Having recently platinumed Killzone 3, it would be stupid to say I didn't enjoy the game. That said it wasn't everything I had expected it to be. Let's start with the basics for offline play:
GAMEPLAY
Killzone 3 plays really well. Its style of shooter is different than Call of Duty and really sets itself up uniquely. The missions are still very linear, but they allow you a couple different ways of doing things. For example, there is one level where you are in a sort of trench and you can just run through it, clearing out the enemies within, or take the high ground and wreak havoc with a flamethrower. These different strategies in the levels are what really give you replay value.
The guns have been made less "bulky" than they were in Killzone 2, and I think this is a very good thing. Killzone 3 doesn't give you the speed that call of duty does, and that is fantastic, but it's also not so slow to the point of being a hassle (the second one in my opinion failed to do this).
The guns are as always quite diverse. The boltgun returns (a big favorite of mine) and you get a gun that looks like something straight out of District 9, just imploding the Higs. The problem I found with the guns though is that no matter what gun your using, your "heavy" weapon will always be best. Rarely did I even use my assault rifle weapon because the heavy weapons were so much better, and the game has so many ammo points that it is easy to just resupply and continue using it.
GRAPHICS
What can you say here? Flawless. Best graphics of any first person shooter out there. The cutscenes look great, the in game action looks great, and this transfers to online beautifully.
The sounds in the game are exactly how they should be. Whether your in an exoskeleton and the machine is beeping at you for low health or RPGs are blowing up in the background, it feels just about like your really in the action.
There are a few hiccups at times when playing co-op however.
DIFFICULTY
There are four difficulties in Killzone 3: Recruit, Trooper, Veteran, and Elite. My first playthrough was on veteran difficulty and it felt pretty fair. All fire fights and true FPS action seemed about right, but when they tried to mix the game up, that's where the problems came in.
On a couple different missions, you are in vehicles, I won't spoil anything, but the difficulty when in these vehicles is downright unfair in many of the missions. Two in particular are unforgiving, the snow mission where you drive a futuristic snowmobile-tank hybrid, and the mission where you are in a space vehicle. I found myself dieing in these missions after no fault of my own... Frustratingly restarting at checkpoints only to have it happen again. Eventually you'll figure out how to do it just right, but it's a little tedious.
As I said before, I have gotten the Platinum trophy for the game. To do this, you must also beat the game on elite. My gripe is this, after having beat the game the first time on veteran, beating it on elite was actually easier and faster for me. The enemies took more shots and did more damage but it didn't seem like they were really any "smarter".
*Side note: on all difficulties that I played, the Higs can through grenades with 110% accuracy, forcing you out of cover.
ONLINE
Killzone 3's online still has a lot of work to be done which is sad. While day 1 patch 1.03 and newer patch 1.04 helped fix a lot of the bugs and connectivity problems, there is still a balance problem that I fear won't be addressed. Frankly there's just no point in not being invisible. You can kill people with the marksman's fully upgraded secondary weapon and still remain invisible. Fun to do, very annoying to be killed by.
The classes are diverse though, and if there were no marksman or sniping, it would be much more balanced and stress more team play. The Operations game mode is incredible and adds a lot more fun to traditional online play. The only problem is, it's found on only 3 maps and they have no plans on making more.
Another online drawback is the lack of squads. A great feature in Killzone 2 is now gone and frankly it makes playing with a friend a little less of a team experience. It's a pretty frustrating thing to have taken out.
The best part of the online though is how it is true to Killzone. They made the guns a little less "bulky" but that's about the only difference. It still plays how it feels it should and the graphics are amazing.
The clan system is also much improved from the valor point system. Unfortunately in order to get a good rank you basically just camp in one part of a map invisible and destroy the other team when they walk by. A simple fix that would stop this would be to make every clan have to have 1 of each type of class before they can have repeats. This would make matches much more competitive and fun. Unfortunately I doubt we'll see such a fix.
BOTTOM LINE
In the end of it all, Killzone 3 is a great experience. Campaign is fun and a good thing to come back to especially with co-op and online offers a lot more hours to play. I just hope custom rooms with no snipers start to pop up because frankly it's just unfair.
The Amsterdam-based studio reflects on its humble beginnings, beloved franchises, and growth through the years.
Up there with the top tier in the industry. Love Guerrilla Games - Horizon Burning Shores is simply STUNNING.
Same. They nailed it with Horizon. The trouble is I also want a new Killzone! Can't I just have it all?!
I have yet to play Burning Shores as I just started Forbidden West (bought at launch, just unwrapped last weekend LOL) and playing on PS5.
man...I still can't believe the graphics especially now I'm playing it on my LG OLED. that graphics and with stable performance backing it up, GG really is the master of their craft!
32.7M sales in the Horizon franchise! With 8.4M coming from Forbidden West alone! Truly a hugely successful game and franchise as a whole. Looking forward to Horizon III
One year after realease HZD sold 7.6 million.
https://www.noobfeed.com/ne...
So not a drop off.
Unless you're saying a HFW should have sold as much now as HZD sold in 5 years?
It's been 3 games, this includes Call of the Mountain. Also no, its a great improvement over HZD.
lol you are comparing:
HZD: 28 February 2017 - May 2023 (6 years+)
HFW: 18 February 2022 - May 2023 (1 year+)
We will see if it surpass original number.
@shane, 2 full main games, 2 DLC add ons, 1 VR spin off game, oh and a an official LEGO set.
Not too bad for an ip that's only been on market for 6 years
Wow, very impressive. I didn't know the numbers were so high for Forbidden West. Still playing through it myself
Yooo, when I first saw that Killzone 1 footage at E3, my friends my brothers and I were like, Holy shit! When it came out, it didn't look exactly like it, but we sunk so many hours into 1 & 2.
I even liked Killzone: SF, it was a spectacle to look at, and even today it looks good. I hope they make a new one. Can you imagine how that will look, and they can get some modern FPS pointers from Bungie.
Such a wonderful studio. They deserve all their success.
The Decima Engine is absolute 🔥 I'm just mad they have abandoned Killzone.
They are probably working on mutiple projects. One of them is Horizon 3, but another is a multiplaer game and probably somehting else.
DSOGaming writes: "While Sony does not plan to release Killzone 3 on the PC, Yahfz shared a video that gives us a glimpse at what such a PC version could look like."
Still looks secure 2 gens later... one of my favorite ps3 moments. With 3D and move the game is on another level
PC almost always ends up the best place to play games, even if it takes a while.
What would you rather play decades down the line? A game at a fixed resolution and frame, considering you have a working disc, and the hardware?
Or run it on an emulator that can update the experience all around, and let you use whatever control input you prefer?
If you insist on the former, it's really only for the sake of nostalgia.
I disagree. The main draw for consoles has always be the simplicity of just putting the disc in / downloading it and playing without worrying about anything else. The average person just wouldn’t want to deal with emulation even though it’s very important for preservation.
Youre getting flak because people on here thibk of themselves as pc wizards. But honestly most poeple try and go get emulators and romz they end up with malware.. yes theyre "easy" if you know the basics but alot of people dont. That said the fact that its taken nearly 20 years to get a sustantially better experience for ps3 games than on its native system shows the complexity of getting bc to work. Sony, if they have any intention, should just invest in a vastly better psnow experience.
jukins
Most people who emulate don't get malware, you'd have to be going to some weird sites for that to happen, heck years ago people were getting sketchier ad's resulting in malware warning on this site if you didn't have a ad-blocker lol.
That's fine if that's the main draw, but it doesn't make it a better experience, just a preference. Having the freedom to do the things you can do on PC is what the appeal of PC is. Buying a game on PC means you never have to worry about the console makers just deciding the next hardware shouldn't support the generation anymore, which means everything you bought is stuck on that hardware instead of moving up with everything else. Nintendo uses this tactic to keep reselling the same games over and over at inflated prices. Sony cut all previous gens off the PS4 and sold it back to people in a poor attempt with PSnow. While the PS5 supports PS4 games, that may not be the case in the next gen after this. No to mention shutting off all the previous stores and updates completely. Even MS stopped making new BC titles at some point, so now there's a big list with 17 pages of titles that are not playable on Xbone and are just trapped on older gen. That's not a problem on PC, the reverse happens where you only have to worry if your hardware can play the newest releases at ultra with no issue.
Shhh don't say that aloud! You're going to trigger a lot of console infidels here.
Well that's the beauty of still owning a retro console tho. Those who usually complain about emulation are just being blindly loyal to a company. Emulation is great for many reason, but if I still owned the console then I disagree nothing beats plugging it back in and going down a nostalgia trip
The RPCS3 devs are doing great work. And Kami works nicely with it too it seems.
Very neat.
While Xbox has committed to backwards compatibility spanning four generations, PlayStation has continued their stance that the feature isn't important. Well, it is! I'm hoping these PlayStation 3 classics that skipped the PS4 entirely show up again on the PS5 for everyone to enjoy.
Resistance, Dead Space franchise, Splatterhouse, Lollipop Chainsaw, Brutal Legends, Alice Madness Returns, Enslaved Journey to the West, Mass Effect franchise. Also wouldn't mind seeing a new Wild Arms game remake or HD remaster, the Xenosaga trilogy, a new Parasite Eve, a new Dino Crisis just too many games to list that are forgotten and left in the dark now adays.
The PS3 is difficult to emulate. PS3 backwards compatibility on PS5 would require translation from PowerPC to x86. Additionally the PS5 likely would have to mimic the PS3’s GPU and CPU.
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This is what pops up on my web browser. So I can't even read the site. So, forget that. They don't need my data.
But let's get something straight. OG Xbox had around 1,001 games. How many are BC on Series X? **39** THIRTY NINE. Come on! That's wack BC. You can't tell me that's a complete list. Talking about commitment. Game preservation. Ridiculous. Covers nothing.
How many games released on Xbox 360? Around 2085. How many are BC?
568. That's it. Around 1,517 are **MISSING** Stop playing. Tired of that nonsense.
Anyway, the only games I really want from PS3 that would be awesome are Motorstorm and MGS4. I'll take BC. I'll take a remaster. I'll take a remake. If not those, then Killzone 2. And in VR, maybe Sports Champions, House of the Dead Overkill and the Time Crisis games.
That's all I need. But we've gone over BC again and again in every possible way. It wasn't that important because Sony sold 115 million consoles without it. That's proof enough with no outcry. And PS5 has damn near all 4,000+ PS4 games BC. It's not PS1,PS2 and PS3. But that's plenty. I'll take more but you get what you get.
Good review, picked up on stuff I noticed. Rented the game but I doubt I will buy it cause of the online problems...
I have no problems being sniped. I play as the engineer most of the time and have a great time. I just want more maps and I will probably play this till SOCOM or Resistance 3 comes out.
It's not getting sniped that's the problem for me, it's the snipers being invisible using that friggin automatic secondary that gets to me. I snipe on Bilgark Boulevard, I don't know for sure the name of it, but I routinely get 4 or 5 kills for every death when sniping on that level. It is just not fair.
You didnt use the assault rifles? Really?
I love them.
Sure the LMG and Mini Gun kick some arse but getting a single shot headshot at a distance is great. Very accurate when fired a shot at a time.
It made Elite boring because there is no challenge at all.