Killzone 3 Multiplayer Beta: Impressions

Mechs are some of the new pleasures awaiting Killzone fans.

Imagine the following: you go out with a guy. He's kind of heavy, and consciously different from other guys. He's solid, exciting and your relationship gives you something no other relationship had before. Now imagine this same guy goes on a diet, and he comes back leaner, faster, smoother, more toned and with big guns and new tricks up his sleeve. He's not quite the same guy you fell in love with, but he's worked really hard to get himself in this shape, and underneath it all, he's still the same guy. That's what has happened with Killzone 3. 





The context of this is that its predecessor,  Killzone 2 has grown a rabid fanbase around it's difficult but deeply rewarding mechanics. The game goes out of it's way to make the player feel like they are carrying a real, metal gun, firing real bullets with massive recoil, and introduced a feeling of gravity missing from the Call of Duty's and Halo's of this world. This, combined with a grim, incredibly detailed, consistent and painterly lit world, cutting edge AI and physics created a shooter that, for all the thinness of it's story and the potty-mouthed cliches, created a sense of immersion like no other. And yet the thing that made it so special could be argued to make it inaccessible: Edge didn't describe it as "ultra-hardcore" for nothing. These are issues Guerilla Games are clearly taking very seriously.


The beta reveals a faster, lighter beast, streamlined for speed but equipped with a wealth of both subtle refinements and major overhauls. Some of it is in the smaller details, like the new near- instantaneous respawns which generates a much faster pace, the smoother framerate, or the fact that the standard rifle has now been replaced by a light machine gun or the ratatatat STA-11. Maybe it's in the handling of those weapons-there's far less recoil, and they feel tighter and lighter, as if they were physically redesigned; there's bound to be howls of protest from the Killzone faithful in that regard, but newcomers may be more grateful. The sense of weight has been alleviated a little by increasing the speed of default movement (but a decrease  in both your sprint time and recovery). This is no COD however, and still feels weighty by comparison to other modern FPS's. Graphically, this is a wonder, showing off fine texture work (I got shot because I was gazing at the detail in the uniform of a fallen player), rich colours and finely detailed effects like thick snow, billowing ash and fluorescent electrical fields . As always, Guerilla Games invest in rich, singular colour schemes which shows off their understanding of how to draw the players eye through a level, those glowing red eyes and blue guide lights leading you to where you need to point your iron sights.

The levels that are on show are imaginative and vast, featuring snow-covered dams, gigantic coil turbines, and Visari Palace laid waste by the nuclear blast that bookended Sev's Helghan ordeal. The real feat these early examples achieve is that they feel like real environments, and not just multiplayer levels. Some of the old problems still do linger here and there. Killzone 2's tight corridors and fixed spawn points lent itself to some of the worst that spawn camping has to offer. Whilst there is evidence of this in the beta, the vast scale of these new maps means that any team now has a plethora of escape roots should the enemy take up residence with a couple of mechs outside basecamp. On the Turbine Concourse map, at this stage at any rate, it seems a bit too easy for to gain control of the two vertically placed tactical control points for the entirety of the match, and the access point turns the spawn point into a turkey shoot for the opposing team, rather than a tactical advantage.

The class system, originally the bastard lovechild of Team Fortress 2 and Call of Duty, is still there, but there have been quite a number of adjustments that make a big difference to the game. Guerilla have implemented an unlock system not dissimilar to what you might see in Battlefield: ranking up earns you unlock points, unlock points buy you secondary abilities and new goodies. What's very cool is that the secondary abilities are now upgradeable BUT  it does not appear that they are interchangeable as they were in Killzone 2. That said, it makes playing as a given class a much more specific experience. For example, the replacement of the spam-happy spawn grenade with a spawn areas that have to be captured makes the tactician more vital than ever. As an example, if you're playing as Infiltrator (formerly Saboteur), your initial disguise ability is pretty much as it was in the Killzone 2, but once upgraded, it becomes virtually persistent, allowing you to unleash the deeply gratifying new brutal melees in even more deeply gratifying sneaky ways.

A lot of hard work to be done then....

All classes now have access to about 6-9 different weapons, and sidearms vary from a new silenced pistol to  the RPG (now mercifully only available as the last unlock and with one round of ammo, which should temper the hilarious but very unbalanced rocket spamming which made it the bane of Killzone 2) Remember the assault class? The guy with the speed boost and the most overpowered arsenal in the game? Well, he's gone. Guerilla amalgamated has mixed the DNA of several of its' old classes, and they all feel more focussed as a result; you know your role if you're playing it, but the new weapon unlocks guarantee you won't be handicapped by it. There is also a fairly lengthy reward system for the new weapons (which co-incidentally sound fantastically loud and distinct, both familiar and suitably otherwordly)  with 1000 kills being the cap for each, and, of course points awarded for doing so. For the faithful, there will be some nice rewards in the hours they will surely invest online come next year.


But there's more: there's the Guerilla Warfare option, which is essentially Deathmatch all day, every day, and then there's Operations, which feels a hybrid of Uncharted 2's Co-Op and Battlefield's Rush mode. Like Rush, one team is trying to destroy a set of objectives, whilst the defending team tries to stop them, but as in UC2, cutscenes bookend each set of objectives achieved that feature YOU and your star teammates. I wasn't overly bothered about this when I heard about it, but seeing it in action as my PSN handle floated above my character on a bobbing Intruder brought about an unbidden "Cool." It creates a subtle motivation to push your team forward and sense of gratification in the gameplay, and shows how hard GG is trying to up the ante on this next instalment of the ExtraSolar War. 


But for all this, for all the flashy new tricks, the mechs, the brutal melees, the overhauled class system and the faster pace, some may worry that this has lost sight of what and who it is; does this still feel like Killzone? Unequivocally, yes: it is violent, noisy, brutal, challenging, chaotic, bloodthirsty and beautiful, but also sleeker, re-engineered from the ground up but still retaining that flavour that earned it such a devout following on Killzone 2. Come February, I'm SO in.


Christopher Parkes
Killzone 3 is due out February 2011.