Killzone Shadow Fall – Review

Here we are with our first review for a PS4 game. We’ve upgraded our consoles to the next generation and are ready for another 10 years or so. Killzone Shadow Fall is the first next-gen game (for PlayStation obviously) that we’ll be taking under the loop. It is the sixth game in the Killzone series developed by our Dutch friends at Guerilla Games.

Story

The game starts with you, Lucas, and your father Kellan trying to sneak through New Helghan to the other site of the Wall. It divides the planet Vekta into two parts: Vekta and New Helghan. The Wall, a massive security fortification, was constructed to separate the two civilizations from each other due to the bad feelings they have towards one another over the previous war. All this was put in motion after the Vektans allowed the surviving Helghasts to live on Vekta when Helghan was destroyed in the war. Now on to the main story again. While trying to sneak to the other side of the Wall, Lucas and his father encounter Sinclair, a Shadow Marshal. On their way to escape New Helghan, Lucas’ father gets killed by the Helghast. Sinclair promises Lucas he will take care of him. While under the care of Sinclair, Lucas became a full-fledged Shadow Marshal and the youngest ever to graduate the Shadow Marshal Academy. At the time of his graduation is when the actual game starts. It is about 30 years after the events of Killzone 3. On one of his missions for Sinclair, Lucas encounters Echo. She is a hybrid, half Vektan, half Helghast and the daughter of Lady Visari, the current leader of the Helghast. After a few encounters with Echo, she convinces Lucas that both of the civilizations don’t want to wage war against each other. How they will stop the war, I will not tell you. It’s up to you to find out by playing the game.

Echo, the hybrid that catches your attention

Graphics

The graphics of the game didn’t overwhelm me. But that is to be expected from a launch game. Why they didn’t overwhelm me? Because the game looks like a ps3 game at its best and we have had a lot good looking games lately for PS3. That however might be an indication that once the developers have learned how to program for the PS4, games will look ridiculously beautiful as this console is 10 times more powerful than its predecessor.
Despite my negativity about the graphics for a next-gen game, it does look really good. But maybe I raised my hopes a bit too high for the launch games.

Beautiful surroundings

Sound

What’s there to say about the sound of a shooter? Mostly there is not much music in the game. And if there is you probably don’t notice it because of all the shooting. The voice acting was superbly done. It was believable, never felt overacted and every voice fitted perfectly by the character.

Gameplay

When starting the game, you have three options: Campaign, Multiplayer and About. The campaign is the main story consisting out of ten chapters. If you start a campaign you have the option to choose the difficulty: easy, normal or hard. If you play a lot of shooters I would recommend the hard difficulty to have a bit of a challenge from this game, else I would advise easy or normal as these aren’t too hard at all.

The game makes use of the new Dual Shock 4 controller by attaching the controls of your OWL to the touchpad on the DS4. You just slide up, down, left or right to give your OWL a command. The four commands are attack, stun, shield and zip line. Attack obviously means attack an enemy while stun means stun an enemy. With the shield command the OWL will generate an electric shield in front of you. You’ll use the command zip line when you want to descend to a lower area, which is otherwise unreachable for you. And yes you’ll die if you just jump to it, but with the OWL’s zipline you’ll be able to safely descend to these areas. You will use your OWL frequently as it is your handiest tool throughout the whole game. The addition of the OWL is new to the game and maybe the best one they’ve added. Granted there are some new weapons, but I found myself using the same ones over and over again, while deploying my OWL for distraction. The OWL also has a fifth function, it can hack/scan terminals and alarms to open doors or prevent enemy reinforcements from showing up.

Another use of the DS4 controller is that when you pick up an audio log the sound will not come through your television but through the speaker built in the controller. You do not expect that at all, when I first picked up an audio log I jumped up 2 feet from my couch just because it came so unexpected and really loud.

Approaching the enemy from above.

In multiplayer you can choose out of multiple Warzones. For example 24 Player Team Deathmatch, 24 Player Warzone, Classic Warzone and so on. Each has its own game mechanism and missions to complete in team. You can play online or offline. Online of course is against other players, offline is against bots. You can choose from 1 to 11 bots, and you can set the bot difficulty from easy to hard.

In the About section you can view the credits of the game again, read the Legal Notices and visit the site killzone.com. Not much to brag about, but still if you ever need to know something you can find it quickly here.

Conclusion

Killzone Shadow Fall is a great shooter, certainly for a launch game. Story wise it seemed it came a bit short when compared to its predecessors. They had a story that evolved through multiple games, while Shadow Fall’s story came to a close at the end of the game. I would’ve loved an open ending to anticipate another Killzone game. It were always the stories of the Killzone games that got me hooked to these games. To conclude this review, all in all Guerilla Games delivered another solid Killzone game to the series.

Luffy

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