“Well, that worked” – Killzone 3

Killzone 3 starts off with a more interesting set-up than anything in Killzone 2. You play as one of the Helghast, enemies in the previous games, making your way through the various security checks in their base. The possibility of the lack of any real moral separation between the two sides becoming text is tantalisingly raised. You are given execution duty, and then… it reveals that you were merely playing as one of the personality-free Earth marines disguised as a personality-free Helghast.

After that deflating twist away from the possibility of a new outlook, what follows is pretty much Killzone 2 again. The first person action is exactly as well-made, but now even more predictable. There are bits where you control a big clunking mech, sometimes with jet-lifters, but aren’t given enough freedom to have any real sense of the extra power. You still have to turn wheels with awkward motion controls. Reviving downed teammates extends to them reviving you sometimes as well, which is nice but a pretty minor thing even by video game sequel standards.

The story spends a bit more time with the Helghast leadership, allowing Malcolm McDowell and Ray Winstone to get stuck into a couple of different varieties of evil boss. They have personalities! Identities! Truly an incredible achievement for the series. It still feels like the Helghast’s name and pseudo-Nazi iconography is doing most of the heavy lifting of conveying how they’re the bad guys, and your own invading army are not. 

Sequels as conservative re-arrangements of the existing is not something which was new in 2011, and is not something restricted to games. It’s an action movie standard and almost the definition of certain repetitive styles of TV and books. There is something specific in just how far Killzone 3 and similar could take that, though. 

Playing a game involves training yourself in ways beyond the learning and understanding you do for something you’re more passively experiencing. With those skills you can go back and play the same thing again, but you can also remind and apply them anew to something that is 90% the same and get a high level of enjoyment out of that even before the pleasure of the 10% of new stuff.

It’s a rather functional way of looking at things, but one I can understand, and Killzone was already a highly functional series, even compared to its peers. Add on a lightly refreshed online multiplayer for players to move over to, such that the previous experience disappears and the sequel takes its place, and the sequel becomes close to the only way of revisiting the previous experience, too. 

In this case I sit outside of the moment, and I played the single player a decade later shortly after playing Killzone 2’s. I found the cynicism and lack of message to the constant action a lot more bleak in the repeat. A lot more bleak than more superficially dystopian or ugly games, even. I want new things, stories that say something. But then, I have plenty of my own experience with playing yearly sports updates that are even more straightforwardly functional. Really, it’s only Killzone 3’s pretence towards anything else that bothers me.

---

Top of the charts for week ending 26 February 2011: