“You know where you have to go, and you know what happens if you get caught,” your main man Sinclair announces in the Killzone Shadow Fall intro. Lucas Kellan may indeed know what awaits him after his capture but that doesn’t stop Sinclair from immediately explaining in great detail what will happen should Lucas get caught in the field. That’s the kind of juicy exposition Killzone is ready to serve up for you.
Shadow Fall along with Knack have the distinctions of being the two full retail launch titles exclusive to the Playstation 4. As we’ve already mentioned on this site countless times: Neither title had to bring its “A game” to get the Playstation 4 to its million sale launch day. Being “just okay” is good enough for a launch game and Killzone delivers precisely that.
The events of Killzone 3 have left the planet Helghan unsuitable for life and in an act of peace the ISA has allowed the Helghan people to populate the planet Vekta. A giant wall is built separating the Vektans from the Helghast and the world settles into a cold-war where each side spies and performs covert operations on the other in a hope of winning a war nobody can seem to let go of.
If this whole thing sounds like an interesting premise, that’s because it is, the execution is where the story falls apart. From hammy dialogue to horrendous voice acting and one of the most unsatisfying endings I’ve seen in a game lately, it’s pretty hard to recommend Shadow Fall for the story alone.
You play as Lucas Kellan, a Vektan citizen who is inducted into a special military group known as the Shadow Marshalls. Lucas serves as something of a “fixer”, most of the missions he’s sent on are recovery and clean up for situations that have gone bad. Rescuing people from a crash site, recovering data from a derelict ship, that kind of stuff. These missions are usually pretty open, letting you explore the level and complete objectives in an order of your choosing. Unfortunately Shadow Fall discards this format as you near the end of the campaign in favor of more traditional (and boring) corridor shootouts.
Shooting in the game feels well designed and Lucas is equipped with all the standard abilities like aiming down his iron sights etc. There are a number of different weapons available to you but most of them don’t feel terribly different from one another. I think most users will just wind up using their default loadout for the majority of the game, until they run out of ammo that is.
One handy ability Lucas has at his disposal comes in the form of a device called the OWL. The OWL is a stoic floating robot buddy who can be called with a press of the R1 key. By default the OWL will simply serve as a rather effective attack drone but it can be also be used to hack devices on the battlefield, fire a zip line to rappel down (not up) levels, deploy shields, and is your primary method for being revived should you fall on the battlefield. The game is fairly generous with how frequently it lets you use the OWL and oftentimes winds up being much more difficult should you forget to deploy your ally.
Shadow Fall feels largely like a tech demo, every feature unique to the PS4 short of the camera is demonstrated here. The light on top of the controller serves as a health display, normally it’ll be a solid green but as Lucas’ fleshy body is loaded with bullets the light will slowly turn red and start to pulse. Audio logs are littered throughout the game and when you play them they’ll come through the speaker built into the PS4 controller. Don’t expect to find too many of them though, and the ones you will find aren’t worth listening to. And lastly the OWL’s different modes are all toggled using the touch screen on the controller. It’s not perfect and it probably could have just as easily been mapped to a button, but all things considered it works pretty well.
From a technical perspective the game is very impressive. It’s probably the best looking title in the PS4’s launch line up and it’s almost certainly the game you’re going to want to own when you try to show your non-gaming friends why you bought this expensive piece of hardware. Everything runs at a brisk 60 FPS in full glorious 1080p and I don’t think I ever had any slowdown during my entire trip through the campaign.
In this thrilling mission Lucas gets to wait in line for 5 minutes. Yes I’m being serious.
The game also includes a rather extensive multiplayer mode. Call of Duty: Ghosts turned out an underwhelming entry this year, and Battlefield 4 is notoriously busted across all platforms, so if you’re looking for a multiplayer shooter to fill your days Killzone might actually be your ticket. There’s nothing here really worth writing home about though and by this time next year most people will probably have forgotten it ever existed.
Shadow Fall does have a very solid multiplayer component, and if you want to take advantage of the free 30 days of Playstation Plus that come with your system this looks like the game to do it with. If this game came out a year into the Playstation 4’s lifecycle I’d be singing a very different tune but as far as launch titles go you really could do a lot worse than Shadow Fall. You’re probably not going to make a lot of fond memories here, but hey it’s better than letting your new 400 dollar piece of equipment collect dust.
