E3 Hands-On: Killzone 3 - Preview
by Karl Koebke , posted on 20 June 2010 / 4,304 Views
During my Sony booth tour I got a chance to play a bit of Killzone 3 and I’m happy to say that it has addressed some of my most damning issues from the first.
The demo I played had me equipped with a jetpack as I hopped from iceberg to iceberg trying to make it to an enemy base. I really liked the use of the jetpack as it was mainly used for jumping high and then floating back to the ground and gave the level a bit of a platforming aspect that the previous game never had. It also had a machine gun attached to it with unlimited ammo, the developer told me that they wanted the player to feel empowered when using it.
Snowy vistas surrounded me and they all looked very impressive, when I mentioned the new visual variety to the developer he told me that the visuals for Killzone 2 made sense for the story since you were storming an industrial city. Now that the invasion has failed you are running for your life and trying to escape Helghan so they can put some greater aesthetic variety in the game as you run from place to place.
Once I had platformed to the enemy base I was greeted by some Helghast with jetpacks. Killing these Helghast was quite satisfying because if you shoot them in the jetpack it will leak and the enemy will shoot off like a rocket to who knows where.
I the came upon what I thought was a small group of Helghast on a level of the base above me. The developer said that there were a lot of ways to approach the situation. Being the headstrong guy I am I decided to use the jetpack to jump right into the fray, and it was about this time I learned that the group of Helghast that I thought was around 3 in number was more like 7 or 8. My death was quick and quite painful considering it was caught on film.
Sadly that was all the time I had with Killzone 3. It looks like the third game will have more visual and gameplay variety then the 2nd, now all they need to do is kill off some of the more annoying characters from the last game’s single player and they’ll be golden.
