Killzone: Shadow Fall

Sony and Playstation have a great reputation for having amazing and consistent 1st party titles, usually having one major hit per year. However at the launch of the PS4, things weren't looking so great with Killzone: Shadow Fall and Knack being their offerings for the early adopters (inFamous had to be pushed back by a few months), which I think is something many people forget. 2015's Bloodborne helped to save the day, but it's really with Uncharted 4 the following year that their 1st party reign actually started (to be followed by Horizon Zero Dawn, Spider Man and God of War in the following 2 years).

I haven't played the entire Killzone franchise entries, but I am a big fan of Killzone 2 which I think is an highlight of the PS3 console exclusives. Pure action and intensive shooter, it was a whole lot of fun. Shadow Fall? Not so much. Right from the start you can see that the game is taking a different direction with lots of story elements and in Chapter 2 the amount of non-shooting things you have to do. Go there, activate this, hack that, climb that and so on. It's still a FPS, but it seems to have taken a lot of influences from Action Adventure games like Uncharted and the gunfights become something of a lesser importance. The issue with this is that none of it is really done in an interesting manner, and all feels like a chore to do so. The flying OWL tool allows you to revive, chase down enemies, zipline and you can also scan the environments, so there's more gadgets involved but at the same time downplays the shooting. Where you are fighting is often weird as the game forces you to fight in the open many times, cover spots are not always there or placed properly... the game also has a tendency to make enemies appear behind you when have reached a keypoint, which is super annoying.

Other elements aside, the gunplay doesn't feel great. There's just a certain lack of satisfaction when you are killing enemies and I don't exactly know what to pinpoint the problem to. It's like I'm just doing and it's just ok with not much more to it. The game being a launch title also is trying to introduce the features of the DS4 controller, audio logs play from the controller, the color changes to red when you die and you have to swipe the touchpad when you want to change abilities. That is a terrible feature because swiping the touchpad requires one of your hands to let go of the sticks, so it's really not efficient to perform this in the middle of a fight (and half the time, the swipe puts it on the wrong ability for more frustrations). It's a little big of a tech demo for the PS4 and certainly feels a little dated for it.

Guerrilla Games were trying to push their key franchise into a different direction, kind of attempting to make it advance to the next level with all these new elements. However this Killzone game forgot to be a Killzone game in the process and really ended up being a mediocre project all around that lacks fun. Even as a tech demo for the PS4, the graphics aren't all that amazing and we would see much prettier things in the years to come. Thankfully the studio managed to redeem themselves with the amazing Horizon Zero Dawn which is now a key franchise for Playstation, however this failed product left Killzone to die and it's a sad way for the franchise to go out. Not only would this be the last of Killzone, but it's also the last time that Sony would release a 1st party studio shooter and rather would let Call of Duty carry that specialty for them while the focused more on blockbuster action adventure games. Not an essential game by any means, but it does serve historical significance of a time where Sony weren't doing so hot.