The Killzone franchise has had a tough history of living up to the standards set forth for it from the hype machine. Whether its because it was the supposed “Halo” killer in Killzone 1, or because it had to match an impossible “target render” trailer for Killzone 2 - whatever it was the first two games in the series seemed to have high expectations to live up to. Killzone 3 on the other has been relatively quiet though, that is, except for the focus on its technical merits - PlayStation Move and 3D support. Perhaps though, this is where the game fails - its more of a tech demo for Sony to showcase its bells and whistles and less a polished product.
Killzone 3 starts with the traditional getting acquainted with controls “intro” sequence, but what’s odd is - you find yourself starting as the Helghast soldier in one of their facilities. To make things even odder, this intro is actually from the middle of the game and once you reach the end, you flash back 6 months. From there the game picks up immediately after the face palm ending of Killzone 2, you once again jump into the shoes of Sgt Sevchenko to face the Helghan hordes. Your journey includes some impressive locales that look great and rarely get stale. You’re taken across the Helghan planet into a freshly nuked city, a warm jungle with exotic and dangerous plants, a frost covered Helghan fortress and even find yourself in space.
The story of the game revolves around the unrest and splintering within the Helghan senate has two men try to rise to power. Its almost unsettling how close these character resemble ruthless leaders of our past like Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler, something that most likely was done on purpose. The story itself for your character on the other hand isn’t as fleshed out, its basically your traditional kill everything that moves and continue pushing forward in doing so. Right from the get go something felt off about the game - this was due to some annoying bugs with the sound cutting in and out on the voice overs. Chatter with characters in the game would get cut off mid sentence - or worse - it would get stuck repeating 4 or 5 times. This really was a shame because the rest of Killzone 3’s audio, namely the use of surround sound and gunfire is phenomenal.
Like I said, while most missions are cut and dry - the game does try to do some different things, or at least tries to borrow from numerous other titles. You have your vehicle mission on a tank, a mission where you’ll drive a mech like robot, another which feels very much like the sniper mission from Modern Warfare. It seems that Killzone 3 lost a lot of its identity and instead just tried to borrow a lot of ideas from other games and not always for the better. Grenade spam from the enemies especially frustrated me throughout the campaign - this is something I thought we were moving past.