Shadow Fall announces its potential in later levels, where you shoot explosive canisters and joyfully ride the resulting billows of energy to higher ground. Elsewhere, you join a checkpoint queue that recalls Half-Life 2's opening, but where Valve's masterpiece used overheard dialogue and televised broadcasts to introduce you to the oppressive City 17, this noninteractive wait provides few thematic details you don't already know, making its length seem unnecessary and self-indulgent. It's simply boring-one more insubstantial graphical set piece. It doesn't build tension, deepen your understanding of the conflict, or stimulate you with great action. The sequence wears out its welcome long before you arrive at the airlock. In one of several weightless sequences, you accompany a sluggish space capsule as it meanders towards its destination, blasting the buzzing drones that appear like clockwork and hinder your progress. Killzone: Shadow Fall uses its downtime to remind you of how pretty it is, but not in service of any particular narrative effect. Granted, many shooters take time to breathe between shootouts, building their worlds and developing their characters by way of slower-paced exploration and dramatic cutscenes. More troublesome is how much time you spend doing relatively little but moving through the game's admittedly gorgeous spaces. There are precious few large-scale shootouts instead, you typically face a small handful of foes who take your bullets and collapse into a heap of ragdoll limbs without too much trouble. Helghast soldiers roam the larger areas, but they are too few in number, and don't offer much challenge. The problem is that none of these activities are particularly interesting. The rain pelts metal walkways during a nighttime sojourn through an industrial installation, in contrast to the sunlit cliffs that play home to your early shootouts. You move from firing at soldiers while avoiding high-speed commuter trains to hacking spider drones and initiating their self-destruct sequence. Zero-G sequences have you floating towards airlocks and you avoid the watchful eyes of patrolling Helghast in a stealth mission. Shadow Fall also makes a go at diversification. Each gun is enjoyable to shoot-the shotgun in particular, which blasts enemies backwards with satisfying oomph. Shadow Fall's sense of weight doesn't match Killzone 2's, but its shooting and movement are exceptionally fluid. The basics are perfectly sound, at least. It's too bad that where Killzone 3 packed its maps with exciting action sequences, Shadow Fall's campaign forgot to bring the thrills. Shadow Fall's levels more closely resemble Crysis 2 and Crysis 3's areas than any prior Killzone game's, yet the game displays such expanses with more clarity than Killzone 3 displayed its tighter zones. You traverse a fair share of corridors, but you also float through the vastness of space and engage Helghast soldiers on stretches of rocky, open land. At first you might think that Shadow Fall doesn't represent a giant graphical leap forward, but it isn't displaying the typical shooter's limited spaces. This is a beautiful setting for a first-person shooter, and a fine showcase for the visual possibilities new consoles introduce. Their capital city may reach into the clouds and spread across the terrain, but birds still fly freely between skyscrapers, and massive mountains provide a sweeping backdrop. Where the Helghast were at the mercy of their harsh climate, the Vektans have made peace with nature. Vekta's gleaming blue seas and futuristic cityscapes have supplanted Helghan's reddened skies and intimidating dust storms. Shadow Fall brings the ongoing conflict between the series' warring races to planet Vekta, which provides a stark contrast to the hazy Helghan environs we explored in the previous two games. More wonderful, however, is the art the software's ones and zeroes convey. Its buttery-smooth performance is also bound to earn kudos: Shadow Fall smooths away the frame rate hitches and texture pop-in we've become so accustomed to in even the most visually impressive console shooters. Like its predecessors, Killzone: Shadow Fall is likely to be described through a technical lens, and the game certainly deserves praise for how many polygons it packs into its most expansive landscapes. To define these games through terms like "IBL sampling" and "particle vertices" diminishes their striking beauty. The Killzone series has often been lauded for its technological merits, but its artistic merits go too often unheralded.
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