Guerilla Games made their art team watch Alien, Blade Runner and Legend then made sure their lighting team got certified by Ridley Scott’s School Of Shafting Lights and set them loose on the game. Keep in mind it’s a launch title, so games three or four years down the road will blow this away, but for now, this is the best looking first person shooter out on consoles right now.
Does Shadow Fall show off what the PS4 can do? The answer is YES. The story occasionally becomes interesting, but that’s despite the Killzone legacy, not because of it.īut first, let’s get the big launch question out of the way. The not-subtle-at-all parallels between West/East Berlin and the post-WWII division of spoils continues with some genuinely interesting moral ambiguity that’s let down by the fact that this is a new team of writers trying to deal with the mess left by previous teams of writers on earlier games.
With the Helghan home-world bombarded with radiation and rendered uninhabitable, the Vektan winners offer to let the defeated survivors live on Vekta itself, dividing the capital city in half and putting up a big wall. For those that are still trying to follow the turns and counter-turns, Guerilla has gone all Cold war-era as form of narrative short-hand for Shadow Fall. The story is just another addition to a pile that’s gotten progressively messier with each outing. Shadow Fall manages to succeed, at its goal, but it’s not going to turn the world upside down the way Halo.
That’s a lot of responsibilities for a new game, even if it’s part of an established franchise. It’s in the same position as Resistance was back in 2006, having to trot itself out as both a showcase for shiny new hardware, while trying to establish itself as a credible series for a new generation.