Killzone: Shadow Fall review: stalemate

This literally does not stop — even as the credits roll, Killzone: Shadow Fall finds another parting shot to underscore the ultimate pointlessness of the Helghast/Vektan war.

It didn't matter that Killzone: Shadow Fall's script was full of awful, overwrought dialogue, plot holes, or general stupidity, or that the voice acting was frequently painful. If Guerrilla was trying to tell me that everyone in the conflict depicted across the Killzone series was irredeemable, then they succeeded. But it also did an excellent job of murdering any investment I tried to place within the characters or the plot. By the end of the game, I didn't actively want any one side to win or lose. I just didn't care.

The tone and presentation are so oppressive that it's almost an afterthought that Shadow Fall's biggest problem is its deficit of fun.

The basic gunplay isn't much of a departure from previous games in the series. Aiming and shooting in Killzone has always been a more laborious process than in its first-person shooter contemporaries. Some of this is due to basic latency between the input on the controller and the game's response to that input, but there's a sense that Guerrilla has embraced this, whether it was originally intended or not. Weapons in Killzone: Shadow Fall tend to be large and loud and onerous. It's part of Killzone's sensibility.

This isn't the problem. Instead, Guerrilla can't seem to find an effective, functional combat loop. Enemies tend to cower in cover or, later, flank from every direction using shielded Helghast with shotguns or worse. Body shots aren't useless, but they're not very effective, making Shadow Fall a game of obligatory, boring headshots, often from a distance under walls of gunfire.

Attempts at stealth are undermined by enemies' improbably wide cones of vision. And, despite repeated instances where Shadow Fall's X-ray sonar ability showed me enemies running in place against walls, they still managed to find every hole and opening to shower me with bullets. Theoretically, you can crouch behind a barrier and hit the left trigger to pop up over it to take shots at Helghast in the distance — but somehow, every piece of cover in the game manages to leave your head exposed to enemy fire.

Death frequently contributes to Shadow Fall's campaign length. The game has an infuriating, trial-and-error approach to forward progress. The UI is disinterested in suggesting the next objective or mission-critical moment in a variety of circumstances. On one level, locked sections of a research vessel are accessed by picking up fuel rods from elsewhere on the ship and slotting them into place — something Killzone: Shadow Fall never told me.

Multiplayer at least manages a level of competency that escapes Shadow Fall's story component. Thanks to a pretty steady 60 frames per second and the revelatory new DualShock 4, it controls better than any previous Killzone game has — while still retaining Killzone's inherent style and identity.

But Shadow Fall's multiplayer stages feels cluttered and not as navigable as I would have liked. It seemed like I was always bumping into some invisible piece of geometry and getting killed for the trouble, or jumping against a railing that my soldier refused to vault. And, similarly to the campaign, there's not really anything new, interesting or ambitious about Shadow Fall's multiplayer — the constantly evolving objective-based play of Warzone matches has been around since Killzone 2.