They don’t go down easily, and some of them have the ability to kill Kellan in only one hit. Battles are often five-against-one or even worse, and even on normal, the game’s enemies present a real challenge. It’s a feature that players will have to rely on, especially in the wider maps, because enemies can hide anywhere, and they never come alone. The aforementioned OWL shakes up gameplay, and the ability to scan for enemies and track them through walls is genius. Beneath the gorgeous exterior is a very competent and fun first person shooter. What this means for future PlayStation 4 games is hard to say, though, and this very well could be a failing on Guerilla’s part rather than a taste of discomfort to come over the system’s lifetime.īut the game isn’t just glitz and glitter. That the Helghast all wear masks is brilliant, because it sidesteps the issue entirely. And the lip syncing was atrocious, with at least a majority of spoken lines failing to match up with the bizarre mouth movements. It seems that games are beginning to reach the uncanny valley, because the dead eyes just made me feel uncomfortable. The one caveat, and this makes the narrative failures even more apparent, is that the human/Vektan faces look really weird. PC gamers may laugh and boast about how great their games look, but for someone with a middling PC and primarily console experiences, it really is truly breathtaking. Although they initially grumbled about having to get up, they had to admit that it was an amazing sight. On at least a dozen occasions, I shouted for my friends (some who play games, others who don’t) to come look at the amazing thing on screen. Playing Shadow Fall was like that over and over again. I sat there, watching the screen for ten seconds, waiting for something to happen because I thought I was still in a cutscene. It was the same feeling I got the first time I played Bioshock, when the plane crashed into the water and suddenly I was in control in the water. Out loud, involuntarily, and I never felt self-conscious about it. I said those words a lot while playing Shadow Fall. At one point, I must have dropped the in-game equivalent of several hundred feet, and I landed and immediately found myself in a firefight. The first time I used a zip line, going down a fifty-foot cliff in seconds, was incredible. The most interesting gameplay hook is a drone that constantly accompanies you and can be used to attack enemies, hack computers, and create a zip line. And there’s a lot of verticality as well. Maps are enormous, and players have to traverse huge amounts of terrain. In game, it’s absolutely seamless.īut the most impressive thing about Shadow Fall’s visuals is not the pretty textures or the fancy modeling-it’s the scale. There are no loading screens, except at the beginning of a chapter, and even those are usually masked by cinematic cutscenes. The textures are just awesome and the signs and pieces of paper on random walls can actually be read both close up and at a distance. Abrams movie, shines through the trees and everything casts beautiful soft shadows. The lighting, although it features more lens flare than a J.J. Everything about the visuals is completely spectacular. By the end, I didn’t want to kill the villain because he did something bad I just wanted to shut him up.īut the story doesn’t really matter here, because it is little more than a vehicle to move player from spectacle to spectacle, showing off just how powerful the PlayStation 4 is. Rather than gripping, it’s just irritating. Characters constantly monologue and moan about the role Vektans (human-like beings) played in destroying Helghan society and how Kellan is just a pawn. Kellan grows up in about two minutes of cutscenes and is suddenly a top level soldier in the elite “Shadow Martials” squad. In the game you play as Lucas Kellan, whose father was killed by the bad guys, called the Helghast.
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