#KILLZONE SHADOW FALL ECHO PS4#

Each battlefield provides interesting flow from point to point and the experience holds up on the new PlayStation hardware. One moment you might be attaching a bomb to an objective, and the next you might be capturing and holding points throughout the map. The franchise's signature Warzones multiplayer fills a map with players and then rotates objectives until a decisive winner secures victory. Killzone's suite of multiplayer offerings also means you won't regret your launch day purchase. It doesn't make up for the design missteps in the campaign, but it numbs any pain you might feel while in single-player confusion.

#KILLZONE SHADOW FALL ECHO PS4#

On a massive TV, with a controller in your hand, and with surround-sound headphones over your ears, it's hard not to get engrossed by Shadow Fall's display of PS4 power. The game looks and sounds incredible and future-facing design create some truly breathtaking landscapes. I appreciate Guerrilla's attempts to iterate and dig deep into first-person shooter design, but it doesn't take much playtime to spot Killzone's strengths. The game never told me I could pull the right trigger to fire an explosive weapon and fend off these drones, so I watched game over screen after game over screen until I finally pushed every button on the controller in frustration.

One sequence relatively late in the game puts Lucas in the vacuum of space where he must protect a container from attacking Helghast drones. Lucas can even use Tactical Echo to highlight enemies by their heat signature through walls, but thanks to some unintuitive map design, this might become a crutch that actually hurts your progress.

Players can hit up on the Dualshock 4's D-pad to highlight the objective on their HUD, but this never provides enough information to make players comfortable with their direction. He's controlled by the player, so he can't be all bad.Ĭopious amounds of confusion and misdirection worsen Shadow Fall's heavy-handed script.

Here's this guy who just mowed down countless, countless soldiers, but let's give him a key card to move on anyway. Helghan civilians frequently cower in fear but not without eventually offering Lucas help. This proves an interesting, if uneven, premise that allows Lucas to travel around both sides of the wall and into space, but more than a few sequences feel forced and overwrought. Players have to help Lucas endure delicate operations in the hopes that a 30-year-old powder keg doesn't erupt to consume Vekta as well.

When the remaining Helghan people show up on Vekta's doorstep, an uneasy truce is struck, a wall is erected, and orphan Lucas joins the Vektan elite Shadow Marshal unit. If you haven't played any previous games in the series, Shadow Fall will recap how Vektans ended the war with Helghast by triggering a chemical fire that consumed the Helghan planet and countless lives. This premise feels forced and many objectives remain unintuitive, but Killzone's hefty multiplayer mode makes up for the single-player campaign's deficiencies. In Shadow Fall, players assume the role of Lucas, an orphan whose father was killed by soldiers while he was escaping New Helghan on the other side of the wall separating Helghan and Vektan populations on the Vektan home planet. Killzone: Shadow Fall continues this motif, beating the player over the head with themes drawn from the Cold War and further horrors of battle.

Killzone shadow fall echo