Long ago in the PC days, FPC games featured a “lean” button that allowed you to peek around corners and shoot giving yourself some cover, Killzone 3′s cover mechanic does just that and you will find yourself wishing that other shooters like call of duty offered this mechanic. Killzone 3 offers a bevy of different mission types and manages to never feel stale. There are your typical missions where you will be following around a friendly soldier, simply shooting bad guys as well as missions where you will go off on your own to snipe priority targets or act as a one man army. There are vehicle sequences just like in Killzone 2 that break up the on foot gameplay though they are a lot better than the ones in the last game. These sequences are broken into two types, on rails shooting and fully controllable vehicles. The on rails segments are fun and spectacular and just what you would expect from a modern first person shooter however the sections where you’re behind the wheel truly stand out. You were made to drive some truly boring and slow tanks in Killzone 2, those sequences are gone in favor of the far better MechWarrior-esque combat suits. Also heavily featured are the new jetpacks which you will get to pilot a few times and are extremely fun, they add a sense of speed and verticality that really mixes the shooting gameplay up.

Killzone 3 prescribes to the same mechanic found in almost every shooter these days: regenerating health. When shot your screen will fill with blood splatters indicating the direction of your attacker, hang back behind some cover and you will fully recover. While the regenerating mechanic does propel the gameplay just like every other shooter it feels even more unrealistic than the old standard health bar and med packs, and it makes no sense at all in the vehicle segments. However it’s hard to bash the game for including a mechanic that is pretty standard to the genre. Killzone 3 adds new up-close and personal melee attacks which are fun and satisfying; when you initiate a melee Sev will but out his knife for a brutal stab or use his hands to dispatch of his foes in a truly grisly manner.

The new melee mechanic is a vast improvement from Killzone 2 which had you flailing around the butt of your rifle, which was impractical, stupid, and if you wanted to use your knife you had to actually take the time to pull it out first so it was pretty much never ever used. Call of Duty games have always featured “stealth” levels that have you following someone around and dispatching guys (when your told to) lighting fast so they couldn’t get the drop on you, the exception to this is Modern Warfare’s cliffhanger level which lets you advance through a snowstorm however you like. Killzone 3 also features a particular long stealth level that has you sneaking around with a silencer weapon sniping and knifing, at first I was rather disappointed with this as I was just following around some friendly doing whatever he told me whenever but about a fourth of the way through he took off allowing me to be solid snake sneaky. This was very well done as the friendly character acted as a tutorial for this standout section and the unique mechanics of the levels environment. Bravo!