Killzone 3 is a terrific first person shooter in just about every respect, and ps3 owners won't want to miss it.
Let's start with the fantastic campaign. Killzone 3's weakest element is the overall story, although it certainly gets the job done as much as most other shooters. It picks up right where the last game left off, with the assassination of the enemy leader. You and your team were supposed to take him alive, but your buddy got a little trigger happy and put him down instead. Suffice it to say, your commanding officers are not pleased with the outcome. An immediate evacuation is then ordered to avoid the inevitable enemy retaliation, and so begins 8 hours of face-melting set piece battles that will leave you breathless. Killzone 2 was a very solid game, but the repetitive level design never matched the gorgeous visuals. Killzone 3 not only looks better, but adds a lot of variety from every standpoint. You'd be surprised at how much color this bleak game manages to put on display. From depressing green skies, to blood-red alien vegetation, to the snowy mountain wastes, Killzone 3 is an artistic delight, and part of the reason you will want to press on is to see what they have in store for you next.
Well, that and putting a truckload of lead into every enemy soldier you come across. Killzone 3 features more enemy variety, and each new level adds new enemy weapons and other wrinkles into the mix, always keeping the action fresh. Speaking of the action, Killzone 3 features some severely beefy weapons and everything feels very powerful. Your character moves with a sense of weight, but the overall feel is far more graceful and purposeful than Killzone 2's relatively sluggish movement. Melee kills have also become more visceral, and jamming a knife into the eye of the enemy after sneaking up behind him provides for an intensely satisfying experience.
As good as Killzone 3 looks, it sounds even better. This is a game that demands to be played at high volumes, as the battlefield simply comes alive. The shooting is all blended perfectly, ringing out hollow at a distance and dishing out an appropriately punchy retort at close range. But it's everything else that really sells the experience. The sounds of aircraft soaring through the sky, the thunderous clamor of artillery pummeling the ground, the sound of concrete falling apart in the wake of an explosion, the soft crunch of snow giving way underfoot, it's all so convincing that for the first hour or so that you may need to remember to close your mouth at some point to keep it from drying out like the Mojave. The voice acting is solidly done, though a few characters are a bit overdone. Overall though, Killzone 3's audio is awesome.
This one-two punch of audiovisual perfection and tight, meaty action combines with stellar and varied set pieces to create a dazzling experience that is certain to have you at the edge of your seat. I have not enjoyed a first person shooter's single player offering this much since Half-Life 2. From the opening scene to the final moments, Killzone 3's campaign is just awesome. You can play this campaign in two player co-op, though it is disappointingly limited to local split-screen.
Once you are finished with the single player game, you are left to tackle the game's substantial multiplayer portion. There are several modes, from the standard deathmatch and team deathmatch, to more interesting objective based options that function a bit like EA's Battlefield games. The best of these modes has you hop into a match and play randomly selected gametypes within the same match. For instance, you could start the game as a simple team deathmatch, and 5 minutes later the gametype will switch to assassination and have your team protect you from the other team. The game will repeat this for about 30 minutes and at the end a handsome amount of experience points may be awarded based on player performance. If you've played Call of Duty online, you pretty much know what to expect from the ranking system, though the unlocks are not nearly as numerous. The maps are well designed, the classes balanced, and after a bit of a learning curve the multiplayer proves to be quite fun and addictive.
If there's anything to complain about in Killzone 3, it's that some of the multiplayer moments in certain gametypes get a bit spawn-campy, and sometimes melee kills don't look right when playing online. Rico is still a cheesy character, and one of the two main bad guys is a hollow military cliche. Despite being serviceable, the plot never matches the quality of the rest of the game, and is largely an excuse to string together the incredible set pieces. These issues drag the game down just a bit, but are relatively minor against the backdrop of its numerous successes.
All told, Killzone 3 is the game playstation owners have been waiting for since the first game was announced. A true, dyed-in-the-wool AAA game that has just enough of a chance of sucking up all of your free time as any Halo, Call of Duty, or Battlefield does. It is the complete package, satisfying whether you play it alone or online. The ps3 does not feature a better looking game, and it plays just as good as it looks. Fans of brutal first-person action will not want to miss one second of this jaw-dropper.