By chance, I recently ended up completing both Killzone 3 and Homefront in the same weekend. Not that that was particularly surprising, as both of those games featured a fairly short single-player storyline. What really surprised me was how unimpressed they both left me, though. If I had to sum both of them up in a word, it’d be that most American of expressions: Meh.
Now don’t get me wrong, neither of them are bad games. Killzone features some pretty epic battles, fantastical sci-fi style weapons and a non-stop rollercoaster ride of action. Homefront tried to take the more measured approach, raising questions about the treatment of prisoners of war, and even throwing in the odd moral dilemma.
At the end of the day, though, both games still boiled down to this. Shoot the bad guys. In the face. Take that, space-nazis/evil Korean invaders!
After the impressive opening sequence to Homefront (the video part of which was ruined by some genius who decided putting PRESS A TO SKIP in the MIDDLE of the screen was a good idea) I was dropped into the game proper. Rescued from a prison bus which had just doubled as a sort of war crimes tour bus, I was given a pistol and thrown into the action. And there it was, the action. Hide behind things, shoot baddies. Kill them all, then move into the next area and shoot some more. I actually sighed when I got to the first fight, as I felt the opening had promised much more. In fact, Homefront’s storyline’s attempt to humanise the enemies at points by showing some pretty horrible things happening to them almost directly clashed with the actual gameplay. Look at the horrible things happening here! Right, that’s done, get your shotgun out, and let’s shoot those bastards IN THE FACE! It reminded me of Comic Relief – look at this hilarious sketch. Now look at the suffering! Now laugh! Now cry! It just clashes.
And Killzone, like a lot of these games, I genuinely couldn’t have given a shit what was going on. In fact, for most of the game, I didn’t know. What I did know was that if anything had red on it, you had to shoot it in the face, and the blue guys were friendlies. I also seemed to get shot a lot by Helghast I hadn’t even seen, which was fairly irritating.
Both of them are good games, though. They’re polished, featured great set-pieces and are well made. So why did they leave me so unimpressed? I think it is a sign of the quality of the games industry these days that games can’t just be very good anymore, they’ve got be astonishingly good to really stand out, and for me, neither of these games went above and beyond the call of duty.*
This FPS malaise I’m in has already had its first victim, entirely through no fault of their own. I’m sorry, Crytek, but under any other circumstances I would have rushed out and bought Crysis 2 on release date, but in my current FPS funk, I’m not even sure I’m going to bother. I’m sure it’s good, but is it REALLY good?
*Accidental FPS pun, sorry.
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