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Oct 8th, 2013 at 08:52:46 - Killzone 3 (PS3) |
Killzone 3 refines the gunplay that I felt was already excellent in Killzone 2. By "refinement" I mean it is more sleek and feels like every other AAA FPS in the 2010s. Killzone 2 had no auto-aiming and felt a little old-school in the gun department. I appreciate the crispness of aiming in 3, but it does feel like it bent to conformity. I think that's a big theme in the game's design, is just bending to what's hot. This involves a lot of Gearing like I talked about in my Killzone 2 entry, which is odd because I thought Gears of War was very unique. Maybe I should call it CoD-ing. I dunno. Either way, the production value was ramped up even higher. The game looks amazing and sounds great too. The "stealth" part through the Helghast wilderness was a visual wonder.
The story took a turn for the better too. There's more they try to tell in this game, which made it a little more interesting. You get to see some of the internal conflict in Helghast high command. Killzone 2 had these out-of-place Soviet-style propaganda posters up all over the Helghast city. They were weird because there wasn't really anything Soviet about the Helghast besides that they were very militarized. Like, no communist-leaning ideology, and I don't think they needed propaganda because everyone seemed to be on board with being a completely militarized society. Anyway, in Killzone 3, you meet the Helghast high command, or Senate or whatever they are called, and they are designed to look exactly like Nazis or Soviet-era Communists. I think this is silly more than anything since the society still has nothing to do with Nazism or Communism. One of the members even had a Hitler mustache. Go google pictures of the Helghast senate to see what I mean. Questionable artistic choices aside, their internal politics add a little depth to the story and that was a good thing.
They tried to tell more narrative with your squad too, not in the sense of backstory or anything, which I think is a shame and something that I would have WANTED them to do like Gears of War, but in terms of the relationships between the characters and having them display more emotions and things. This was still welcome, like Rico expressing regret for spoiler spoiler and Narville finally admitting his plans aren't always correct and letting Sev and Rico gung-go it. The only problem with this approach is that sometimes it interrupted otherwise exciting gameplay segments with cut scenes. I only didn't like this when those gameplay segments were too short. Other times it was fine, but the length of gameplay segments/frequency of cut scenes was disjointed.
Another aspect of the game that made it feel disjointed were many of the "gunner" segments. These were the times when you get in a vehicle that is 100% on rails and you just aim and shoot at things. This actually happened a lot and, while visually and kinaesthetically pleasing, was just sort of lame because you can never actually drive the vehicles and you have no control over anything in the segment except shooting at things. And all the weapons for all these vehicles are the same. Left trigger fires missiles or rockets. Right trigger is the machine gun. These didn't even have to be in the game. They just felt tacked on, there because they had to be because gunner segments are cool and that's what Call of Duty does. Since they did put them in, they should have been more open-ended and given the player more control over driving at least, or changed up the weapon types or something to add variety. There were also "did it because we have to" style stealth and horror elements. One level in particular has you stealthing through a gorgeous Helghan environment sniping and stealth-killing (another addition to the game, Gearing) enemies silently by pressing L1 when you get near them. Very out of place gameplay in the context of the rest of the game. The horror bit was lame too, felt forced, and reminded me exactly of when you go in the refinery or whatever in Gears and find the mutated spider thingies...what a coincidence, you're also in a refinery here and find mutated spider thingies!
There was *slightly* more gun variety in Killzone 3 than 2. They added some type of energy gun that was fun to use and...I think the bolt gun was new. They also let you detach machine gun turrets and carry them around, which was sweet. You can carry 2 primary weapons in Killzone 3 instead of K2's 1 primary. So you can always have 1 "heavy" weapon like the machine gun turret or sniper rifle and 1 normal weapon like a submachine gun or assault rifle, and then of course the pistol. This was an obvious improvement from Killzone 2 because you could switch weapons on the fly and expand your tactical repertoire to deal with a variety of situations.
Unfortunately though, again, there isn't much enemy variety. You fight all Helghast soldiers with different guns. This time there is a melee version that rushes you, some with lightning guns and one with a jetpack. Oh, by the way, I was excited to be able to use a jetpack. I think it was a feature on the box. You only get it for one level! It was lame. They also had tiny bits of levels with low gravity, which was also poorly done. Anyway, jetpack enemies. There were like no boss fights in the game, which was disappointing. There was a giant segment where you take down a big walker but it wasn't that great. Toward the end of the game, the levels get very corridor-y. You just go down corridor after corridor after corridor and fly an underwhelming spaceship gunner part for the finale. It was in the corridor-y parts that they bring the low gravity trick. The low gravity trick could have been cool if it was used for anything at all, but it wasn't. Enemies don't take advantage of low gravity and neither can you. If you jump you just float up in the air, a simple target for enemies to shoot down. Yet when your AI teammates jump, they don't float. Hmm. Enemies also float when you kill them, for whatever reason. Alive - grounded. Dead - float. Huh?
Oh yeah, before I forget, one more Gearing thing. You can revive your AI teammates and they revive you too. This was sort of stupid because half the time they wouldn't revive you and half the time they would. When they won't, they say things like "There's too much enemy fire" and "You're too far away." Most of the time I argue they definitely could reach me if they'd just run and do it. Then sometimes like they wouldn't revive you if they'd recently revived you and other times they'd do it 3 times in a row without a problem. I didn't like that there were no hard and fast rules so that I never could guess very well whether or not I'd be revived. Anyway, not that huge a deal.
Last thing I'll say to wrap up...the end sucked. It ends abruptly, no epilogue or anything. After a trilogy of games, I expect an epilogue or some wrapping up or something. Then there was a little part in the middle of the credits that I won't ruin, but was just dumb.
Killzone 3: fun game, worth playing especially if you like the series. Beautiful game. Killzone 2 is the better one. Read there's a sequel for PS4 on launch. Wonder how it'll compare?
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Oct 8th, 2013 at 11:49:58.
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Oct 8th, 2013 at 08:11:42 - KillZone 2 (PS3) |
Killzone 2 was awesome, a huge step up in all things from Killzone. Sometime between the two games, the developers learned how to make a fun FPS. It's a little weird writing this now after also finishing Killzone 3, which I'll get to momentarily. Killzone 2 I guess was one of PS3's big-name shooters along with the Resistance series. It's got AAA production values with good voice actors, good audio and stunning visuals. The environmental art in particular had my jaw dropping. Each area looks huge and dwarfs any skirmish that is happening when the camera pans out, and when you look around you, you're in awe of the scale. I kept thinking how many battles like this were happening all over the city and nearby areas. The narrative also is much better told than in Killzone. In Killzone, the Helghast invade Earth. After driving them away, in Killzone 2 humanity goes on the offensive and attempts to capture Scolar Visari, the Helghast's leader, on their planet, Helghan. The planet is harsh and cold and has crazy lightning storms, which the Helghast harness and use for their defense system. After the first wave of the assault is decimated by said lightning defense system, your objective changes to go figure out where all the energy comes from and whatnot. You find out there's a giant power grid and some mineral that the Helghast use, so you destroy the power grid and move on to Visari again. He nukes his own capital city to prevent you from getting at him, but you go anyway, kill his security detail and kill him. Roll credits.
At least halfway through, the game started to show signs of what I will call "Gearing," that is, being uncannily similar to Gears of War. Gears also takes place on a harsh and brutal planet. It also has a mysterious energy source lurking underneath that the bad guys also harness for their military. In Killzone 3, there are even little spider enemies filled with said mysterious energy that explode when you shoot them, just like the little spider enemies in Gears of War that are filled with mysterious energy that explode when you shoot them! Your squad in Killzone 2 and even more in 3 begins to resemble your squad in Gears. Similar banter, similar ideals and issues. Problem is they're not nearly as well done, which is not necessarily a criticism because Gears had perhaps the best characterization of any shooter I've ever played. Killzone's characters are functional. You're the level-headed one. Rico is the hothead who is going to disobey every order. Narville is the one who gives orders and does everything by the book and plays it safe. There's even the token female, Jammer, who should have been given a more prominent role so it wouldn't be so obvious that this was a game about men only. Gears had some female characters, but they actually fought with you and were serious badasses such that the game didn't feel like it was just for boys about boys. I can't remember, but you might have played as a female at some point. No reason to make military shooters with only male characters. So I really wish that Killzone 2 had more of its own identity because the problem gets worse in 3.
Some great things about Killzone 2 were that the aiming and gunplay felt very good, even like a nod to older shooters. There's no auto-aim, which really tested my skills. There were some seriously difficult sequences. The one I remember most was the boss fight against Visari's head security guy, Radec. He can turn invisible and will *poof* appear right next to you with a knife and slice you up if you aren't always running. If you do run, he'll *poof* appear far away and open fire with a deadly machine gun. So you always have to be running, listening to where he's coming from, where he is, which weapon he has out, determine if you need to take cover from machine gun fire or charge him to shoot before he can stab you. Hit him and he *poof* disappears. The sequence leading up to Radec was so hard too. I loved it. I eventually figured out the best trick to killing Radec was just my gun choice, after figuring out how to move toward and away from him depending on his weapon and how he (dis)appeared and all that. Shotgun. Just use a shotgun. Don't get fancy!
There was another great boss fight early on against this flying missile launcher drone thing. The designs of these fights aren't very complex, but they force you to be almost perfect in your execution, otherwise you die. So with this sentry bot fight, you're on a small square rooftop with a pillar in the center. On either side (front and back) there are two energy canisters (that mysteriously "refill" or something when you shoot them). If you shoot a canister when the sentry is near, it gets shocked and you can shoot it with the missile launcher. You just repeat this 4 or 5 times and stay behind cover as best you can. The sentry fires machine guns and constantly swoops around the pillar forcing you to shuffle around it to hide. But every so often, it will strafe and launch 3 rockets. You will always take damage from this, but if you move your butt ASAP you will live. Then while the smoke is clouding the air from the rockets, you need to quickly determine where the sentry is and get back to the pillar to hide from the machine gun fire that has probably already begun again. It was a really difficult but enjoyable fight.
Unfortunately though, these are the only two boss fights I can think of. You never fight another sentry like that again, in Killzone 2 or 3. There are more, but they are either supposed to be ignored or they are killed way easily. And that's another big problem with Killzone 2. There is very little enemy variety. You ONLY fight Helghast troops with the occasional (easy version) sentry bot that just has machine guns. The troops all look more or less the same and just come with different guns. Oh, there's the flamethrower Helghast and there's the sniper Helghast and the submachine gun Helghast...Definitely needed more enemy variety.
The game also suffered from lack of gun variety. This one is mind-boggling. You can only have ONE gun at a time, plus your pistol. Come on now. And there aren't but a handful of guns in the game at all. There's like one version of each, sniper rifle, assault rifle, LMG, flamethrower, missile launcher, SMG...maybe one or two more. And frag grenades only. The cool thing that I guess speaks to the good level design and encounter design is that I never really felt bored of the enemies or the guns. I enjoyed fighting the whole time, even though it was limited, something I was able to think more about after the fact and into Killzone 3.
And that's about all I've got to say on that. I'll write a short entry for Killzone 3 soon, mostly just saying what I liked/didn't like that changed and say some more about more Gearing that went on in that game! Killzone 2 was really good!
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Oct 5th, 2013 at 08:56:50 - Killzone HD (PS3) |
Very excited to get a PS3 and acquire all the exclusives I'd wanted to play for years. One of those were the Killzone games, which are like futuristic sci-fi FPSes with cool case covers. I was going to skip Killzone 1 because it was on PS2 and it didn't get very good reviews, counter to Killzone 2 and 3. But I found out you could buy a Killzone Trilogy with a remastered HD Killzone. What the hell, I'll try it for narrative continuity.
Oh my god, Killzone sucks. I spent about two hours with it. The environment is gray and drab. Owing from its PS2 days, which I can't really fault it for being hampered by the technology of a decade ago, the draw distance is really close. I kept seeing grass pop up 10 feet in front of me, and buildings fade to gray not far from the character, making it look like you're walking through Silent Hill where you can only see a short distance in front of you and everything is gray ash beyond that. The movement is clunky. I felt like I was driving a tank, not controlling a human. The weapons take forever to reload, feel slow and sluggish and have these weird firing arc animations where they tried to animate bullet paths but it just feels laggy. The aiming is utterly horrendous. The slightest touch of the analog stick send the view scope swinging nausea-inducingly wildly. There is no precision aiming on the sniper rifle. Enemies are hard to hit because the aiming sucks, and then they take like 30 bullets each. Seriously, it was...what's another adjective for really bad...REALLY BAD.
Another dated aspect, checkpoints are too few and far between. It autosaves when you complete an area and if you die, you have to restart whatever area you are on. Since the aiming sucks and the enemies have boss-like hit points sometimes and you move like a damaged tank, you die a lot. This set me back 10 minutes at a time. Really irritating. What else...Oh yes, the sound sucks too. There is no music. No music! Just guns. Actually it makes the game eerily quiet in places, but I didn't like it because it is supposed to be an action game, not a stealth or horror FPS. The voice acting ain't great and the AI is dumb. Your allies are invincible for some reason, but offer very little help killing anything. They also shout things out, like good squadmates should do, but what they shout is really dumb. I can't remember any examples, but I remember just scrunching up my face like "...what?" The enemy shouts weren't very good either. They mostly yelled "Killl themmm" over and over.
Story was intriguing, which was really why I figured to give Killzone a shot before 2 and 3, but the gameplay sucked and I didn't uncover an iota of plot during two hours. That's the same thing I said in my CoD write-up just now. If the story sucks, or is absent, the gameplay must be excellent to keep me going. After quitting the game because I couldn't handle the drabness anymore, I looked up the storyline. Apparently...nothing really happens and can be summed up thusly: The bad guys attack the good guys' planet. The good guys repel them. All major bad guys are still alive.
I switched to Killzone 2 last night and happy to report that the third time's a charm. I finally got a PS3 game that I enjoy! It remedies almost everything from Killzone 1, except (so far) that the enemies all feel very much the same. They are just Helghast with different guns. It makes the game feel less sci-fi that I want. But the environment is amazing and feels very dystopian (though there are out-of-place Soviet-style propaganda posters) and there may be some creatures coming into play as the game comes to seem more and more similar to Gears of War. More on Killzone 2 soon, as I will likely complete it this weekend.
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Oct 5th, 2013 at 08:35:13 - Call of Duty: World at War (PS3) |
Ok, my first two PS3 games ever are failing left and right. Or I'm just making poor choices. I inherited my brother's PS3 recently and have just finished getting missing accessories and buying most every PS3 exclusive I wanted to play and most every game that was supposed to be better on PS3 or that was region locked on my NTSC-J 360. Began with one of my brother's games, one that I would never have bought on my own. I'm not a Call of Duty fan, but if a friend has one I'll play through the campaign just to watch big explosions and see how disjointed the story is.
World at War, in the 2 hours I played it, succeeded in having big explosions and a disjointed story, par for the CoD course. Unfortunately, my PS3 won't read the disc anymore. I read online that this is a not uncommon problem with World at War, which is weird. The disc is cosmetically perfect and the PS3 reads everything else I put in it. People online reported the same phenomenon. But anyway, I can only review based on the first two hours.
I enjoyed the WWII setting. I know there are a zillion WWII games, but I don't play many of them so I don't have era burnout. I play more futuristic sci-fi games and was glad for the return of fighting with MACHINES instead of cyber-weapons. The audio was fantastic, the sounds of the guns rang in my ears. It sounded (to the best of my knowledge) really like firing old guns from that era. As you would expect, the game looked gorgeous too.
The difference between this WWII game and most others is that this was set in the Pacific theatre. There is no D-Day level. A couple early levels had me going through an island jungle getting ambushed by tricksy Japanese soldiers who like to yell "BANZAIIII" and charge. They also liked to pretend to be dead, then get up and yell banzai, hide in the bushes and emerge yelling banzai, kill your allies and hide under them and get up and yell banzai, hide in the bed of a truck or near a crashed airplane and come out and yell banzai, hide in trees and yell banzai...It was startling at first and I would tense up and bayonet them like my life depended on it! But it quickly became an old trick.
Therein lies the problem with World at War, and is one reason why I don't care one way or the other for CoD games. That is, the game boils down to shooting rubber ducks at a carnival. You and your squad roam around shooting anything that moves. Segments are over fast, enemies usually come from one direction, they're easy to spot, easy to kill, and there are hordes. I realize that this is often a staple of the genre in general, but coupled with the lame stories CoD games tend to have, I notice these things more. I am pretty sure that World at War actually did use infinitely spawning enemies that continue until you move forward or reach an objective. NOT A FAN of infinitely spawning enemies because there is no feedback saying "Yes, you are doing this right. Keep doing what you are doing." Infinitely spawning enemies say, "Keep killing them until they stop. Stay right there." Because the assumption is that there AREN'T infinite enemies so the player would notice if they were doing something right. But these would just run along the same trajectory as the previous one I just killed, hide behind the same cover.
The narrative was typical. You play from the jostling perspectives of a handful of people. After two hours I'd been two characters and had jumped in time twice or thrice. I had NO IDEA what was going on outside my immediate objective. No idea how the characters related to one another, why I was in 1941 then 1944, and on and on. Unless I'm in love with the gameplay, it's hard for me to keep going when there's a story I don't care about. Lots of soldiers die and the alive ones scream about it. Lots of people yell at my character and curse and are really macho and war is hell man. Everyone's courageous and a real soldier and this is how it really was, right? I did find some of the squad commentary funny about the Japanese bonzai soldiers. Some character kept saying, after every time you would be ambushed, things like "I can't believe they booby trap our dead soldiers!" or "These Japanese are really low!" or something that conveyed the effect of naive surprise. As the player, I was like "It's war. Get over it." Why comment on that stuff? It's the reality of war that tricks are involved. The enemies (from whichever perspective) are always dubious in character. There's no time to take the moral high ground when you're wandering through the jungle being ambushed. What's weird is that naive character never died.
There you have it. Two hours with CoD: World at War before my PS3 quit reading the disc. I hope it's the disc's fault and that none of my other games suffer a similar fate!
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