So What Was That Whole Killzone Series About?

a lot of high-profile big first-person shooters came out in 2004 half-life 2 halo 2 metroid prime 2 doom 3 counter-strike source notice something all of these games have in common none of them are on the playstation 2. despite being the biggest console of the early to mid 2000s the ps2 wasn't really the place to go to get your fix if you wanted first person shooters and that makes some sense around this time the fps genre had become a space for technology-pushing graphical showcases the ps2 wasn't the best place to make one of those it was the most popular console of its time but the least powerful platform that wasn't a handheld or something first person shooters were a really big deal though so you can't fault sony for trying to get an exclusive fps for their platform and they really tried hard to make the most commercially appealing mid-2000s fps possible what's popular in first person shooters right now interplanetary science fiction and world war ii let's just combine the two together so in november 2004 amongst all these other first-person shooters sony published killzone developed by guerilla games exclusively for the playstation 2. set far in the future on a terraformed planet called vector a gang of plucky misfit soldiers in the interplanetary strategic alliance the isa have to prevent a brutal invasion from the helghan empire the helghast from the planet helghan are a people who according to the manual lost something called the first helgen war and ever since have been living rough on their world where the terrible living conditions have caused them to mutate into big hulking pale bald chaps scholar visari unifies the downtrodden helghast people into the helghan empire an authoritarian totalitarian supremacist regime that now plans on invading vector partially out of revenge for the outcome of the first helgen war thus begins the second helgen war we'll be experiencing in this game so yeah the allusions to world war ii are not subtle probably could be assumed but in the killzone visual design book dutch studio guerrilla games confirms that they based the conflict of kill zone on the occupation of their own country in world war ii the helghasts are inspired by the totalitarian regimes of the early to mid 20th century like stalin's ussr mao's china and of course nazi germany on the opposing side the isa is a futuristic take on the contemporary liberal market economies of today's quote-unquote free world basing the antagonists of your game off regimes responsible for some of the biggest real-life atrocities of the last century is a sure-fire way to immediately communicate to players who likely live in societies with an opposing ideology more in line with the protagonists that the hell gasps are bad news what was really a stroke of genius though was the emphasis that was placed on these antagonists throughout advertising rather than depicting a larger than life character the player will be taking control of the majority of killzone's marketing and branding focused on the helghast the characters you'd be fighting in the game this made the series stand out in its early days as the box art read more as a challenge to the player instead of an invitation to embody some extraordinary individual it was asking the consumer if they were up for the challenge of taking on this imposing enemy really i bought this design book to see if gorilla was inspired by jinro when designing the helghast but apparently they just liked the gas mask look and then added red eyes when play testers were having trouble shooting them which fair enough i can believe that i recommend reading killzone's manual because it provides more setup and world building than the game does to be honest look at this isn't this cool it's made to look and read like an in-universe isa magazine it's got in-universe recruitment posters and adverts for fast food all very liberal market economy style there's little stories about the state of vector during the invasion politician appeals for temporary ceasefire and and it's a section explaining how the pause screen works this stuff's pretty charming to me on second thoughts maybe don't read this thing it will make you miss game manuals what will strike you the most about killzone's gameplay is its stark indifference to the player there's no music during gameplay in killzone no stings to punctuate the ebb and flow of battle all you hear is the brutal sounds of gunfire and explosions and the noise of people screaming at each other [Applause] even at full energy you can be taken out fairly quickly and health only regenerates a small amount on its own combine this with slow movement and you have a shooter that really forces you to take your time and methodically make your way across enemy infested land checkpoints are fairly scarce and scattered making every step forward tense and laden with consequence despite being set in the future on some new planet humanity has settled on the weaponry used here is fairly conventional and plausible the look of killzone is more similar to the near future shooters like modern warfare that would crop up a few years after it rather than its contemporaries in the sci-fi shooter genre like halo this gives killzone a bit of an original touch for an fps set considerably in the future but with a very grounded style killzone encourages disciplined cautious play with a strict checkpoint system that can be pretty punishing this will indeed have you considering what to do carefully but inevitably when a game's main punishment for failure is to have you repeat big chunks of it there's gonna be the odd frustrating moment that frustration is compounded in killzone as a slow paced game the least i think a hard game where you can die fast that has scarce respawn points should do is to be able to get you back in the action as fast as possible kill zone is at its worst when it owns you and fails to do that having you re-plod through fairly uneventful areas to get back to the meat of things again you'd think for a game that chugs so much in terms of performance that killzone would be outputting some mad visuals for ps2 but really i can't say that it is it looks fine but i'd say the console has much better lookers in terms of art style and raw graphics some of which run a lot better than killzone i will say that there are some pretty large levels though environments can get pretty big so yes those parts are pretty impressive for the system but again that performance it ain't good i don't know if any graphical quality would make up for how much this game chokes i wouldn't really call killzone a polished game in general low inconsistent frame rates weirdly compressed audio here they come classic moments where you touch the wrong thing and instantly die repetitive looking environments the melee kills feel weak and almost unfinished shooting feels pretty box standard it's not super satisfying but it's not totally limp and unsatisfying either killzone one has potential that isn't really fully realized the interplanetary conflict with real world influence has a lot more to offer than just a pretty good manual the story does capitalize on the premise a little but not as much as it could have you get four characters to play as each with a different background and set of skills who spend the bulk of the game trying to regain control over vectors defense systems one of them hakka is a half helghast half vecton character who defected from the helghan empire half helghast half human he's distrusted by rico your heavy weapons guy and the two bicker throughout the game you bastards don't even give a [ __ ] about your own hacker is a pretty interesting character and his dynamic with rico is fun even a monkey will write shakespeare given enough time what the [ __ ] is a shakespeare seeing the two butt heads the whole game only for their battles to bring them together ricoh saving hacker at the end is one of the game's highlights it's probably the emotional peak of the whole series to be honest the thing is though you also have jan and luga your other two playable characters who are just kind of boring are you asking me if i got laid what no no gee they have some sexual tension great but they're just a bit generic vanilla captain protagonist and smug assassin they're characters who don't really inform us much about the universe of killzone the way rico and hacker do they could be characters in any shooter with an army in it i feel like more of a focus should have been placed on hacker and rico i think their dynamic alone is interesting enough for a full game's worth of character development hacker a great character to explore the vex in helghast conflict with your mother pretends you're dead already the rest of your family never even mentioned your name someone splits between both factions who makes the choice to betray aside paired with rico a vexin who hates and mistrusts or helghast the hell gas scum wiped out my entire platoon and they'll be paying off that dead in blood for as long as i breathe sir i see it's the best part of this story but i think it could have been taken further if given more focus taken in its totality it's hard to call killzone anything but fairly mediocre but you can definitely see some cool ideas with potential for expansion you can see why it would be worth making more kill zone titles better be with all this [ __ ] the next entry in the series came out in 2006 on the playstation portable even though it's a small little handheld spin-off i kind of have to talk about it since it was developed by guerilla games rather than being outsourced to some other studio to make on the quick while gorilla focused on the next home console entry as of writing killzone liberation is the only non-first-person shooter kill zone game which was probably a good move because if getting an fps kill zone to run properly on ps2 was hard enough imagine what one would look like spluttering along on psp with no second analog stick to control the camera with either it's a bit tragic then that the genre they went for this time top down shooter still feels somewhat impaired thanks to the psp's lack of that second analog stick which could have made aiming even in this context a lot easier despite that liberation is a decent enough game set after kill zone 1 once again the player takes control of jan templar as alongside rico he continues to fight off invading helghan forces on vector there's not much to say about it really though take cover pick targets this time you can unlock extra missions that are perfect for a mess about if you're on the go with the psp these let you upgrade your character which i recommend doing as if you don't the main missions are going to be no joke the fifth and final chapter of this game was also free downloadable content though with the psp's online services down you'll have to go to gorilla's website to get the file for it now it's funny because at the end of chapter 4 where the credits roll since this is where the game ended before the dlc rico is currently in captivity are you okay yeah but i lost rico so if you don't get the fifth chapter downloaded where you save him you'd be going into killzone 2 completely confused as to why he's no longer in enemy hands so yeah there's no moment in killzone 1 or liberation that really rises any higher than decent by themselves they're not really games that would stand out much in the annals of gaming history so it's really quite shocking how much of the quality gets turned up with the series next entry in the words of pop culture's most famous black gas mask wearing space totalitarian this is where the fun begins 2009's killzone 2 is an excellent shooter and a real triumph for guerrilla games coming off the original's mixed reception it takes the grounded gritty presentation of killzone one's universe and elevates it with more intense gameplay and amazing production value what struck me about playing killzone 2 again 11 years after it came out is how incredible it still looks and it's not all down to detailed assets though those still do look sharp there's a great emphasis put onto the little touches here the bobbing of your gun when you aim the sickening lurches the helghast make when hit the lights coming off your gun the way bits of wall get chipped away when bullets make contact the dark red blood that contrasts disturbingly well with the cold muted environments it seems like being unable to produce a ps2 fps that could visually compete with the rest of the genre and other systems made gorilla and sony determined to flip the script on ps3 and killzone 2 absolutely does delivering one of the most impressive looking shooters out there in a game that's this nasty dirty brutal and real it feels right that your character is slow and lumbering as you carry these heavy powerful metal death machines from place to place a relatively slow turning and aiming speed here lends the weapons a realistic heft as a result your shots feel a little extra cathartic when lining up and letting one loose out of these big chunky death sticks has this kind of build up to it this kind of heavy gun play isn't gonna be for everyone but what better place to double down on a shooter like this geared towards realistic harsh ungraceful warfare than a console exclusive an fps tied to thumb sticks which are never going to be able to replicate the speed and precision of a mouse it's not like slow movement is a handicap that makes the game unfair if the enemies are playing by the same rules right the guns here all feel ferocious thanks to the aforementioned details especially the sniper rifle the way it jerks wildly after a shot just makes that shot feel all the more savage for the time killzone 2 was one of the most raw and unsanitized shooters out there without veering off into being overly ridiculous or gratuitous your hulking slow movement never becomes tedious like it could run the risk of and kill zone 1. since here while the moment-to-moment combat is still weighty and deliberate the overall pace of the game has been sped up substantially you're almost always kept in the action plus environments are less repetitive you get to see new places at a faster rate checkpoints are now less punishing too as a result killzone 2 was less challenging than one but also less frustrating it also meant i felt more encouraged to try wild card tactics which again helped the pace of the game as i wasn't always tiptoeing through being ultra cautious the crouch button here also now will attach you to cover allowing for quick peeking in and out of said cover i think a cover system makes a little more sense for first person shooters than third person tutors as in first person it can be harder to gauge if your entire body is in cover when you can't see your character's entire body a command that tells your character to take his head scoop up his limbs and tuck it all behind something can therefore be quite useful in a way a third-person camera simply gives us more visual feedback than our bodies offer us in real life to make up for the senses a game can't replicate as accurately senses like touch and proprioception which in real life let us know where all our body parts are at at a given moment without looking at them therefore including a button that quickly toggles you in and out of cover giving you some reassurance that you're going to be more protected once that button is pressed adds up in a first person shooter especially one with relatively slow movement played on a controller with fairly low field of vision in an fps like kill zone where repositioning is a slower process than some other shooters a function like this is welcome popping your head in and out of cover can be done more swiftly and reliably without compromising on the deliberate heft your character exhibits throughout the rest of play they even added background music in killzone 1 a lack of background music was more apt you travel much longer distances in kill zone 1 with enemy camps placed in between you and a far away destination killzone 2 focuses less on travel and guerrilla warfare and more a lot of back to back chaotic large scale conflicts for control over a location the game has already placed you into so some score to complement that intensity of play i think is warranted this time the game takes place on helgen the helghast homeworld as the isa invades to capture the helghast leader scholar visari helgan was partially inspired by hong kong and that kind of compact urban setting lends a real intimacy to your battle with the helghan in the early segments helghan perfectly paints a picture of helghast's society grim slums that contrast with the self-importance of immaculate colossal marble structures built to honor those who command and control the planet's military might a lot of noise is made about kill zone 2's quote-unquote to reveal in 2005. a target render of what kill zone 2 could theoretically look similar to which sony claimed was real footage of the game running i think it would be wrong to let this marketing blunder overshadow just how good killzone 2 did end up looking with all its detail and with how tightly paced some of its linear enemy encounters are i think kill zone 2 comes closer than most fps games to actually feeling like a playable first-person cinematic there are some segments of my footage that look like they were scripted for some e3 demonstration but it's just me casually playing the actual game they released oh visually i think kill zone 2 looks more appealing now than the fakey fake target render ever did the game is less focused on interpersonal drama between the members of your squad than the original this time around you play as just one character newcomer sev your four-man squad is then filled out by the returning ricoh and two other newcomers the upbeat gaza and the foul-mouthed natco do you understand why i'm here i guess your mom got drunk with the guys one night you i'm next i ain't got all day i gotta get home in time to tuck garza's mommy in the team aren't amazing characters with much development but at least there's a fun dynamic here between everyone all it takes is a little finesse finesse my ass the fact you can't pick who you play as anymore is not too much of a loss for me the differences between each character and kill zone 1 weren't vast enough to encourage me to replay any level as a different one i think the highlight of killzone 2's cast has to be of course one of its antagonists colonel radick radic is so memorable for a lot of reasons even though he's not actually in the game or the series that much he has a cold chilling voice imposing design and manages to kill a pretty major series cast member didn't i kill all of you yet but i think what makes him stand out is that he's basically the ultimate visari hell guest early in the game the player can overhear to helgast discussing how radic executed two grunts for uniform extreme and barbaric but as we come to discover that extremism was born out of ideology rather than him simply flexing his power when you defeat radic in combat at the end of the game and he's unable to prevent seven ricoh from taking vasari's palace he executes himself he must have viewed those grunts he killed as soldiers who failed to see their commitments to the helghast through and when he too fails at his own mission he gives himself the same punishment he wasn't just some high-ranking selfish helghast with a lust for personal gain and power but he seemed actually sincerely to be extremely perversely devoted to the beliefs and philosophy of his world's regime that extreme devotion coupled with his considerable combat ability makes him the ultimate example of a helghast soldier to appear at any point during the series he's definitely the character i think of most when i picture that iconic helmet he's their ideals and aesthetic cranked up to their highest intensity if i had to pick a standout moment in killzone 2 it would be the final assault on visari's palace moving up towards the palace as the hellgast flood out slowly gaining ground pushing back thinning them out just enough so you can move to the next barricade until little victories finally pile up and you've made it to the front door of the stronghold it's an amazing moment the red tint of this level reflects that you're at the beating heart of the helghan army and they're throwing everything they have at you so that's the peak of the series killzone 2's campaign elevates the series to this compelling unique place where pacing gameplay visuals tone setting all come together in a tight package yet 2011's kill zone 3 seems like it wants to backtrack all of that killzone 3 kind of drops the grounded future aesthetic in favor of giant thousand foot tall mechs laser guns fleshy alien habitats sleek high-tech sci-fi labs and big crazy bug knife robots up to this point killzone was pretty light on overt sci-fi technology the warfare and its weaponry was conventional and rudimentary the environments weren't overtly futuristic at all even spaceships and hovercrafts looked fairly basic unflashy looking more fit to be delivering cargo than hastily deploying troops into a war zone there were hints of more advanced tech and alien abnormalities here and there radix camo the odd oversized spider one of the most out there concepts and two was the special power source native to planet helgen petricide but in two it's portrayed as like this kind of souped up electrical current while in three the irradiated version of petricide is like this magic obliteration energy a lot of killzone's uniqueness came from this fairly utilitarian future world it chose to present its warfare in that all changes in killzone 3 and what makes this change all the more jarring is that it literally takes place 5 minutes after killzone 2. we see the story continue on from the exact same building killzone 2 ended in yet it feels like we're on a totally different planet in a different time where were these giant mechs five minutes ago in killzone 2 when i was fighting the hell guest i'm sure they would have come in handy also the character natko basically disappears when he was right here a minute ago they just completely dropped this character from the story without much explanation he only shows up in kill zone 3 if you play the campaign in co-op where he'll be the second player he still won't be in the cut scenes though i don't know it's just odds to demote this character from the status of well being a character to just a skin for whoever is player two in theory the premise here is that you and the gang are stuck on helgen after landing a significant blow to the hell guest and you have to survive here with no evac in sight with the higgs on your tail mad than ever a gritty low stakes game about surviving on helghan as a small group sounds very killzone but that premise is kind of dropped and the game decides instead to escalate into a big save the world mission as the helghast plan on nuking and destroying all of earth it's kind of a sudden raising of the stakes even for the series as a whole considering game one was about gaining control of a defense system and game two was about arresting a guy i guess they wanted a blowout finale for the third game but it's weird to see three starts low-key and then switch gears so suddenly near the end i don't know if there is a way to switch those gears more smoothly in a 5-hour fps campaign without it you know coming off a bit silly in general killzone 3 is way more over the top than previous titles i get that the melee used to be pretty unsatisfying but did that mean we had to include crazy execution kills where you push your thumbs through the hell ghast helmets visorize shatter them and then somehow crush a dude's skull underneath like would that even be possible to do what is this duke nukem in terms of gameplay killzone 3 seems to want to up the pace a little hints of this can be seen in the aim sensitivity 2 started you at fifty percent speed by default and three starts you at thirty percent by default but thirty percent in three is much faster than fifty percent in two meaning that to get a similar sensitivity to two and three you'd have to drop the sensitivity to like the lowest setting this indicates to me that gorilla wants you to play with faster aiming here shifting kill zone towards being a more fast paced shooter overall even including this slide move you can zip around with which is odd because i always assumed killzone's weapons had a realistic hefty weight to them which would prevent power sliding while holding them i felt like i had a lot more sudden deaths in killzone 3 2. maybe it's because the levels are less compact than 2 more open making it easier to get hit from afar by multiple foes no matter what the reason when playing on the same difficulty across both games three would wipe me out suddenly on far more occasions however killzone 3's quick deaths don't really make the game harder and therefore encourage any kind of style of play because they included this revive system where rico can bring you back to life in a lot of levels with no real penalties to speak of you don't have to use the higher aim sensitivity and slides to dash around and be fast on the draw or even conversely take your time and watch your every move like in kill zone one any new playstyle the game might have wanted to encourage is kinda made void rather than these quick deaths making the game harder they were just inconvenient and mildly annoying the revive system gave the game this kind of awkward stop and start pace unlike killzone 2 where you'd always get set back when dying success being dependent on you pulling off a nice satisfying string of continuous gameplay you can bumble through a lot of killzone 3 and stark contrast to where we started in one where there was no messing around the faster aiming default and revive system end up feeling like band-aids placed over a game that was running the risk of becoming frustrating the way it's otherwise designed slightly more lenient gameplay without the revive system i think would have been a more satisfying experience i say that because killzone 2's gameplay left me a lot more satisfied the game also has an odd obsession with rail shooter levels it even ends on one with an entire analog stick out of play these segments are much less compelling than regular gameplay maybe one would have been a nice change of pace but the amount in three seems overkill the turret sequence in two wasn't a masterpiece but again it was an okay change of pace getting to spend some extended time above the clouds of hogan rather than down on the cluttered surface like most of the time but more importantly there was something tasteful about it it wasn't trying to put you on a theme park ride and give you a tour of some crazy imagery it was trying to simulate what getting into a turret on a big battleship would be like again in a fairly grounded way you get into this cockpit and there you are stationary just hanging off the edge of the sky nothing but a cracking piece of glass protecting you from thin air and that's in general one of my big issues with killzone 2 does have an almost simulation approach to its warfare it's gunplay weighty it's look bleak and unforgiving throughout the tone consistent the combat brutal and shocking without veering into the ridiculous i came to expect a series that was marrying grim real world history with plausible dark science fiction instead with three you get this occasionally bleak but usually pretty crazy and ridiculous game that throws all sorts of exaggerated sci-fi concepts crazy mad scientist villains and over-the-top situations at you something you'd more expect to see in some kind of light-hearted space adventure game not the dark gritty world war ii allegory killzone owner bean up to this point feels jarring all of a sudden for a kill zone to be like this and i think this new direction hijacks what had become a really promising direction with game two i think it really lacks some of the details i mentioned in the kill zone 2 segment that really brought out the grit of the combat taken as isolated segments there's of course parts of killzone 3 that are pretty fun to play the jetpack section was a cool mix-up i suppose adding an extra layer of verticality to the combat you also don't have ricoh here to bring you back to life so this part can be a bit of an enjoyable challenge even though i do think the idea of helghast blasting off and bouncing around in these vulnerable looking rickety things is kind of silly and makes them a little less threatening the hell ghasts are all about looking imposing and dominant these lurching wobbly jetpacks don't look like they'd be approved but liberation let you use a jetpack during a few sequences so i'm not going to say you're not allowed to have one in killzone the one in liberation did look a little less wacky though i'll also acknowledge that i haven't really touched on competitive multiplayer modes in this video the online play was a big part of these games unfortunately most of them are no longer online so i can't really revisit them just gotta use bots now which is never gonna feel the same i never got too into killzone 2's multiplayer though i know that was a significant portion of the killzone 2 experience for a lot of people but i did play a good chunk of killzone 3's multiplayer and i have fond memories of it the base siege mode was a lot of fun especially with buddies infiltrating the enemy base planting explosives and then seeing yourself in the gang in a little cut scene dashing out of there hella satisfying if you want a pretty game with competent shooting you could still of course do a lot worse than kill zone 3 and i would like to emphasize that some of what's here still does look amazing for ps3 just what it's rendering most of the time doesn't feel very kill zone but why this change in direction well i'm going to speculate about that a little later in the video but before we get to that i want to talk about killzone mercenary for the ps vita 2013's killzone mercenary wasn't developed by guerrilla games but by gorilla cambridge formerly sce studio cambridge the studio that bought us medieval usually i might skip portable spin-offs not made by the original studio behind the franchise in a retrospective but since it's the only killzone game not made by gorilla it would seem silly to leave this video incomplete i also want to talk about mercenary because i actually quite like it once i got over the fact that like killzone 3 mercenary was going to be making use of a much more glossy high-tech sci-fi aesthetic here and there i actually found a pretty cool little shooter here with a fun premise for this universe as the title would imply you play a mercenary who throughout the game takes jobs from both the isa and the helghast during the invasion of vector and the invasion of helgen so in a cool twist we get to fight for both sides of the conflict if fighting for the helghast seems unpalatable don't worry isa admiral gray has introduced who's trying to develop some kind of viral weapon that would wipe out helgen so she's up to some pretty evil stuff too admiral gray made the conflict more gray bravo leading the helgen side of things we have kratec who has the coolest helghast design of them all popped red collar i guess helghast uniform regulations do become a bit more lacks as you rise in the chain of command also to make your a moral doesn't take aside cool protagonist more likeable the game gives you a child to protect hey every film about an edgy comic book character does it tying into the mercenary theme in this game you gain cash for kills which you can then spend on new weapons and tools to deck out your loadout with you get rewarded with more money for more efficient and skilled play and get deducted money if you die it encouraged me to mix up my approach and play consistently with these new extrinsic rewards on the line i'm not saying i'd want this in something like a kill zone 2 but for a mercenary themed kill zone it's great there are some cool settings here too you have the vecton embassy on helghan which has these cherry blossom pink plant things maybe it's a callback to the park on vector in the original maybe you know they're both pink i like the idea of a level that can plausibly combine the aesthetics of vector and helgen the level kind of fits the game's theme nicely the fact you're dabbling in both sides of the conflict here we encounter the most underrated killzone character boris the hell guest you fight alongside him to protect that kid and i don't know he's just a lovable tough guy with a heart of gold killing civilians that's not soldiering that's the lowest of the low i also like this cool helgen fishing town built into the side of cliffs and rock formations it's a place visually in line with what you'd expect an industrialized unsanitized helgen fishing town to perhaps look like it's neat even if its scale does seem a bit implausible but it looks like it belongs on helghan more than a lot of places in three mercenary isn't a groundbreaking fps but for a short handheld romp with quality graphics it's hard to do much better at least i guess before the switch came out the upgrade system encourages playing on even perhaps after beating the campaign and getting that top level gear so the game is perfect for a little bit of pop out and play wherever you may be to rack up some kills it's weird to say that it's probably my second favorite kill zone game second only to two which yes means i wasn't a huge fan of gorilla's next entry in the series killzone shadowfall shadow 4 was released to the same year as mercenary in 2013 as a launch title for the playstation 4. and uh yeah this one's going to be quite a tricky one to talk about i don't really know where to begin with this one there's going to be spoilers for killzone 3 from this point on cause because they're basically required to understand this game so at the end of killzone 3 a series of events led to your team i guess accidentally nuking the surface of the entire planet of helgen which as you might have guessed ends the war so in shadow four the isa take in all the surviving helgen refugees which makes sense it's the least they could do i'm with you so far rather than trying to integrate both cultures into one society they build a giant wall dividing the planet into two and the isa lets the helghast forcibly remove all current vector residents from their homes if those homes happen to be on the side the helghast were given now things are getting a little more questionable accepting the helgen refugees makes perfect sense but why would the isa allow the helghast to self-govern on vector soil and keep autonomy over their own military how did the helghast to negotiate for this insanely good deal after killzone 3. what did they have as leverage here in killzone 2 simply arresting vasari was considered a good enough goal for the invasion considered an outcome that would place the isa in a position of strength over the helghast but the whole planet getting reduced to rubble after three somehow still leaves room for the helghast to have bargaining power what situation is there left beyond the new king of the whole planet that would leave them with less bargaining power then i feel like this planet-wide new king must have ended any advantage helghan had over the isa right and yet the helghast get given half a vector and the people living there lose their homes or die thanks for winning that wall isa are even helgan citizens super stoked with vasari's regime continuing in its classic totalitarian style is this helga and gentleman pumped to still be living under visari law they'll treat the people so far thank you for yourselves the police are everywhere obviously with the whole war thing after doing world war ii in space guerrilla wanted to do a cold war kind of thing in space a west slash east germany kind of scenario but unlike kill zone 1 and 2 which were fairly analogous to world war ii this scenario isn't really analogous at all to post world war ii germany this is like if britain blew up germany and gave scotland to the nazis the conflict in shadowfall is more like an amalgamation of all sorts of different real world split territories slash border conflicts of course it's not such a big deal the story doesn't fit the real world chronology of world war ii it's more of a problem for me that the events leading to this scenario in shadowfall don't make much sense what was the isa's rationale here why don't the isa attempt to demilitarize the helghast and try and have both societies co-exist that would come with its own hurdles but surely those hurdles would have been lesser than the ones created by forced relocations and this mexican standoff divided society situation they create which inevitably does boil over into war again it seems like gorilla thought about how cool a city split down the middle between vector and helga and society would look and it was like whatever okay get us to that scenario no matter what and it is a cool setting but the justifications given for it in universe were so flimsy to me it killed much of my ability to take it seriously and get invested with this new status quo awkwardly put into place shadowful tries to tell a more nuanced story than past kill zones aiming to explore a greyer conflict both sides as the isa and helghast forces scheme against each other on either sides of this great wall this time the isa getting up to some very bad stuff themselves and not even accidentally but given who these factions are based on i think gorilla quickly ran into a bit of an issue when one side of a conflict is a liberal market economy and the other is totalitarianism how do you critique the liberal market side without looking like you're condoning totalitarianism and how do you criticize the totalitarianism without looking like the only alternative you have for it is the liberal market economies side offering credence to boomer memes that all bigotry disappeared into a puff of smoke because elements like north america and britain won world war ii i just wanted to make a video where i said i didn't like the graphics and kill zone shadow for lol you should put this entire post you just wrote in your script heck post a screenshot and read it out i'll read my lines the answer shadowfall lands on is to make both of these sides just act extremely terrible and then for better or for worse pieces out without a solution for that mercenary had a bit of this going on too but i can see how throwing in a more bloodthirsty isa higher up we hadn't heard of made sense in a game where it points you were gonna be fighting for the helghast during a period of history where their fanaticism was at its peak shadowfall wants to put the focus squarely on exploring the intricacies of this relationship between these two cultures but the result feels both awkward and half-baked you play as lucas kellan whose father gets killed by helghast soldiers during the mass settling on vector he carries out covert operations ordered by thomas sinclair the guy in charge of the isa presence on vector known now as the vsa it quickly becomes apparent that sinclair has a deep prejudice towards the helghan race these people are animals all of them and as shadowful goes on we get to see an isa who behave just as badly as the helgen regimes have been depicted so far in the games they put a deadly biological weapon into production designed to wipe out the helghan race there weren't many hell guests on board to begin with whatever it was it killed them all they're flesh it just started falling off their bones the humans on board are fine no side effects nothing now i understand what massar means by ethnic bullet after a terrorist attack the isa on the spot deport all citizens of helgen descent over to the helghast side of the wall we now have an isa just as supremacist as the helghast ever were so here perhaps gorilla are trying to say that the liberal market economies the quote unquote free world they mention in their art book can end up resorting to methodology and behavior very similar to that of outwardly totalitarian societies societies that that free world claimed to be in opposition to i found the weapon every day new helgen continues to exist we are under threat we can remove that threat but that kind of message ends up being undercut by the fact that the game never actually asks the player themselves to do anything too morally questionable or reprehensible and perhaps grapple with the reality of taking orders from a side that's long since abandoned the moral high ground you'd think taking orders from a bigot and being someone whose own father was killed by the members of the race your boss has basically been raising you to hate that lucas kellen and you as the player would be tasked with doing some pretty horrible things in the name of a perceived greater good the player in kellen could be put into an awkward position forced to do anti-helghast missions than endanger or end the lives of helghast who don't deserve it and who aren't committed to the ideology of those in charge make kellen reflect on his assumptions through gameplay in a powerful way that's not something the player gets to experience first hand though it's convenient that when kellen goes on a mission all the hell gasps that get put in front of your crosshairs are portrayed as evil psychos still worshipping a dead warmongering dictator and tyrant justifiably upset about the destruction of their homeworld albeit in an evil voice before vowing revenge i lost my entire family here everyone i was the only person in my family who survived there will be a reckoning vector will be ours the civilians will not be killed we will give them a chance to leave and if they choose to stay that is a different matter the helgen side of the wall has been turned into one giant slum despite the helghast having complete autonomy over a land that started out rich with resources in a lot of cases it seems like you're doing the citizens of the helghast side a favor by breaking into their land and playing cowboy they set you up as this attack dog for this morally bankrupt isa but when it comes to the gameplay i don't think gorilla wanted to undermine the series brand which is isn't it fun to take on the scary helmet men that's perhaps where the game is at odds with itself it's like the game is saying yeah sweeping bigotry against this fictional race is bad but you did still kind of buy this game to have fun shooting them right don't worry most of them are still portrayed as amoral monsters while kellen does eventually go rogue it's not because he ends up contributing first-hand to some kind of reprehensible act his bigot boss has sent him to commit it's just because a helgen lady tells him that war is bad seems like a bit of a waste of a setup sinclair's not supposed to be in the right right because the helgen race aren't predisposed from birth to evil totalitarians right they're not orcs from lord of the rings correct they are innocent people no they're not innocent tell them it's been my assumption that they're just people capable of multiple points of view from the very first cutscene of the series where we see helgens not on board with vasari's regime getting executed gorilla have really managed to muddy the waters though by having this weird constant where any defecting hell guest who fights alongside the player is always depicted as of mixed descent half helghast half human which considering how much this trope gets revisited starts to imply you need some vectin in you to not like totalitarianism well there is one helgen who isn't implied to be mixed who fights against the interests of vasari alongside the player the true unsung hero of killzone boris the helghast yellow is pissed one of shadowfour's problems is that the nuanced pitting of these two opposed sides fighting a proxy war as close neighbors doesn't end up mattering much the vsa and helghast both independently developing powerful weapons away from vector kinda overshadows any conflict actually happening in the split city such hoops are jumped through to get us to this split city setup and the riders might as well have not bothered because the game ends up boiling down to everyone fighting over superweapons away from vector and the city superweapons which weren't developed on vector and the city by the end shadowfall entirely opts out of this tricky border situation it presents saying well both sides in their own time built some super weapons somewhere else due mostly to resentment over the war and at the end of the game our protagonists are gonna try and stop them being used which i think we can all agree is the right thing to do well great that really gets us out of any tough conversations involving land control law enforcement security foreign intervention emigration rights in this whole shared planet situation when the only big choice our protagonist has to make is yeah i think we should shut down these off-world super weapons before they're used i'm pretty sure shadowfall is a game that just wants to say that bigotry is bad and war makes monsters of us all but i think it does it in a very convoluted yet superficial way that a lot of the time wastes the potential of a setup it bends over backwards to get us to i think the issue is i don't see a story with themes and messages when i play shadowfall as much as i see writers straining to make a grey conflict out of two competing systems where one of the systems is based on some of the real world's worst regimes nobody wants to be seen as condoning some monstrous totalitarian regime in their video game by making them in any way sympathetic so there's only two options really a black and white conflict where the totalitarians are in the wrong or a gray one where they're in the wrong which can therefore only be made grey by making the other side very wrong too maybe the hellgast shouldn't have still been devout supremacist totalitarians come shadow for but again if you don't make them that then your series can't be about guilt-free shooting these guys anymore and maybe a series that wants to be about guilt-free shooting some guys shouldn't try and make a game about a grey conflict if these were just two random alien races with poorly defined ideologies it probably wouldn't be such a big deal to depict them however you wanted but killzone has been analogous to the real world since day one so unless gorilla were to make a killzone game with completely new factions they're stuck juggling the heavy implications that come with how you frame fictional regimes based on real ones i've been discussing this aspect of things rather than just making fun of the various plot inconsistencies because it seems to be what gorilla wanted us to do from the beginning this is a series that wanted to be seen as something more than just a shooter i'm just meeting it on its own terms here shadowfall has a plot that goes to such dumb lengths to get us to an interesting status quo with the split city we have the helghast still around with a massive army so we can still have a game about finding them even though it wouldn't make sense for them to have this kind of military might anymore so with all these contrivances at the bare minimum i think the game could have made more out of the alliance of lucas kellen and ekko the mixed race helghast special agent you team up with to try and stop both sides with everything said there was at least an opportunity here to make two likeable characters that embody the series conflict and creates a more compelling version of hacker and rico's relationship from the first game but if anything these two end up being less compelling than the ogs kellen barely speaks when he does it's just basic stuff to keep the plot going you tried we find stall this ends echo just kind of exposits to kellen here and there acting annoyed she's having to do whatever she's doing they don't really build a rapport or exchange any banter that makes you care about their team up they miss an opportunity to make you care on a personal level that these two people keep getting forced to be apart by being on opposite sides of this conflict they could have been a really cool duo where the effects their respective cultures have had on their personality and outlooks shine through via their conversations maybe by coming together these two could have proposed a viable alternative to the system's perpetuating war in this universe two people from either side coming together to find a way to create peace between their two nations but instead the search for any long-term fix gets supplanted by the need for these two to shut down the big ridiculous doomsday weapons as quickly as possible before they can be used two pretty strong soldiers going rogue unsurprisingly doesn't solve the issues of this world i agree with the game that this isn't a solution to things but it solidifies how shadowfall only really has a bit of grim fatalism to push for its final message as the game comes to a close and this whole series with it i guess since there hasn't been any more killzone since shadow four what we're left with is a real downer cap to this franchise echo assassinates sinclair during a live public broadcast which will stop him personally using the biological superweapon to kill millions but having the credits be summoned by the public assassination of the vsa's leader an assassination the vsa will no doubt assume was carried out by the helghast can only be inferring that the conflict between the two sides is destined to continue on indefinitely it frames the whole series as a bleak cautionary tale about xenophobia and mistrust winning out but to me it rings kinda hollow three ended on such a full stop a devastating end to a war an end that gets walked back for the next game just so we can ultimately say and the war never ended that walk back kinda undermines the ending this cynical open ender this bitter back and forth in shadowfall takes place after we've been detailed one of the most generous giftings of land in the history of the universe putting aside the jumbled story and its themes stylistically killzone shadow 4 was kind of doomed to not click with me since it moves away even further from the visual and tonal approach on display with earlier games like two the series has committed now to this colorful bright sleek ultra futuristic aesthetic is this killzone or deus ex human revolution on top of that the levels have become much larger than they've been before at least since one and also they've become slightly non-linear from time to time occasionally getting the choice for what to do next isn't a bad addition but i think the scale of these stages hurt the experience for me there's now a lot of time spent traversing large areas between enemy encounters where there's just nothing much going on killzone used to be relentless you were in the kill zone out here fighting for your life in shadowfall i spend half the time trying to find enemies to fight so what is my theory as to why killzone slowly moved away from gritty dark warfare to colorful sci-fi adventure with a little robot sidekick well in the late 2000s to early 2010s in cool gamer criticism circles a bit of a backlash was brewing towards a perceived oversaturation of quote-unquote brown and grey shooters usually linear ones with short campaigns and some kind of multiplayer mode being a shooter with more deliberate gameplay aiming perhaps to portray the grim reality of grounded unembellished war zones or worse not being colourful had started to be equated with a lack of creativity in gaming discourse maybe this is a tad anecdotal but that's definitely the vibe i got when i was younger i probably held that stance too from time to time to look like an enlightened gamer going against the grain grim shooters had started to become a more predominant force in mainstream gaming but i think the backlash started to frame that kind of experience as inherently inferior to more light-hearted games with more over-the-top extravagant scenarios and a high variety of colors as if more color and not being very grounded or realistic equals being more creative somehow in response i think shooters did try for a bit to up the saturation a little and get a little less grounded in reality with more over-the-top fantastical scenarios that wanted to be perceived as more exciting and crazy and fun in a more traditional sense big robots kaboom lasers badass takedowns etc it feels especially off to try to do this with killzone or re-jig it into an over-the-top rolican sci-fi adventure but while also keeping the extreme blunt violence and mass murder of its predecessors even trying to jazz up the once bleak violence by portraying it as hell are epic or funny in places your king went down like a [ __ ] it almost makes me feel a bit uncomfortable if anything the grittiness of killzone i think was kind of integral to the series killzone 2's uncompromising bleak dark dirty approach to warfare its focus on that was kind of the selling point more so than the average war shooter at the time it's definitely what made it stand apart from cleaner more colorful sci-fi shooters like halo i think killzone 2 was one of the best examples of this aesthetic ever the grit of killzone the bleak overwhelming chaos i think that could have been a more sustainable identity for the series if it needed to go on for six games rather than the prolonging of the one conflict isa vs helghast all the games decided they kind of had to be about by going more colorful and futuristic the killzone series just ended up blending into the crowd as a lot of shooters got more exaggerated and overtly futuristic to be perceived as fresh and bold if expanding the audience of the series was the objective though i don't think there's much chance of convincing people who didn't want to play killzone 2 to play a killzone game by making it more bright and sanitized plus you might end up losing the interest of people who were already invested i think people complaining about brown and grey shooters were more looking for new series with a lighter tone to scratch their itch rather than having franchises they didn't play or didn't like the look of bend to their whim call of duty went in a more colorful futuristic direction with faster gameplay around the mid-2010s and more recently 180 backed the more successful look and tone of its late 2000s titles when the new direction was met with a lot of negativity from longtime fans not that one type of tone will guarantee you success at any point in time the aesthetic still has to be high quality as does the gameplay but i could see a polished kill zone with a darker aesthetic really capturing people's attention around the mid-2010s and especially now nowadays a lot of popular shooters are colorful fast-paced sci-fi shooters and perhaps due to that over-saturation some of the least popular shooters are too if killzone had committed to its bleak aesthetic it probably would have been more noteworthy going into the early to mid 2010s perhaps the change wasn't a cynical move to placate an audience maybe gorilla really did feel constrained by the aesthetic of killzone 2 and wanted to shift the series looking world so as to better serve original concepts they wanted to try but maybe a whole new series would have been the place to experiment with a new style and tone rather than a kill zone game that takes place right after the previous one given what the style evolved into in shadowfall maybe there's a better place to try that than a series called killzone i think with horizon that's what gorilla have decided to do by shifting focus from killzone over to a new colorful ip with big robots unlike kill zone 3 shadowfall at least has some excuses for this change in direction the game's name makes reference to the fact you're playing as a shadow marshal the stealth class from the original kill zone so it's implying at least that you should come to expect a game more focused on stealth and dashing about perhaps the title also takes place decades after the original trilogy so it's not a total stretch that technology would have evolved a change in direction is one thing but what hasn't really been the case since the original is how unpolished shadowfall feels the quality of the environments and characters is a bit uneven the game also opts for these first person cut scenes which are excusable in a portable game like mercenary but killzone up until mercenary has always had like fully edited cutscenes where you see the player character they didn't point the camera at the mocap actors and do one long take it's not like this is done to achieve some kind of immersive first person experience like when i finished doing this turret sequence and the game just faded out into a first person cut scene that's gonna take place somewhere else rather than me walking somewhere next and having the scene seamlessly trigger even if the transitions were super smooth first person cut scenes aren't even a stylistic choice the game fully commits to i can think of one cut scene that triggers randomly that doesn't have the player character there at all the old games did that too of course it only feels out of place in shadowfall because it only happens one time here making the game overly colorful also results in a visual overload sometimes it used to be easy to identify what was what in the killzone series because the odd bright color contrasts well with the muted environments but now it can be really hard to read what is what at a glance with everything glowing at you so many sources of bright lights hard to tell what's an enemy visor and what's a bit of random set dressing i encountered some legit wacky moments too like when i planted this bomb and then went off to hide while it detonated because i assumed it would attract attention the bomb went off and then enemies spawned directly into my hiding spot i guess this just happened to be the place where enemies were programmed to spawn in once my bomb went off but if that's the case why let me come in here at all have these doors lock once the bomb's planted look at this guy over here too he runs so far away after this where's he going is he off to tell the devs about what just happened let me know if this next one happened to you there's this bit where you're flying up towards the ship and at the top i kept getting completely stuck glued to the top barely able to move it took me a few reloads before i flew up and ascended to the right spot now when i load up the chapter this doesn't happen but i swear on my first time up i was i was glued up here alright anyway this is where the series leaves off and what a weird series it ended up being a series that started wobbly but pushed forward until it delivered on its vision in a spectacular way but then seemingly and suddenly backtracks that vision who am i to say what the vision of killzone should or shouldn't be i guess but i think in this day and age a shooter series that continued more in line with killzone 2's presentation and gameplay could have legitimately stood out more and thrived instead to me it felt like killzone kind of peted out running all over the place trying to do so much at once in each campaign instead of nailing one direction like killzone 2 did i'm a broken record now i don't see as much vocal fanfare for the series anymore i think this is a case where if gorilla wanted to make something different they should have just done that instead of grafting those new creative ambitions onto the killzone series the outcome is an awkward series of games that seems to start meandering by the franchise's second half these later games feel a bit unfocused lacking cohesion as they try and marry the brutal grounded warfare and dark real world inspiration of the first kill zones with exaggerated fantasy sci-fi action and ridiculous technology right now it seems like gorilla have moved on but if they ever do return to killzone i think a game in the style of two would be the best way to go not just because it's my preference but again because a shooter like that i think would genuinely stand out in the market of frantic fast-paced sanitized colorful shooters of today i think there's room for every style of shooter on the market but i also think killzone was best off occupying one of those styles and trying to excel in one space to the best of its ability so yeah that's what that whole kill zone series was about thank you for watching and thank you for your patience between uploads at the moment this video went through a lot of iterations before finally getting finished an extra special thanks goes out to my patreon supporters who have been backing me during this video's production you're seeing the top back is scrolling by you right now if you'd like to help support the channel and get exclusive extra content like short form scripted video reviews of more recent games please visit patreon.com the gaming brit show and consider backing peace out and see you soon you

Channel: TheGamingBritShow

Views: 535,565

Rating: 4.9210019 out of 5

Keywords: killzone, retrospective, shadowfall, playstation, first person shooter, critique, analysis, takedown, franchise, what happened, killzone 2, exclusive, halo killer, killzone 4, killzone 3, liberation, mercenary, helghan, helghast, visari, sev, rico, jan, templar, hackah, review, sony, ps3, ps2, ps4, guerilla, horizon, thegamingbrit, tgbs, gamingbrit, gamingbritshow

Id: Ko8WgF0XVLc

Length: 62min 51sec (3771 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/cmetz90]

The video: an hour long essay about how chasing the trends of the FPS genre resulted in an uneven tone and left what was strong about the franchise behind, while introducing confused and half-baked politics.

The reddit comments: “I [like / don’t like] these games.”

[u/danielcube]

I really enjoy the trilogy as their own games. The first one had several gameplay styles and the other two were great with their physics.

[u/ChaosWarrior01]

The ending of the third game really hit me. No victory, no epilogue about what happened next, nothing but the cold realization of what you just witnessed. None of the characters even can say anything except wonder how many people they just watched die.

[u/OneManFreakShow]

I really loved this series (2 onwards, never played the first) and always wished it would have caught on in a bigger way. The multiplayer that would change modes every five minutes was brilliant and I wish that had inspired other games to include a similar gametype. Campaigns were great, too - I loved the pacing and momentum of the mechanics. Almost felt like a third-person shooter in a first-person perspective. Really solid games overall. Thanks for the reminder to check them out again.

[u/bill_on_sax]

Killzone 2 was ahead of its time. Still looks amazing and has some of the best weapon animations even when compared to games now.

[u/PaulaDeenSlave]

Ah, yes. The Halo killer. I don't remember who actually coined that phrase or if it was a headline that pretended the author didn't invent it for content.

[u/Galaxy40k]

I think that TGB really nailed his description about why KZ2 is still so visually impressive. It isn't just about the graphical fidelity, but all of the little details - The way that your gun sways after each shot instead of just having a canned recoil animation, the way bits of columns crumble as the shots you miss tear through the environment, the way the Helghast recoil with each bullet connected. It's so just so damn GOOD

Like all of these years later, I still haven't shot a sniper rifle in a video game that feels as powerful as the one in KZ2. While the weight of the controls themselves is controversial, the weight conveyed through the visuals themselves is really impressive

[u/ovalcircle1]

Watched the whole video.

TLDR: There is a giant zone and 2 factions kill each other in an attempt to take it over.

[u/Sylhux]

The whole series leaves me with a "yeah it's cool but..."

While a lot of people think Episode 1 is the worst of them, it's actually the only one I enjoyed playing and replaying over and over again, I loved the ability to choose which character you play and the different paths it opened, I wish they would have kept this feature.

I liked 2 and 3 but after finishing the campain once, I felt like I was done and I have never touched those games again.