​Killzone Shadow Fall: The Kotaku Review

And there’s more, like the ol’ ‘biological super-weapon in
wrong hands.’ Likewise, enemy-among-us and ‘the infrastructure of a more
welcoming society being turned into weapons’. And you play through all of this the same way you’ve played through dozens (hundreds?) of other shooters: peek around cover, hide-and-heal, look for the rocket launcher. The AI don’t really seem like they want to keep on living. Rather, they just want to make the task of killing them as annoying as possible.

Glimmers of interesting play ideas do exist on this Killzone game, however. The OWL is a
remote drone that can throw up a force shield, hack devices, stun enemies or shoot
at selected bad guys. It also revives you when you’re downed and spools out a
zip line when you need to reach another less-elevated area. Swiping in a
certain direction on the DualShock 4’s touchpad changes the task OWL will do
for you. This input method felt surprisingly natural and I never felt like I
was tripping over a new way to play the same ol’ tired FPS missions.

The OWL stuff is fun and creates some opportunities for
strategies—which can feel like single-player co-op—that differentiate Shadow Fall‘s single-player from other
FPS campaigns. Some vestiges of that also pop up when Kellan partners up with
another human, too. Nevertheless, it’s not enough of a differentiation, though.

There’s an element of braggart showmanship to Shadow Fall. It’s as if with every mindboggling
vista or nutso-busy cityscape Guerilla is saying, “Hey, look at what we
can do.” But the problem with all the visual dazzle is that it makes the
screen hard to read. Someone’s shooting at you; but from where? You’re supposed
to climb a cliff; but which parts? The tricks that developers use to drive the
eye to key parts of a game world get lost in a ton of visual noise.

The advent of next-gen hardware and the technological
muscle-flexing that comes with it doesn’t make shitty on-rails sections any
better. All those motes of debris don’t enliven an umpty-millionth ‘shoot a
minigun from a helicopter’ moment. No amount of teraflops is going to make a bad game good.

And the focus on hardware maximization also highlights what these
game-makers can’t do. Guerilla aims at nuance with the game’s Cold War
parallels but it’s too heavy-handed. Certain sections of the game are outright
snooze-inducing, especially the seductively slow camera pan shots where the
player is supposed to ooh and aah at the shinies. The voice acting in Shadow Fall is either wooden or overdone.
Character faces are more detailed but awkwardly animated.

Another thought bubbled as I kept neck-stabbing and shooting
through Shadow Fall: if this game
wasn’t so astoundingly gorgeous, I’d be bored out of my skull. It’s a cliché
that beauty fades and Shadow Fall‘s
pulchritude is no exception. Once the wonder faded, it became clear that the
game is a collection of missed marks and recycled design.

It’s kind of a surprise, then, that Shadow Fall‘s ending is far better than I was expecting. Filled
with war-justification speechifying and the tensest gameplay moments of the
whole campaign, it’s centered around the most shocking kind of political power
shift. Shadows Fall‘s conclusion is the
kind of finale cooked up by people who want players to talk about it. But by the
time the ending rolled around, I already felt like I’d suffered through a ton
of half-baked acting and combat encounters. One sorta-interesting level wouldn’t
be enough to redeem the whole experience.