This review contains spoilers
Killzone 3 is a first person shooter exclusive for the Playstation 3 released in 2011 and developed by Guerilla Games. Over the past year or so I’ve decided to go through the Killzone games after beating almost all the Halo series and the Resistance series (which I’ll review at some point later on). Having beaten Killzone 2 last year and temporarily given up on Mercenary after having my save data corrupted unknowingly, and with a buddy of mine going through the Killzone series on the highest difficulty as well. I decided to give this game a spin, and I have some thoughts. First I’ll go with the plot.
So the first thought I had in mind was that the game’s plot was strangely weaker than the previous game’s, which itself personally wasn’t the most memorable. The game starts mere moments after Emperor Visari’s murder by dipshit Rico, who rightfully gets chewed out by his superior Narville. The orders are in and everyone is to evacuate back to Vekta, which is cool and all except for the fact everything goes to hell as the Helghast go apeshit and attack the ISA with full force. Now here is where I’m going to mention the first story critique: I like starting off immediately after the second game, however there’s one thing I want to mention. Your squadmate Natko isn’t around, at ALL. Now this was explained apparently by Studio Director/Art Director Jean Bart van Beek, who stated this according to the Killzone 3 Official Guide: "Following Rico's costly mistakes in Killzone 2, Nakto probably requested a transfer to a different squad... But the real reason for Nakto's absence is that we felt the story could do with a few less characters, so we can focus on the important ones. Nakto is of course still in the game, he's the character your buddy plays in co-op." Ok, cool I guess, except if you don’t go through the coop game it’s a literal plot hole, albeit that most people will forget about anyways considering most of these guys have the personality of dog piss stained cardboard but it’s still a noticeable plot hole to me. So yeah, no clue where this guy is and he’s never mentioned again and if it takes place mere moments after Killzone 2, how could the dude request a transfer to a different squad? Who knows and who cares I guess. Back to the plot, the ISA fight through the nuked city of Pyrrhus to try to find their way out; Rico of course disobeys orders again to rescue sniper Jammer, who has been cut off from the rest of her platoon. Sev (The Player) tries to escape with Narville, however everyone blows up and is sent flying everywhere and the remainder of the ships evacuate out leading the rest of the ISA to be stranded on Helghan. This is mixed in with cutscenes of the Helghan military squabbling over crushing the ISA and power politics involving Jorhan Stahl (voiced by Malcolm McDowell) and Admiral Orlock (voiced by Ray Winstone with the name of a silent movie era vampire but I digress), where they piss and moan at each other while the rest of the Helghan military guys just kinda exist? Now keep in mind Malcolm and Ray really make these scenes in my opinion, and it’s nice that they’re trying to show a bit more of all sides now but also I don’t know who most of those dudes are, which fair enough not everything needs an explanation but I still kind of thought it was shrug worthy.
After shit went haywire, we fast forward six months where Narville orders Sev to check up on some technological thing that’s supposed to get them home. However, after sneaking through Helghan base camps in the Jungle, Narville gets in touch with ISA command and it’s learned that they’re given orders to “Stand down and surrender so they can begin negotiations” which is an unbelievably shitty idea. Helghast discovers where they are however and Sev races back to base, going against Narville’s orders to escape and hold off the Helghast where they fight it out as much as they can before they get captured. Sev and Narville are separated, and Sev is kept in an entirely different drop ship before getting rescued by Rico and Jammer, who now lead a team called “The Raiders”. After shooting their way through numerous facilities, they end up at Stahl Arms and rescue Narville (dressed up as Helghans in a stealth mission) before he’s executed live by Stahl himself in a power play against the rest of the Helghan military as he’s effectively gone AWOL. I forgot to mention earlier that this moment is played In Media Res as the first chapter with a couple things mixed up and different, which I guess is cool for a tutorial aspect but at the same time it feels inconsistent to skip some things this time around but whatever I guess. Also, Stahl’s men have been collecting green stuff on the planet and have weaponized it into something called Petrusite, basically a real nasty war weapon which can basically disintegrate people. Everyone fights their way out and Stahl escapes, before the Helghan Senate promotes Orlock to Visari’s position. Stahl is ordered to turn over all weapons to Orlock and his plans are discovered; he views himself as the true ruler to Helghan and as such plans to use Petrusite to conquer Earth. The ISA in the meantime escape and fight through a junkyard, a Petrusite weapon field thing and a giant ass spider mech before launching themselves into space to stop Stahl, but not before arguing with each other constantly about disobeying orders and I have thoughts about this.
They end up at a Helghast space station (Rico’s second time, what a record); Narville, Sev, Rico and Jammer take the fight to them to stop it. Stahl and Orlock meet to the trade off but predictably end up backstabbing one another, and Stahl gets the upper hand after going on the usual villain monologue about his intentions. Stahl then escapes, intending to warp to Earth to begin the invasion but the ISA shoot their way through and stop the fight in a space battle, dropping a nuke on Stahl’s cruiser. However one issue with that, the ship ends up dropping it’s weapons into the giant Petrusite field and the entirety of Helghan gets wiped out in a Petrusite infused genocide. I don’t really know what to make of this except they fucked up and killed a lot of innocent people as well; and surprisingly they have a little post credits sequence that has an escape pod where Helghast presumably find Stahl alive. I guess my thoughts are how did Stahl live through this? Also, I find the whole murdering the entire planet thing interesting because it will presumably raise the stakes (though I heard it was a flop) in Killzone: Shadowfall and to me kind of shows that both the Helghast and the ISA are fucked up in their own special ways, though it’ll take a lot more to me than “Everyone is bad in way” to actually get me interested I guess. Also I want to bring up some stuff before I go to gameplay here:
In Killzone 2, Rico disobeys orders constantly and goes gung-ho, which basically ends up getting squadmate Garza killed and the entire Helghan fleet on their ass; now he definitely has the most character development in this game and he actually mellows out a bit and thinks about his actions. However I don’t understand (maybe I’m just stupid) the theme here? Before in Killzone 2 it’s “Don’t disobey orders unnecessarily” and in this game it’s “Disobey orders for the right reasons”? I guess that sounds good but I just feel in conjunction with Killzone 2 it just feels kind of weird, like an inconsistency. Also for the most part I don’t get much in the way of character development for Narville and Sev other than more arguing about disobeying orders and such. Also I don’t know shit about Rico’s raiders, Jammer doesn’t seem to have much in the way of personality and in the end they just end up being Call of Duty protagonists. I don’t need to have them read their innermost fears and feelings but Christ almighty give me something please? Also in Chapter 6, you end up escaping the base and race after Stahl’s cruiser, but you also randomly teleport into vehicles to go after them? Where did they come from? Were the vehicles in the nearby hangars? I’m not sure if it’s just me overthinking but I noticed a couple of inconsistencies here and there and it leads me to believe that game development might have been a bit rushed in certain spots.
To me, Killzone 3 basically has the same gameplay as the second one, but with an added sort of cool Brutal Kill system that has stuff like stabbing people, poking your fingers into their eyes, snapping people’s necks, stabbing more people, etc. It feels good, the gunplay for the most part still feels good (the headshots you can get with the sniper and silenced pistol feel punchy as hell and satisfying as an example) though a bit awkward like the others; basically it’s not Call of Duty snappy. The sixaxis stuff still feels unnecessary, only being used to open valves and place bombs. Other than that the gameplay is basically the same as the last one: go from place to place and kill people while following an objective. Of course there’s more in the way of variation, for example you end up driving vehicles in scripted segments like a tank in Chapter 3, in Chapter 5 not only do you get to play Minigunner a couple of times but in a cool as hell segment you get to fly a jetpack and blow people up (sadly the only time in the campaign), Chapter 6 you drive some sort of Star Wars lookin vehicle and in the last chapter you fly through space. Also I want to mention, the final level has two spots or so where there’s no gravity and you can jump high so that’s nice. All that variation is good, I like that they tried to spice it up but honestly I don’t have much to say except as for actual gameplay if you liked Killzone 2 it felt like more Killzone 2 with minor improvements. I guess other than that, I had a couple of glitches here and there; one that was particularly egregious is that since I’m a trophy hunter, I wanted to get the trophy where you get 40 soldier kills on a beach while driving a tank. Now I don’t know if I was just missing some but according to some comments the more you update the game then this trophy just doesn’t pop up. So I deleted my Killzone 3 update files, played through the mission again, got it then exited before reinstalling the files again for one trophy; if you don’t care for trophies this shouldn’t apply to you but also I have weird OCD so it was painful that I had to do that. Other glitches I had included stuttering in certain spots, lip syncing in cutscenes being completely off most of the time, the ends of sentences being cut off about half the time and a glitch I WISH I recorded where in Chapter 6 Narville kept walking towards the wall and then shot into the air and disappeared before reappearing in the next room. And last but not least, fuck the Completist trophy and the MAWLR (giant spider mech in Chapter 8) fight; the trophy stuff can be vague as hell and the actual boss is rather frustrating to me personally jumping in between two separate spots trying to shoot down pieces of mech while avoiding Petrusite lasers. One last thing, the multiplayer was shut down and unlike Killzone 2 it hasn’t been brought back yet so I’m not sure what the multiplayer was like but if you’re trying to go for a platinum I wouldn’t bother to be honest.
The sound design/graphics/everything else here is decent; again the voice actors are good with Ray Winstone and Malcolm McDowell really hamming it up as Helghast generals/industrialists fighting with each other. I didn’t know that James Remar (Ajax of The Warriors fame) voiced Narville so that’s cool and everyone else sounds good and fits into the vibe. The soundtrack is decent with more of the same vibes it brought to Killzone 3 with the orchestral stuff, it’s nothing really crazy and I won’t be listening to the soundtrack in the whip but like it fits the game. The art design is more varied this time; the junkyard and the ruined city are still grayish and whatnot but I enjoy it when they get out of that environment for the Jungle and the snow. The jungle probably is my favorite just because of all the foliage, I think it’s an interesting insight of what the Helghan homeworld actually looks like and I would’ve liked to see more areas of the planet that had interesting flora and fauna. The snow I just like because it has more color palettes then most of the game combined. I guess also to throw something else out there, the game still looks great graphically and is again another reason why Guerilla Games is lauded, their games for the most part look beautiful. Sometimes the effects are a little much but generally speaking it looks great and I can’t complain, and didn’t really need much upgrading from the last game.
I guess if I were to give my thoughts on Killzone 3 it would be this: it improves in a lot of areas but it also falters in a lot of areas. The story was less interesting in certain aspects than the second game and better in other areas, the gunplay is still kind of sluggish but the brutal kills are cool. Again I think this game does better in location variation, but then it glitches randomly and does some goofy shit with it. I’ve heard people say Killzone 3 feels like an expansion pack, I wouldn’t necessarily agree but I also can get why they say that with how the game is plot/world building is. I would still say in a lot of ways Killzone 2 is better but I guess if I had to choose I’d rather come back to this one more? Again I don’t know, It’s still going to get the same rating as Killzone 2 but I guess I’m not too surprised these two go hand in hand so well to be honest. I guess if you play this, just be aware there’s some weird stuff that goes on in this game and I suspect again it might have been rushed a tad bit but I’m not sure. That being said though it’s not a bad game, and though it’s still worse story wise to Killzone 2 I’d say it makes a good companion to that game as well. In time I’ll play through Shadowfall and go through the slog of trying to get all my progress back for Killzone: Mercenary; which though fucking miserable trying to get all that progress with the valor cards than losing it to a random save crash I’m unsure of the origins of, still stands out as the best game in the series from what I’ve played apparently.
So the first thought I had in mind was that the game’s plot was strangely weaker than the previous game’s, which itself personally wasn’t the most memorable. The game starts mere moments after Emperor Visari’s murder by dipshit Rico, who rightfully gets chewed out by his superior Narville. The orders are in and everyone is to evacuate back to Vekta, which is cool and all except for the fact everything goes to hell as the Helghast go apeshit and attack the ISA with full force. Now here is where I’m going to mention the first story critique: I like starting off immediately after the second game, however there’s one thing I want to mention. Your squadmate Natko isn’t around, at ALL. Now this was explained apparently by Studio Director/Art Director Jean Bart van Beek, who stated this according to the Killzone 3 Official Guide: "Following Rico's costly mistakes in Killzone 2, Nakto probably requested a transfer to a different squad... But the real reason for Nakto's absence is that we felt the story could do with a few less characters, so we can focus on the important ones. Nakto is of course still in the game, he's the character your buddy plays in co-op." Ok, cool I guess, except if you don’t go through the coop game it’s a literal plot hole, albeit that most people will forget about anyways considering most of these guys have the personality of dog piss stained cardboard but it’s still a noticeable plot hole to me. So yeah, no clue where this guy is and he’s never mentioned again and if it takes place mere moments after Killzone 2, how could the dude request a transfer to a different squad? Who knows and who cares I guess. Back to the plot, the ISA fight through the nuked city of Pyrrhus to try to find their way out; Rico of course disobeys orders again to rescue sniper Jammer, who has been cut off from the rest of her platoon. Sev (The Player) tries to escape with Narville, however everyone blows up and is sent flying everywhere and the remainder of the ships evacuate out leading the rest of the ISA to be stranded on Helghan. This is mixed in with cutscenes of the Helghan military squabbling over crushing the ISA and power politics involving Jorhan Stahl (voiced by Malcolm McDowell) and Admiral Orlock (voiced by Ray Winstone with the name of a silent movie era vampire but I digress), where they piss and moan at each other while the rest of the Helghan military guys just kinda exist? Now keep in mind Malcolm and Ray really make these scenes in my opinion, and it’s nice that they’re trying to show a bit more of all sides now but also I don’t know who most of those dudes are, which fair enough not everything needs an explanation but I still kind of thought it was shrug worthy.
After shit went haywire, we fast forward six months where Narville orders Sev to check up on some technological thing that’s supposed to get them home. However, after sneaking through Helghan base camps in the Jungle, Narville gets in touch with ISA command and it’s learned that they’re given orders to “Stand down and surrender so they can begin negotiations” which is an unbelievably shitty idea. Helghast discovers where they are however and Sev races back to base, going against Narville’s orders to escape and hold off the Helghast where they fight it out as much as they can before they get captured. Sev and Narville are separated, and Sev is kept in an entirely different drop ship before getting rescued by Rico and Jammer, who now lead a team called “The Raiders”. After shooting their way through numerous facilities, they end up at Stahl Arms and rescue Narville (dressed up as Helghans in a stealth mission) before he’s executed live by Stahl himself in a power play against the rest of the Helghan military as he’s effectively gone AWOL. I forgot to mention earlier that this moment is played In Media Res as the first chapter with a couple things mixed up and different, which I guess is cool for a tutorial aspect but at the same time it feels inconsistent to skip some things this time around but whatever I guess. Also, Stahl’s men have been collecting green stuff on the planet and have weaponized it into something called Petrusite, basically a real nasty war weapon which can basically disintegrate people. Everyone fights their way out and Stahl escapes, before the Helghan Senate promotes Orlock to Visari’s position. Stahl is ordered to turn over all weapons to Orlock and his plans are discovered; he views himself as the true ruler to Helghan and as such plans to use Petrusite to conquer Earth. The ISA in the meantime escape and fight through a junkyard, a Petrusite weapon field thing and a giant ass spider mech before launching themselves into space to stop Stahl, but not before arguing with each other constantly about disobeying orders and I have thoughts about this.
They end up at a Helghast space station (Rico’s second time, what a record); Narville, Sev, Rico and Jammer take the fight to them to stop it. Stahl and Orlock meet to the trade off but predictably end up backstabbing one another, and Stahl gets the upper hand after going on the usual villain monologue about his intentions. Stahl then escapes, intending to warp to Earth to begin the invasion but the ISA shoot their way through and stop the fight in a space battle, dropping a nuke on Stahl’s cruiser. However one issue with that, the ship ends up dropping it’s weapons into the giant Petrusite field and the entirety of Helghan gets wiped out in a Petrusite infused genocide. I don’t really know what to make of this except they fucked up and killed a lot of innocent people as well; and surprisingly they have a little post credits sequence that has an escape pod where Helghast presumably find Stahl alive. I guess my thoughts are how did Stahl live through this? Also, I find the whole murdering the entire planet thing interesting because it will presumably raise the stakes (though I heard it was a flop) in Killzone: Shadowfall and to me kind of shows that both the Helghast and the ISA are fucked up in their own special ways, though it’ll take a lot more to me than “Everyone is bad in way” to actually get me interested I guess. Also I want to bring up some stuff before I go to gameplay here:
In Killzone 2, Rico disobeys orders constantly and goes gung-ho, which basically ends up getting squadmate Garza killed and the entire Helghan fleet on their ass; now he definitely has the most character development in this game and he actually mellows out a bit and thinks about his actions. However I don’t understand (maybe I’m just stupid) the theme here? Before in Killzone 2 it’s “Don’t disobey orders unnecessarily” and in this game it’s “Disobey orders for the right reasons”? I guess that sounds good but I just feel in conjunction with Killzone 2 it just feels kind of weird, like an inconsistency. Also for the most part I don’t get much in the way of character development for Narville and Sev other than more arguing about disobeying orders and such. Also I don’t know shit about Rico’s raiders, Jammer doesn’t seem to have much in the way of personality and in the end they just end up being Call of Duty protagonists. I don’t need to have them read their innermost fears and feelings but Christ almighty give me something please? Also in Chapter 6, you end up escaping the base and race after Stahl’s cruiser, but you also randomly teleport into vehicles to go after them? Where did they come from? Were the vehicles in the nearby hangars? I’m not sure if it’s just me overthinking but I noticed a couple of inconsistencies here and there and it leads me to believe that game development might have been a bit rushed in certain spots.
To me, Killzone 3 basically has the same gameplay as the second one, but with an added sort of cool Brutal Kill system that has stuff like stabbing people, poking your fingers into their eyes, snapping people’s necks, stabbing more people, etc. It feels good, the gunplay for the most part still feels good (the headshots you can get with the sniper and silenced pistol feel punchy as hell and satisfying as an example) though a bit awkward like the others; basically it’s not Call of Duty snappy. The sixaxis stuff still feels unnecessary, only being used to open valves and place bombs. Other than that the gameplay is basically the same as the last one: go from place to place and kill people while following an objective. Of course there’s more in the way of variation, for example you end up driving vehicles in scripted segments like a tank in Chapter 3, in Chapter 5 not only do you get to play Minigunner a couple of times but in a cool as hell segment you get to fly a jetpack and blow people up (sadly the only time in the campaign), Chapter 6 you drive some sort of Star Wars lookin vehicle and in the last chapter you fly through space. Also I want to mention, the final level has two spots or so where there’s no gravity and you can jump high so that’s nice. All that variation is good, I like that they tried to spice it up but honestly I don’t have much to say except as for actual gameplay if you liked Killzone 2 it felt like more Killzone 2 with minor improvements. I guess other than that, I had a couple of glitches here and there; one that was particularly egregious is that since I’m a trophy hunter, I wanted to get the trophy where you get 40 soldier kills on a beach while driving a tank. Now I don’t know if I was just missing some but according to some comments the more you update the game then this trophy just doesn’t pop up. So I deleted my Killzone 3 update files, played through the mission again, got it then exited before reinstalling the files again for one trophy; if you don’t care for trophies this shouldn’t apply to you but also I have weird OCD so it was painful that I had to do that. Other glitches I had included stuttering in certain spots, lip syncing in cutscenes being completely off most of the time, the ends of sentences being cut off about half the time and a glitch I WISH I recorded where in Chapter 6 Narville kept walking towards the wall and then shot into the air and disappeared before reappearing in the next room. And last but not least, fuck the Completist trophy and the MAWLR (giant spider mech in Chapter 8) fight; the trophy stuff can be vague as hell and the actual boss is rather frustrating to me personally jumping in between two separate spots trying to shoot down pieces of mech while avoiding Petrusite lasers. One last thing, the multiplayer was shut down and unlike Killzone 2 it hasn’t been brought back yet so I’m not sure what the multiplayer was like but if you’re trying to go for a platinum I wouldn’t bother to be honest.
The sound design/graphics/everything else here is decent; again the voice actors are good with Ray Winstone and Malcolm McDowell really hamming it up as Helghast generals/industrialists fighting with each other. I didn’t know that James Remar (Ajax of The Warriors fame) voiced Narville so that’s cool and everyone else sounds good and fits into the vibe. The soundtrack is decent with more of the same vibes it brought to Killzone 3 with the orchestral stuff, it’s nothing really crazy and I won’t be listening to the soundtrack in the whip but like it fits the game. The art design is more varied this time; the junkyard and the ruined city are still grayish and whatnot but I enjoy it when they get out of that environment for the Jungle and the snow. The jungle probably is my favorite just because of all the foliage, I think it’s an interesting insight of what the Helghan homeworld actually looks like and I would’ve liked to see more areas of the planet that had interesting flora and fauna. The snow I just like because it has more color palettes then most of the game combined. I guess also to throw something else out there, the game still looks great graphically and is again another reason why Guerilla Games is lauded, their games for the most part look beautiful. Sometimes the effects are a little much but generally speaking it looks great and I can’t complain, and didn’t really need much upgrading from the last game.
I guess if I were to give my thoughts on Killzone 3 it would be this: it improves in a lot of areas but it also falters in a lot of areas. The story was less interesting in certain aspects than the second game and better in other areas, the gunplay is still kind of sluggish but the brutal kills are cool. Again I think this game does better in location variation, but then it glitches randomly and does some goofy shit with it. I’ve heard people say Killzone 3 feels like an expansion pack, I wouldn’t necessarily agree but I also can get why they say that with how the game is plot/world building is. I would still say in a lot of ways Killzone 2 is better but I guess if I had to choose I’d rather come back to this one more? Again I don’t know, It’s still going to get the same rating as Killzone 2 but I guess I’m not too surprised these two go hand in hand so well to be honest. I guess if you play this, just be aware there’s some weird stuff that goes on in this game and I suspect again it might have been rushed a tad bit but I’m not sure. That being said though it’s not a bad game, and though it’s still worse story wise to Killzone 2 I’d say it makes a good companion to that game as well. In time I’ll play through Shadowfall and go through the slog of trying to get all my progress back for Killzone: Mercenary; which though fucking miserable trying to get all that progress with the valor cards than losing it to a random save crash I’m unsure of the origins of, still stands out as the best game in the series from what I’ve played apparently.