Part 6: Icy Incursion
VIDEO NOTE: Due to a technical hiccup on Blind Sally’s recording computer he wound up basically falling out of the Discord call about halfway through the video. So while he was still recording his audio for the majority of the remainder of the video he ended up screaming into the digital abyss while Jobbo and I carried out without him. And that’s why the commentary in this video kind of goes off the rails at a certain point.
So Sally and I have decided that in order to split up the work load a little more for Killzone 3, each update from here on out is going to be helmed by the poor unfortunate soul whose turn it was behind the controller for that video. Which, in this case, was me, Crow.
Since it’s been a while: a recap (unless you’re binging this on the LP Archive, in which case, READ THIS SHIT ANYWAY DAMMIT)!
As you’ll recall last time on Killzone 3, things went even further to shit for Our Heroes(?) as we found them hiding in a very inhospitable jungle somewhere on Helghan waging a full-on guerrilla campaign against the Helghast and trying to hold out until Vekta or Earth sent another fleet in to rescue them.
Ooooonly to find out in rapid succession that 1) Earth strongarmed Vekta into signing an armistice with Helghan, 2) the ISA/UCA/EarthGov would not be sending any rescue or recovery mission to Helghan to extract the remnants of Battle Group Mandrake, 3) every ISA soldier on Helghan has now been officially classified as prisoners of war, and 4) oh yeah fuck you Stahl found out where they were hiding and had his PMC assault the base and now Sev and Narville have been captured and are on their way to Sathl Arms Deep South so that Stahl can parade them in front of a camera and execute them while all of Helghan watches.
We begin this chapter inbound to Stahl Arms Deep South, which, as you can imagine by all the ice and snow (and by the intro level), is situated somewhere close to the southern pole of Helghan, a far cry away from Phyrrus City and the Kaznan Jungle.
This is where Killzone 3 really starts unfolding its varied environments and opening up its colour pallet a little more than the previous games did.
Also, take note of the namedrop in this little intro bit, we’ll be seeing Vigilant Base itself up close and personal in the next video.
Sev has been taken on a separate transport to Vigilant from Narville. You can see we’re slowly filling in the gap of the “how did we get here?” puzzle the game opened with.
Though for some reason Sev starts running his mouth off trying to rile up the two Helgoons keeping watch over him on the Vulture, prompting one to even try taking a swing at him by bringing up Visari’s death.
And if there’s one man alive who knows exactly how Scolar Visari died—aside from Rico—it’s Tomas Sevchenko.
But if it seems like this is wildly out of character for Sev to be acting like, well, Rico, fret not. It’s all a ploy.
Remember, Sev isn’t your average ISA grunt, he’s a smarter blend of bean. We've already established many times over that he's a clever, level-headed voice of reason in the swirling tempest of insanity around him. He's able to talk sense into Rico in his darker moments. He's able to make Narville confront the moral cost of his actions, even if turning a blind eye to them in the moment is the tactically sounder solution. He was able to stand face-to-face with Scolar Visari as the man came fundementally unhinged in front of him trying to break him and calmly told him he was going to rot in prison for what he'd done... ignore that whole "AND THEN RICO SHOT HIM" part. My point is: Sev has a plan already worked out in his head. And it starts with riling up his captors verbally to throw them off guard.
Whipping his rhetorical dick out and taking a nice long piss on Visari and everything he stood for? Eh, that’s a personal bonus for Sev at this point.
Eventually, Sev gets his wish and the Helgoon does haul off and punch him for talking shit about Visari, allowing Sev to grab the soldier’s knife and jack him in the leg with it.
Unfortunately, because these are Helghast soldiers, they just kind of… shake off getting stabbed. Because they can.
But Sev keeps pushing and when the trooper goes to stab him back, well—HOLY SHIT WHAT
The Helgoon is ripped clean out of the Vulture—along with the door—by the harpoon tow cable.
…Is this it? Is this a Shakespeare?
No, no it’s not Shakespeare, it’s just Rico with the save.
Rico will never not be a massive shithead, but he does know how to stage a rescue.
Or maybe not.
Or maybe yes. Well, here we go, after six months and one level, Sev and Rico are finally reunited, and it feels so… good? Can anything associated with Rico be classified as good?
Anyway, Rico and his collection of ISA remnants had been working their way down here to the south during the six month interlude between Chapters 3 and 4. His team caught word that Stahl had been bringing ISA POWs down to Deep South for unspecified purposes and he brought his team here to investigate it.
Because Jammer had tapped into the Helghast comms network, they were able to pinpoint the Vulture convoy taking Sev to Stahl Arms Deep South because the Helghast just wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how they’d captured “Visari’s killers” out on wide open channels for anyone to hear it.
And I guess we can just assume that Rico was smart enough to know that Stahl hadn’t captured him, so then by extension that would mean he must have at least Sev, right?
And of course, because Rico still has a bug up his ass about Narville, he takes any excuse he can get to cut the captain loose and book it back to base. Sev, however, isn’t having any of that and has to goad Rico into following the remaining Vulture to Stahl Arms Deep South to save him.
But to his credit, Rico relents and now we’re off to storm both Vigilant Base and Stahl Arms Deep South to save the last link in the ISA chain of command on Helghan.
Most of this mission is going to be spent hopping from ocean rig to ocean rig. As you can see by the blue piping, the area outlying Vigilant and Stahl Arms DS is dotted with petrusite extraction platforms all linked up to a central refinery complex further along the ice flow. The petrusite is funneled to the refinery through massive pipelines that are cooled with seawater.
Said refinery. This is where the bulk of this chapter is going to be playing out.
Again, we get to see Killzone 3 really indulging itself with its colour pallet here. In addition to the harsh white with the snow, we also get to see more pinks and blues in this level than we do elsewhere in the game, maybe even the whole franchise outside of Shadow Fall.
In addition to being a refinery complex, the run up to Vigilant and Deep South is also an ad hoc breakers yard. As you’ll see in the video, the entire area is clogged with the hulks of old tanker ships that have been just frozen in place by massive glaciers and the Helghast have seemingly built the rigs right out from the roots of their wrecks.
It really shows off how unrelentingly hostile the entire Helghan ecosystem is. Everything on this planet wants to crush and kill and rend every last bastion of life on it in the most brutalistic way possible. It hammers home the idea that there is just nowhere you can go on this planet for safe haven.
This stage also introduces us to what was surely—alongside the PlayStation Move and 3DTV compatibility features—the core element of Killzone 3’s marketing campaign: the StA-X6 Jetpack.
The first official gameplay trailer for Killzone 3 is curbed from Icy Incursion and heavily features the jetpack in it.
You might remember we briefly encountered a prototype version of the StA-X6 in Killzone: Liberation. Which means that…
Yep!
The back half of this part of Chapter 5 is an extended jumping puzzle of sorts once we get access to the jetpack itself.
Just like the jetpack in Liberation, the StA-X6 functions as a rife/machine gun as far as the game is concerned. When equipped, it takes up the rifle slot in your weapon inventory and has infinite ammo, though you can only fire its built in assault rifle for a limited time before it overheats.
The segmented display on the left handle there shows your boost fuel. You have two modes of movement, vertical and horizontal. You get three vertical thrusts—denoted in orange—and two horizontal thrusts—in white—before the jetpack runs out of power and has to recharge for a few moments.
This is basically prime schmuck bait. I’m not trying to excuse my meltdown in this level, but there are a lot of jumps around the rigs that look doable, but actually aren’t, and the only way you’re able to gauge whether they are or not are to actually take the leap and find out.
And while the game is generous about respawns, it doesn’t do you folks much good who guessed in this dumb death counter that we thought up post-facto after we’d recorded everything.
At the end of the video there’s a set piece on the refinery itself where you need to blow the thing up using timed charges.
And I love the utterly low tech solution to this problem. They just literally duct taped the timer to the standard remote detonator charge and hotwired it to the detonation circuit. It’s like a special all-warcrimes episode of the Red Green Show.
“If the women don’t find you handsome, they’ll at least find you… on trial for making improvised explosive devices.”
Still, I love how detail and story conscious Guerrilla Games is when it comes to things like this. They didn’t have to make a unique model for the dem charges for this mission, but they went and did it anyway. After suffering through the work of lazy-ass devs like Level-5, it warms my heart to know that studios like Guerrilla and Project Aces exist who actually put hard work into the little details of their games instead of just
ing out on them.Moreover, this helps to show just how far up shit creek Rico, Sev, Jammer, and co. are that they’ve had to scrape materials together with literal wire and duct tape in order to mount something resembling a credible resistance to the Helghast.
Visual storytelling!
With the petrusite refinery blown into the drink behind us, we then move on to Vigilant Base itself, which we will be covering in the back half of Chapter 5 in the next video.
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StA-X6 Jetpack
An upgraded version of the SL-06 jetpack commissioned from Stahl Arms by General Armin Metrac. The StA-X6 features a suite of upgrades gleaned from both the SL-06’s combat trials during the siege of Southern Vekta, and from the successful implementation of the ATAC drone platform during the invasion of Helghan.
The StA-X6 incorporates a similar thruster and stabilizer system to that of the ATAC’s, and features a modified version of the StA-3 Stova LMG mounted on its right control arm.
Air Trooper
The Helghast Air Troopers return in this mission from Killzone: Liberation. Though unlike in Liberation, where they were a one-off thing for that part of that particular chapter, we haven’t seen the last of the Air Troopers in Killzone 3 quite yet.
Really, the jetpack enemies in this game exist for one reason: creating hilarious ragdolls as you damage their jetpacks and they go careening into things in hilarious fashion ultimately ending in an explosion. The game doesn’t send them at you in choking waves like it does other enemies, though it will usually send one or two in as a supplement to waves of normal Helghast grunts to keep the combat interesting.
And here is some more artwork to round out the “Icy Incursion” part of this chapter before we move on to Vigilant Base.
