined a bit. This may be just personal taste here, so your mileage may vary, but I found that having so many options at my disposal took me out of the fast and furious combat at times, which I didn’t care for.

And speaking of combat, if you’re looking for multiplayer, Killzone actually has a surprisingly solid and fun set of modes. I have an image of this series as one that’s not all that heavy on the multiplay, but Shadow Fall definitely kept my attention. I’m not even really a multiplayer fan at all (and haven’t played a multilayer shooter with any regularity since Halo 2) and I dug what Guerrilla did here. I suppose if you’re a multi-maven, you might find the offerings a little too slim, but for anyone looking to extend the life of the game post-campaign (which is unquestionably the focal point) it’ll do the trick pretty nicely.

Final Thoughts

Killzone Shadow Fall is such a mixed bag that I’m actually torn on which way to go with my Final Thoughts on it.

On one hand I loved the graphics and the sound design as well as many of the level layouts that developer Guerrilla Games put together here… on the other hand the story is sub-par, the writing is as well and the campaign has no flow to it that actually got me excited to head back into the game’s world for another go-around.

There’s still so much untapped potential within Killzone that I’m flat-out disappointed by the fact that the series continues to be so unpolished. Even when there’s so much to like about an installment, there’s just that much more to not like. Killzone Shadow Fall is slightly more in the former’s direction, but there’s still too much of the latter to call it the triumph that I thought it might finally be.