‘Killzone 3’ launches players into action

“Killzone 3”, the latest installment in the Killzone series, earns its place in the area of top quality first-person shooter games. The latest segment of the series excels with impressive battlefields, gripping combat and engaging player experience. Despite these impressive qualities, the story and character development do suffer.   For those who have never played a Playstation exclusive Killzone game and aren’t familiar with the story, it follows the war between two factions of humans. On one side you have the ISA, the normal-looking humans, who are the good guys.

Then you have the red goggled Helghast who have made it their primary objective to take over the universe. In “Killzone 3,” you follow Sev, who is a part of a group of ISA stranded on the Helghast planet fighting tooth and nail to survive. This could have made for an awesome story line if Sony had developed it further.

The game jumps around to different time zones without giving anything in between. This opens up some opportunities for a wide array of level types, but leaves the story feeling disconnected. It seems that the story was built around the levels instead of the levels being built around the story.

Although it would have been great to see Sony weave an intricate story, the levels that they do bring as a result of the lackluster story are absolutely phenomenal.

Killzone takes the player through some really in-depth levels that, despite being filled with a raging war, are quite believable. The broken buildings parallel to scenes of war that are seen in modern day warfare.

These levels can seem repetitive, but are broken up nicely by varying level types, such as snow, jungle, and vehicle segments. They also do an excellent job of supplementing the feeling of being in the action–creating a chaotic atmosphere equivalent of actual battlefield action. Killzone does a good job creating a gamer experience with substance. When the player runs, the camera moves appropriately. When the player reloads their gun the screen moves to look at the gun, as would any real soldier.

These additions make the player feel like what they do has real consequence. The sacrifice of this is that the controls don’t feel as snappy as other shooters might. Overall, this trade off is worth it.