Killzone Shadow Fall Review

After the release of Killzone 3 a couple of years ago, many people were unhappy with the series’ direction and worried about its future. I wasn’t one of those people. Killzone has always offered an alternative to Call of Duty and Halos, and I was interested to see what they could do with a new console and a lot more horsepower. There is a lot of good to come of it.

Graphics

Killzone has always been a bleak-looking game because of the tones it pulls the player through, but that ends with Shadow Fall. You’re brought into a far more vibrant world with many diverse locales and levels to battle through. Seeing the large, lush world Guerrilla has created with so much detail and scale is always wonderful. The game looks and runs beautifully.

Gameplay

Killzone: Shadow Fall begins with a rather lengthy tutorial/origin story where you try to get through the wall safely, only for unfortunate circumstances to occur. The wall in the story feels like the real-life Berlin Wall and has a dark and ominous atmosphere. The story has much more exploration than previous games, and you can easily get lost in the expansive areas you travel around. You are able to easily walk around undetected if you are smart enough to use stealth to your advantage, although there are times when stealth isn’t an option. Sometimes the stealth kills don’t work very well either with a rifle butt replacing a knife skill and alerting everyone in the area.

Audio

There are a ton of different collectibles to collect in the game, the coolest being the audio logs, which play from the speaker in your DualShock 4. It’s startling to hear out of the blue, but it makes it much easier to hear through that speaker than over the game music and everything else. The sound design has always been a high point of Killzone, which continues in Killzone Shadow Fall. You can hear every little detail around you, from enemies in the distance to the raucous sounds of bullets and explosions happening around you.

OWL

The missions are completely non-linear, giving the game much more replay value. The game lets you approach things head-on or take different routes with your OWL unit’s help, making it a whole new game. Your OWL is your robotic companion and does many valuable things that can help you get out of some tight jams. The OWL can shut down enemy alarms and override electrical controls, attack people, throw up a shield for you, or even shoot out a zipline to fly down. It creates multiple possibilities and outcomes to every battle and differentiates itself from other games in the genre. The OWL can even revive you, provided it’s not in battle and an adrenaline (health) pack is available. It’s something different, and it takes away the whole shoot, take cover, shoot mentality.

Doing Too Much

Killzone: Shadow Fall does many things well, but it also forces the player to do something that it doesn’t do so well. There are areas where you have to almost complete puzzles when you’re putting energy into different slots to power doors and such, there’s platforming where you have to be rather precise with your jumps, zero-gravity sections, and more. It takes away from the core experience to make players do things that aren’t fun and unnecessary to the story.

Multiplayer

While the campaign is the bread and butter of the franchise, the multiplayer will keep you coming back repeatedly. Shadow Fall throws out the conventional experience-based progression system for various challenges to test your true skill. Almost every weapon for each skill tree is unlocked from the start, and Warzones allow you to tailor the game to your liking. Want to just use snipers and knives with one life, you can? Want just shotguns on one map? You can do it. Toss that fact and the fact that this game is set to be supported for some time, and I’d say Guerrilla Games has built a pretty solid experience.

Conclusion

Killzone: Shadow Fall is the best Killzone game in the series thus far and will bring better direction to the future of this series. If Killzone 3 was a low point, Killzone: SF is a high point for the franchise. I’d definitely recommend picking this one up especially with the low amount of games available on the PS4 right now, you won’t regret it.