![]() Lucas shoots his way through no fewer than three different spaceships (the ISA Cassandra and two Helghast spires) in the campaign, and each is an exquisitely machined box of dark metal and neon tubing. ![]() The human element recedes, repackaged as luxury tech. Sevchenko’s fishtank eyeballs in Killzone 2 and 3 is replaced by a red electronic swell. Everything glows and sparks, from the hairline LED that runs along the slide of your pistol to the wrist-mounted screens carried by enemy engineers. Freed from the vile motion blur and gore-caked lenses of the PS3 era, the series’ lust for technology finds beautiful expression in Shadow Fall. This series has always been about admiring hardware: the spearpoints of ISA Cruisers jabbing through the clouds in the opening scenes of Killzone 2, the endless coils of bullets snaking around the mounted gun on a HAMR IFV, the sky-scraping, spider-legged MAWLR weapon from Killzone 3. I fear Lucas takes it even less seriously as he races to prevent the total extermination of his people, he often pauses to collect the scattered pieces of a 70-page comic book. Melee kills feel as neat as punching a ticket-the pliable enemy is gripped, turned, and stabbed so smoothly that his existence seems only an advertisement for the utility of your very shiny knife.Ĭutscenes bray about the horrors of war, but we experience combat as an extended light show. Scenes of carnage are served up as spectacle, exhibits of new graphical horsepower that makes the little fires in the rubble blaze brighter than anything you’ve seen in a game before. ![]() But the game never establishes a contrast between the fantasy of soldiering seen in the boy’s bedroom and his lived experience of headshots and grenade multi-kills. In the present, the kid’s neck has telescoped up to adult height, he has learned to carry proper big guns, and he’s earned his stripes as a Shadow Marshal (a term in use since the 2004 Killzone, but still funny today). pushes his vast face far too close to yours whenever he talks Lucas gets barely a moment to mourn the loss of the man who taught him how to Press X to vault before the story skips forward more than a decade and leaves this rather unimpressive trauma in the rear-view. pushes his vast face far too close to yours whenever he talks it comes as a relief when the moony enormity of it is finally blasted out of frame by Helghast bullets. Lucas and his father make a break for it in a sequence that doubles as a painfully obvious tutorial. The inky plating of their armor looks even better in full-size than it does on the Helghast action figure propped up next to the pencils below Lucas’ desk. The glowing red compound eyes in their skull helmets have never flared so merrily. The game opens in his bedroom, which is covered in military recruitment posters and hardback books with titles like “ISA SOLDIER.” Through Lucas Kellan’s window, we see Helghast soldiers stalking down the street, lining his neighbors up against a wall. Our hero grows a good few feet after the prologue, but his perspective never changes. We first see the world of Killzone: Shadow Fall through the eyes of a child, and we continue to see it that way for the rest of the game. I’ve divided this article up with ellipses-please imagine when you read them that you’ve been knocked unconscious, like the hero of a military shooter, and regain your senses as you hear the next paragraph spoken by the squadmate who saves your life with an adrenaline shot, or the interrogator who tortures you with an electric baton, or the PR guy who shakes your hand and congratulates you on experiencing the next generation of emotions. Newcomers to their world may mistake it for a melting plastic Christmas tree. They are chasing a super-weapon that could turn off all the red lights, or all the blue lights, with the flick of a switch. They are floating in zero G through corridors cast in gold and green. They are re-zoning them for industrial killing use. They are lighting up the forest zone, the downtown zone, the slum zone. The red lights and blue lights are fighting again in space.
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