Killzone Shadow Fall

[Stig]

Played it on the Vita last night for an hour or so. Love the fact I can do that but it's so much more difficult cause everything's smaller and the controls aren't as easy as using the pad. Still, I enjoyed the fact that whilst my wife was watching xfactor I can just stick the game on via the Vita. Looking forward to playing more, but on the TV.

[HarryBizzle]

I've tried remote play and within about a minute had come to conclusion I never want to play a game like that.

[Mortis]

Each to their own I suppose - I find it useful for those little moments when you want to game but don't want to be too antisocial with the other half. Some games work well (AC4, FIFA) others not so much (KZ,NFS, Resogun) - it's an excellent feature though - hopefully I'll be able to test it over the internet at the inlaws over the weekend.

[Stig]

I found Resogun to be perfect on the Vita. I just remapped the buttons so I didn't have to use the back panel.

[Mortis]

I didn't know you could do that - resogun now added to my list of remote play games

[jonamok]

Resogun is fine on remote play until you have to move inside the first cartwheel boss. The vita sticks (for me) are nowhere near up to the required fine control. Just kept clipping the walls and dying. Absolute piece of piss on the DS4 of course.

[Spacehost]

Finished this tonight. It's definitely weaker than the previous two KZs, but it's not the worst FPS ever. Feels too tightly scripted and lacks the big battlefield scraps that made KZ2 so memorable.

[jonamok]

Finished it just before also. Solid 7 or 8 out of 10 for me. Few silly difficulty spikes and daft insta-death freefall bits aside, I enjoyed the last 4 levels. Not as good as the first half, but not enough to ruin it. Writing was total bobbins, but the combat is very beefy, the weapons great (love that electric bolt gun) and the visuals are stunning throughout. I even liked the ending(s).

[David Kenny]

This game has some of the most incredible environments I've seen in a game, the tram ride at the end of The Dead with the ships floating about everywhere and those enormous spider walker things roaming around, made my jaw drop. In fact the whole of The Dead was visually stunning, and pretty inventive I thought.

[Chadruharazzeb]

Is that the Blade Runner-y level?

[David Kenny]

Hmm, I might have got the name wrong but it's the one

Where you have to make it through the collapsing city on the destroyed planet. And now that I think about it maybe the tram ride was actually the end of the chapter after that. Where you see hundreds of warships waiting for the imminent invasion. In my defence, I played quite a few of them in quick succession.

The bladerunner-y one was also very nice looking, but a bit empty.

[Chadruharazzeb]

Ah yes, you are correct. That level. It was rather pretty.

[Mystacon]

Just finished up to the start of Chapter 9 last night.

Really surprised at some of the negative feedback this is getting, especially with regards to Chapters 7 and 8. I think it's great personally, I'm really enjoying it. Ok, so it's pretty run-of-the-mill sci-fi bollocks in terms of storyline, but it plays well with the exception of some small annoyances and it looks incredible at times.

[jonamok]

That first tram ride with Echo in the Helghan container city on Vekta (Ch 5 or 6 maybe) had me gawping. The sheer depth and detail in the structure in all directions was truly impressive, and it all just popped off the screen.

Shame they had to rush it so much, and shame about the completely nonsensical story (and I was trying to pay attention, honest).

For example, I approached the end-game convinced that Massar's weapon was in some way biological (wasn't that discussed right at the outset?). But judging by the penultimate level it appeared to just be

some kind of big-ass firework Stahl used to take a load of ships down over ruined Helghan.

What the hell did I miss?

[sladie]

Just finished this. I really enjoyed it, and that was after nearly trading it/breaking the disc during Chapter 2. My main gripe was that sometimes it was really unclear where you had to go! I had to resort to Youtube a couple of times to figure it out. Apart from a couple of difficulty spikes at the end, I thought the Chapters were all excellent (apart from Chapter 2 which should have been nearer the end of the game). I'll have to post some screenshots (what a great little feature that is BTW).

[grounded_dreams]

I've just finished Chapter 2 and man that was a hard slog.

Sladie [and anyone else], are you saying that was the worst/most annoying Chapter? Cause like you, I almost gave up with the game having to repeat it over and over.

Had a quick go on the next section [zero gravity] and looks like its got a bit of a Dead Space vibe in this Chapter.

[Spacehost]

Chapter 2 really felt in gameplay terms like it should have landed somewhere between chapter 5 and 6.

[sladie]

I'd say Chapter 2 is the most annoying - it just throws so much new stuff at you in a big environment where it's really hard to spot the enemy and that stupid alarm section. It would have been a nice change of pace later on in the game - just strange to put it right up front. There are definitely parts later on that are frustrating, but at least by that stage you have some sense of the game and the fecking OWL thingy. Most of the other Chapters are pretty fun, so it is worth sticking with.

I still don't fully understand the guns in this game. I don't get how some replace your primary firearm, but some replace the secondary firearm. And even by the end I couldn't recognise the good guns by name and most of them just look too similar. The melee though is awesome, has a lovely "crunch" to it.

[Spacehost]

In my experience you always kept the Shadow Marshall rifle and swapped out whatever other weapon you had. There are some weapons (like the minigun) that you carry in addition to your other guns but you can't do anything except use it or drop it to go back to your other guns.

[geldra]

Protip: If you're struggling with where to go next, push up on the dpad for an objective marker.

[Down by Law]

One of my main complaints about the plot...(spoiler heavy)

The game introduced a lot of antagonists, none of which you get the pleasure of dispatching.

Bald guy who tortures you - never seen again

Tyran - Killed by the AI

Stahl - Killed by the AI

Sinclair - Killed off screen by a secondary character

The game sets you up to smash these guys in yet it robs you off the pleasure at every opportunity. Bugger

[sladie]

Protip: If you're struggling with where to go next, push up on the dpad for an objective marker.

I found that to be quite hit and miss though. Probably just me not spotting the obvious paths!!

[Spacehost]

The marker is very hard to spot in certain environments, especially a certain late-stage mostly-orange environment or twelve.

[squirtle]

This is picking up nicely now. Thoroughly enjoying it.

[NecroMorrius]

The chapter on helghan has the dubious honour of being the only gameplay sequences I've ever played where I still can't work out the designers intention for the sequence even after replaying it 15 to 20 times. It's like a bunch of blokes with a very specific type of aspergers that causes a complete and total inability to empathise with another human being built a tech demo and tried to reengineer it into a game at the last minute. It's utterly confusing, baffling, strange and counter intuitive. My wife was in hysterics at me narrating all the problems like a tipsy Attenborough as I played the same totally bewildering sequences over and over. There are entire swathes of map populated with enemies that don't contain anything or lead to anywhere... Insane sequences where you have to run around in front of a sentry gun picking up things to put in things while rock solid flying drones who take two clips to kill spawn behind you with no warning, which can't be targeted or stunned by your owl because I don't know and so you have to stand still and fight them or the sentry gets you, so you're just an idiot standing still getting killed over and over because I don't know. So you put the things in the things and shoot them, and the sentry thing blows up. You die at the same time from something which spawned behind you, but the game checkpoints after you die and reloads in the exact same spot and time except now you're alive and the thing which spawned behind you is gone. And then in the midst of this hobbled, laughable shite, a stupid big robot wanders in and instakills you, and your Owl can't get you up because it's recharging for some reason even though it wouldn't target the thing you were fighting a moment ago so you haven't used it for ages. And then you walk backwards into some floaty shite and float into the air for a moment before crashing to the ground and dying because I don't know. And then eventually you find the sniper lady who is nine foot tall and she says LETS GO but for some reason you can't run for 30 seconds and have to slowly walk towards a checkpoint, and then you can run again.

[NecroMorrius]

And then you walk along a corridor for a bit and come across a Helghan monologuing to himself like Phil Mitchell after two bottles of Asda rum

[Ferine]

There are certainly times when the game could do a better job of guiding the player, but I think this one is on you: the area has several places to take cover from overhead attacks and there are stashes of EMP grenades, rocket launchers and miniguns laying about; the latter is the most effective, making short work of even the giant spider bots.

[NecroMorrius]

Yeah, nope. Not on hard. Nope. You can't take any kind of sustained fire from any single enemy, you're dead in two or three hits. Now try fighting a sentry gun, two flying drones which take two clips to down each, and a giant spider thing shooting tiny spider things at you, all at the same time. Nope. It's not that you can't do what you need to do, it's that you can play the same sequence 42 times and still not know what you need to do. Saying this game doesn't do a great job of guiding the player is the understatement of the century. Case in point, there's a massive whole sequence of that level containing two spider bots and numerous spider chests (lol, worst gameplay mechanic ever) which leads to a dead end.

The next section involves an "infiltration" of sorts, where you're given a sniper rifle to kill a bunch of guys you can't kill with a sniper rifle (because they're shielded and too far away to use the OWL on) so you use the only weapon you can kill them with (the alt fire for your default gun) which eventually runs out of ammo so you die a lot until you cheese it and a couple of them fall off a ledge of their own accord. Then you find your way into a room full of weapons, including a nice minigun. You pick up the minigun and make your way into a vent which leads to the objective. Except you can't crouch through the vent while holding the minigun. So you put it down again exactly where you found it. Then you put some C4 on a thing and a countdown starts, counts to zero and nothing happens. You put some C4 on the other thing and the countdown starts again, except this time loads of guys randomly spawn around the area you're standing in as the C4 explodes. So you fight them, and then the objective marker disappears and you have no objectives listed in your tiny tiny tiny objective list. So you run around for a while scratching your head until you find a big door. When you're a foot away from the big door you've walked past twenty times before, the nine foot tall woman says "GO TO THE BIG DOOR" and then an objective marker flashes up for a quarter of a second, exactly where you're standing, and immediately disappears as the big door opens.

It's fucked. Totally fucked. Fuuuuuucked.

Courtesy of gaf

[jonamok]

Yep. Had none of Mozzezez issues bar wandering along behind the 9 foot woman.

Think you might be trying a bit too hard to hate on it Moz?

[jonamok]

Agree that it is totally rushed, and not nearly playtested enough. But I think I must have played it exactly how the designers anticipated, and you have found ALL the crazy wrinkles that never got picked up by playtesters.