Perhaps it is an indicator of how the gaming community has matured in the last two years, perhaps not…but Killzone 3 released last week amid a fraction of the internet flame wars and console partisan fury that it’s predecessor came out to two years ago.  There’s almost no 360 v PS3 fanboy nonsense about it this time around…but that doesn’t mean it’s not a hotly debated game.

We’ll get into that later, for now let’s start off by talking about the single player campaign for Killzone 3.  The game’s narrative itself begins about three quarters of the way through Killzone 2, with Scolar Visari presiding over the detonation of the ISA nuclear warhead Red Dust in the Helghan capital city of Pyrrhus.

We see that Colonel Mael Radec and Stahl Arms Chairman Jorhan Stahl were there as were the members of the Helghast “Senate,” four guys who I have tentatively named “Mohawk Hitler,” “George McFly Sr.,” “Red Foreman” and finally “Epic Mutton Chops Guy.”

Please forgive the pic quality…I pulled it off a youtube screenshot.

Anywho, basically there’s a walk in and a cut to the speech that I guess Visari was broadcasting to the people of the planet Helghan as he blew up their capital city.  The controller tutorial is presented from a different perspective…and then it just…well it just takes you to the end of Killzone 2.

For those who don’t already know, at the end of KZ2, generally unlikeable Sgt. Rico Velasquez murdered Helghast Autarch Scolar Visari, and playable character/mohawk machismo Sgt. Tomas Sevchenko sulks as a massive fleet of Helghast Warships overruns the ISA invasion fleet, most of the ground force of which had already been annihilated by the aforementioned nuclear holocaust visited upon Pyrrhus.

As said already, the game starts with you playing through the general weapons tutorial…as a Helghast soldier.  You then take your Helghast ass up to a studio to oversee the execution of ISA soldiers on Live Helghast TV in retribution for murdering Visari.

Flash backward six months to the immediate aftermath of Killzone 2, and Cpt. Blowhard…errrrrrrrrrrrrr, Captain Narville is now berating Rico for being a murderous, racist idiot and basically telling him that he’s going to prison, he’s worthless, yadda yadda yadda.  Rico doesn’t just allow people to walk on his feelings like that, though…and in defending himself, for the first time in the series, Rico took steps toward becoming a likeable character.  Then all hell breaks loose and everyone has to drop everything to get out of the city.

The escape from the aftermath of Killzone 2 is pretty involved, and it takes up at least a third, if not half of the actual gameplay itself.  It basically details Sev and Narville getting seperated from Rico and a large contingent of the ISA ground force.  If the game were longer, this wouldn’t even be a talking point, but the game itself is pretty short…so it is.  It also might help if it had set up the rest of the story properly, more specifically if it went into greater detail about what Rico and the Raiders (Rico’s band of merry but stranded ISA buddies) had been doing over the six months between the beginning and the end other than growing Rico’s afro…but whatevs.  It wasn’t the last plot hole in the game.

As far as Killzone games go, the first half is a subpar experience all around.  It plods along slowly and has several awkward moments that really take away from the enjoyment when they should be adding.  There’s a vehicle section that starts almost literally out of nowhere, and it has you driving and operating a turret simultaneously.  Problem being that the vehicle you’re driving is a PIG on rough terrain, and the turret has a rather large Dead Zone that it can’t aim into.  Coincidentally, that’s where most of the enemy vehicles you encounter spend most of their time.  It was so awkward that my neck hurt from it.  Not even kidding.

There’s also a lot of plot inconsistency and flat out BAD voice acting.  I think part of the reason Killzone 2 was such a success was because Guerrilla Games had almost intentionally stayed away from extended cutscenes of any kind.  This time around, there’s drama, ambition, betrayal and bad feelings on both side of the ball.  Petty internal power struggles affect both the Helghast and the stranded ISA invasion force.  It’s all pretty predictable…with one side coming together to sing Kumbahya around the fire and the other side trying to kill each other and eventually triggering their own downfall.  I’ll leave you to guess which one’s which.

The problem with it all is that it’s all so telegraphed and when it isn’t, it’s just uneven.  Starting the story in media res was a first for the series and wasn’t particularly effective.  Adding all that dialogue was money in some places and a crapout in others.  The game didn’t seem to be a part of the same story that Killzone, Killzone Liberation and Killzone 2 were telling.  It should’ve been among the darker stories of the series, but it’s really the one most like a Summer Action Flick.

That said, the game picks up with a vengance in the second half.  There’s huge battles, dropships, and insanely large vehicles to commandeer and destroy as the stranded ISA forces try desperately establish communication with Earth and ultimately to escape Planet Helghan alive.  The Killzone series encounters some of it’s biggest, most action filled, most chaotic and frankly best moments in the second half.  The very end itself is big production…an intense affair that finishes awkwardly on a few different levels.

The best I can describe it without spoiling it is that the ending view does not give enough time to appreciate the gravity of what had just happened…and trust me when I say, it was pretty freaking heavy.  But the game just zoomed to the credits, which (again…not trying to spoil anything) almost seems to downplay the severity of the finale, which if I were to rank it on a scale of 1 to 10, would get about a 12.

The gameplay has been tweaked, and while it’s not at all like Call Of Duty as many including myself had feared…it’s still a lot lighter than before.  It is still Killzone, however…it still moves substantially slower/more realistically than CoD, and it’s just as intense as ever.  Among other things, this game incorporates a reciprocal revive feature.

Where in KZ2 you would many times have to revive your teammates, they were never able (or inclined) to revive you when you went down.  In Killzone 3, Rico and Narville will revive you if they’re close enough…and that’s a help during some of the more challenging sections of the game.

I need another entry to go into my opinion of the multiplayer offering, and I’ll save that for tomorrow or the next day.  I will however give you my full game review score now…Killzone 3 is an 8 out of 10.  It is most certainly NOT better than Killzone 2.  It has moments that certainly trump KZ2 at its best, but the single player is simply BAD at some points.  It also takes too long to get good and from there it doesn’t last long enough to truly enjoy it.  Multiplayer is great if uneven…however the “support” that Guerrilla seems to be leaning toward for the near future of Killzone 3 is at best concerning and at worst…well, we’ll talk about that in more detail within the next 48 hours.

Killzone 3 gets an 8 out of 10.  It’s a great game with great production value, great fun and a multiplayer component that is excellent fun despite its shortfalls.  If you own a PS3 and enjoy shooters, this should eventually find its way into your library.