I'm going to level with you guys, I come into the KZ3 beta without being in any way hyped about the game and having not been entirely pleased with KZ2's campaign or online. What I had seen of this game from the close beta looked quite good to me, but certainly not ground breaking. As I intended to do a review of the OB, I decided to jot down some notes during the course of my time with it. This write up will include every issue I have found with the game, everything I like about the game and general observations about many things.
To kick it off, I will start with my 'likes'. In Killzone 2 it took quite a long time to take down opponents, something I wasn't satisfied with. Gladly, this has been rectified and kills in KZ3 are very quick, especially at short range. The one map in the OB is good without being great. As a result of the map being fairly one tone (i.e. lots of similar indoor rooms, stairs etc), it can be hard to remember early on (for me it was the first hour or so) where the part of the map you are in is in relation to other parts. The map is at lest conducive to fast paced and somewhat dynamic gameplay.
I also love how quickly and freely you can vault over objects like railings, and it goes without saying really that the animation in KZ3 is pretty impressive, with everything from melee kills to running looking very smooth. Speaking of smooth, during about 4 hours of game time so far I've encountered only 2 laggy sessions which is certainly better than CoD. The control feel is certainly anything but smooth on the other hand. There is still noticeable weight to the guns, and although it took me over an hour to fully get used to the control feel, I'm now very happy with it.
On the graphics and sound front, nothing particularly disappoints. The menu music is great, as are sounds generally (although I have a few issues with it I will address later). The graphics don't stand out to me as being awesome, although I’ll certainly admit they're amongst the best on consoles. But really, it's sad that people think this is comparable to PC games and again I’ll talk about this later.
Now I'll get onto my dislikes, and a warning this section will be very long.
First thing I noticed is that there is a lot of film grain to this game, more so even than there is in say Bad Company 1. It adds harshness to the graphics without having any benefit in return. The next thing to annoy me was that you have to select your kit on every spawn. In Bad Company (which like Killzone has mid game kit customization) you can customise your kit and then tell the game to go with that setup on your next spawn, but no such system is present in KZ3 and I found it an unnecessary nuisance.
While I'm on spawning, let me go into the spawn system. It's a mess. I found that it would frequently spawn me within metres of opponents who have direct line of sight on you. Frustratingly it especially frequently spawns you near enemies using the disguise ability (more on that later). On one occasion it even spawned me literally with the other team at the very start of the game. I thought they were friendlies using disguise, and then one killed me. There is also a spawn point on the OB map which sees you spawn with your face literally up against a very dark wall, not exactly fair. Also, after dying you can usually be revived or can choose to bypass that waiting time. Then you have to select your kit and then respawn. However, there is a glitch which I experienced several times whereby you instantly respawn as soon as you are shot down.
The disguise is an ability available for the infiltrator class which allows the player to appear to enemies as a friendly. It changes their name tag to that off a friendly player (and its colour to green), and it also changes their appearance to that of a friendly. This is a game breakingly bad choice from Guerrilla. Many games descend into simply shooting everybody you see because so many people are using disguise to sneak up and melee you that it is simply safer to shoot everyone and do away with the chance that they are an enemy. This also leads me into the ridiculous melee system.
Brutal melees look cool, there is no doubting that. But if you actually look at their affect on gameplay it is certainly negative. If you choose to melee an opponent and it goes into a brutal melee and then another enemy appears, you're in trouble. The melee simply takes too long to complete. You can easily lose a kill during the animation to a team mate you decides to shoot instead, or you can get killed yourself. There is also a plethora of issues surrounding the system. Firstly, if you engage in a BM (brutal melee) and the opponent is killed part way through, it takes about a second to return control to you. Secondly, if experiencing lag it is possible to shoot an enemy, then have them attempt to BM you, but during the attempt your bullets catch up and they die by your gun. There is again about a 1 second delay between them dying and the player getting back control. Thirdly, the gap between attempting melees is simply too long (about 4-5 seconds). Fourthly it's on the wrong button. Why would you put melee on the L1 and zoom on the right stick. They should have just stuck with CoD like controls of shoot on R1, scope on L1 and melee on right stick press, it is much more natural. Fifthly, engaging in a BM ruins immersion, as because the animations are canned, there is a significant camera position jump upon BM initiation. Sixthly, I found that initiating in a failed BM where the opponent is killed can reload your gun (only happened twice to me).
Now onto the UI. It is fucking hopeless. After each game there is a one minute gap before the next game starts. All you can do is check out the scoreboard from the last game and see how many points everyone got. You can’t do any of the normal stuff like check your/opponents stats, send someone a message, change controls, access options, etc. What makes this particularly horrendously ridiculous is that you can actually check your overall stats during a game, exactly when you don’t give a toss about them. WTF! On this note, checking the scoreboard isn’t advisable as it completely takes away your control. In pretty much every game ever, you can check the scoreboard and continue to run at the very least. Here though, it isn’t possible to quickly bring up the scoreboard and check how your going while on the move, as it takes too long to appear/disappear, plus the aforementioned issue. The menu’s also have a generally poor design both in terms of functionality and visual appeal. The red background makes things hard to quickly skim over for me at least, plus it is simply ugly and often things are hidden unnecessarily in sub menus.
I also take issue with the Guerrilla Warfare mode’s body count, which at 50 is far too low. The games go for up to 10 minutes, but at least on the OB map I haven’t had one go for more than 6 minutes. Another issue is that the FOV in this game is incredibly restricting, even more so than in CoD. As I said before there is an interval period of a minute between games. The game doesn’t even use this for loading the next map (if it does, the loading is very slow), as the new game loads at its conclusion. After this there is another 30 seconds before the game starts which you can use to customise your load outs. Why could this 30 seconds be removed by giving the player the ability to customise during the interval? Honestly the interval period in KZ3 has to be the biggest over sight in gaming history. The loading times on Friday night particularly varied widely, with the loading sometimes taking mere seconds to complete, yet sometimes it took until into the second minute of the next game for the loading and connecting to complete. I also had the loading freeze completely twice, although oddly I could still bring up the XMB and quit the game without it restarting the system, as generally happens when a game locks up. This leads to my next set of issues.
If you choose to load something, you can’t back out of it. I’ve faced infinite load screens at several places and had no option but to quit the game. These infinite loads occurred once on loading the leader boards, twice on selecting the ‘multiplayer’ button, and once or twice on loading a session. They need to put in an abort button to each of these in order to fix the infinite load problem.
General gameplay issues come down to a few things. Auto turrets for example are simply not welcome for me. For the same reason that automated gunships are bullshit in CoD, turrets are bullshit here. The game is an FPS, not an FPSwAB (FPS with Automated Bots)! The grenade throw takes a long time to complete, and you can also not throw a grenade or shoot while vaulting an object until the animation completes. When it comes to weapon balancing, the shotgun is very powerful over about 15 metres, but over the next 10 metres you can go from 1 shot kills to 3 shot kills, which is bollocks. After sprinting it takes about a second for the cross hair to come back up, which is a bigger issue than it would otherwise be as one of the way to detect a disguised enemy to that the crosshair colour still changes when over a disguised enemy.
The sounds are very hard to localise, which is possibly due to the hectic nature of the map and also because of the ambient sound effects being quite dominant. In most games, it is possible to hear enemies approaching by their footsteps; you somehow get a sense of having someone behind you. This is not the case with KZ as the map is so confined that there is always loud gunfire nearby. You’re hearing also gets completely dulled when on low health, so if you take a shot from off screen it is practically impossible to work out where it came as you can’t even hear them firing when on very low health.
The games unlock system is quite irritating, as it completely stops you from jumping from one class that you’ve ranked up to another that you haven’t and still having a chance at doing well. Once again referring to Bad Company, in that game you could say unlock pistols as you rank up which can be used in every kit, leaving only primary weapons to be unlocked for each kit individually. In KZ3 though, incredibly you have to purchase each secondary weapon for each kit separately. This wouldn’t be such as issue if you had a pistol from the start, but you don’t. Then once you buy the first pistol, it’s useless from more than a (very heavy) stone’s throw away.
Nearing the end now and my final gameplay related issues are that the double kill (and triple kill) timer is very, very long, in fact so long as you get your next kill within 5 seconds or so of your previous then that counts as a double/triple kill. It’s simply too long, but I feel it has been made so long so that people can get double kills with BM’s. Once you die you can be revived by people with the right class. Dead allies appear on the map as a green cross regardless of whether you can revive them or not. The issue here is that once dead yourself you have no way of knowing whether that team mate nearby is able to revive you or not, which means that you often waste time waiting to be revived by someone who can’t, or choose to take your life and respawn when a team mate was about to revive you.
Finally onto my issues with the graphics. The lighting downright sucks. For example, the lighting volumes readjust as you move. So if you move forward by an inch, the light dulls while moving and then comes back up once you stop moving. Lighting from internal light sources particularly is very soft and ill defined, and the shadowing even appears out of place in some (I’ll try and get a screenshot to show you guys what I mean). The lighting is also very dark in a lot of places indoor, for my money too dark. The games water has received a lot of praise, but I have only criticism for it. Anyone who has played Crysis knows that the waves are very detailed in terms of their shape. It’s as though they aren’t constructed of polygons. In Killzone 3 though you can easily make out the polygons which make up the waves by the way the light reflects of them. On top of this, the waves bob up and down completely unnaturally. Object textures are generally good by console standards but the OB has its fair share of sub CoD resolution textures (again I’ll try and make some screenshots to show you guys them), some examples of which are the hand rails along stairs and the large (oil/gas?) tank which sites outside up against a wall. Grenade detonation is certainly less than spectacular, and the particles it throws up don’t seem to depend on the material it lands on. The game uses HDR lighting, and an example of this is looking in the sky in the direction of the sun. This makes pretty much the entire sky go white, and is perhaps a bit too aggressively integrated (many games are guilty of this).
There are only a few bugs left to mention, and then I’m heading for the hills. The Ribbons counter in the stats menu does not update correctly. I’ve earned many more of each ribbon and also a wider range of ribbons than it has showing up. When using the shot gun, the sound effect for chambering the next round after firing often doesn’t play, and also for the shotgun, I once had it only reload one bullet at a time (I had to press the reload button after every individual bullet was loaded).
So there you have it, the longest and most boring review of a one level demo/beta ever is complete. But what do I actually think of the game itself? Despite the many issues, it is still good enough fun for me to have this down as a definite purchase. I doubt I will be able to stick with the game for that long, as the disguise ability particularly gets on my nerves too much, but it should last long enough to warrant the asking price if the OB is anything to go by. My Recommendation is for everyone to try out the beta before committing to a purchase, but I would be surprised if the majority of people didn’t enjoy their time with the game.
PS: Just for the hell of it, as of the time of me writing this my stats are:
Time Online: 3:39:38
K/D Ratio: 1.43
Kills: 371
Assists: 54
Deaths: 259
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This is so fucking well written and honest that it's unbelievable. I absolutely agree with you on every single dislikes. Other thing I don't quite like is that it feels somewhat faster than KZ2 probably because they lowered the weapons weight and but most annoying is that I cannot remap my button. But that's just a minor complaint. I guess it might just have to do with the type of person that I am and although most of my complaint I have with the beta don't take away the fact that I think it's looking like a good game, I still notice them and they irritate me sometimes.
Anyways, nice blog dude.
i feel like some of the issues you have with the time is suppose to be like that for more realism, i will admit the delay on grenades is annoying to me but i feel like it should be that way because it would prolly take that long or longer in real life. also controllers to zoom and melee can be changed so L1 is zoom and stuff so yeah...
Even though after reading the whole thing, Killzone 3 is still going to be a first day buy for me and this has in no way affected me, but I will say that your concerns were well put and properly thought out. Kudos good sir.
I dont think they will keep the UI like it is now though. Atleast i hope not, the neon is not doing it for me. I agree on the 1 minute time between matches hopefully it will be brought down atleast by 30 seconds in retail.
Great review, anyone can see you put effort into it.
As in depth a review you have written, I couldn't help get the feeling that you want the game to be like every other FPS out there. The melee is great due to fact you are vulnerable, this will hopefully deter many of those melee on the run guys who infest every other FPS out there.
I have little issue with the graphics and don't entirely agree, plus I think you lose creditability for yet again being a person who brings PC into the equation.
You should really just say "as console games go there is no doubt that Killzone 3 is up there with the best, there are some graphical issues I have but they are more likely down to personal likes and dislikes and should not detract from what is a great looking game for this current generation". Please, no need to mention PC's.
Apart from that you mention some good points, even though the bots don't bother me as Killzone 2 has them.
Good write up though.
P.S the game gives you the option to change to alternate controls when you first boot it up, so you should point out you don't need to click R3 to zoom.