Let’s say you just defeated your enemy by blowing up his planet. Then, apparently feeling guilt, you give the enemy refugees half your planet, because, hey, what could go wrong? I mean you have a (presumably small) population that hates you to the death and not just because you blew up their planet, so it’ll be okay if you give them half of yours, right? And rather than giving them some continent somewhere, you just put a wall up and they get one side and you get the other. Oh, and your citizens that lived there? They need to move, and your enemy may or may not cooperate in giving them safe passage.
Does that sound like the stupidest, most contrived scenario for a game? It does to me, but that is the premise for Killzone Shadow Fall. Since I never finished Killzone 2 or 3, I don’t know if this is in keeping with spectacularly stupid plots or is a new achievement in stupidity for the series, but there you have it.
Assuming you can muster up the effort to keep playing the game after that introduction, you’ll see a very attractive game that seems like it could be fun. You get dropped on the enemy side of the wall, yet for some reason, you don’t have any gear with you. You need to find all your stuff, including your personal helper robot, which is a nifty thing. Again, contrived and stupid. The video below shows me retrieving the ammo for my rifle with the help of the robot. I order it to go and kill the baddies then use it to make a zip line so I can get to the dropped supplies. I then explore a bit and find a downed allied aircraft. I stopped the video at that point, because I thought I was going to die, but I fought off the attackers and continued the mission.
The main problem I have so far with Shadow Fall is, while it is pretty, the field of view is narrow enough that it is hard to see enemies until you’re being hit by their bullets. This is annoying. Surely if I can have flying robot helpers, I could have a HUD that outlines the enemies for me.
In the short term, I have abandoned Shadow Fall and continued to enjoy Knack. Once Knack is done, I will consider what game I should play amidst playing LOTRO Helm’s Deep and Star Trek Online’s The Sphere.