Part 10: Chapter 3, Stage 2

• Chapter 3, Stage 2 with Blind Sally, nine-gear crow, and JamieTheD

Ah, what a beautiful park! Commonplace on a planet such as Vekta; it's a veritable space-Eden! It's too bad about all that warfare. All that dust has formed a fog throughout the part making everything look sickly and washed out, while preventing you from seeing too far.

Heh, who are we kidding, it's so you don't see the terrible draw distance in this level. This is a Turok: Dinosaur Hunter-style trick.



Anyways, I mentioned the whole "Destroyed Beauty" thing with regards to Gear Of War. There was actually an art book released by the same name. It's how the devs spoke about the game when hyping it. I think there was a particular effort made because the first Gears game got a bad rap for not having much variety in terms of environments. Well, I'd like to point out that Guerrilla was doing the whole "destroyed beauty" in Killzone long before Epic. As we get further and further out of the ruins of Vekta City, we're going to get to encounter a wide range of biomes on the planet. They look great! Well, as great as the PS2 could churn out, but hey.

But here's a bunch of images of artwork from Gears Of War so you can make the comparisons to Killzone for yourself.



We also discover that explosives can be used to destroy the light fixtures in this level. Calling back to what Guerrilla allows us to interact with, we find we can destroy sources of light. What is light often used to represent? Intelligence. Hope. Life itself. We're already killing swaths of life in the form of Helghast soldiers. We can also destroy the fundamentals of life, as shown in Chapter 2 with water, food, and shelter being our primary targets. Now we can destroy and even more core concept of life. Can life as we know it exist without light? No! And as such, we can destroy it. As far as I'm concerned, this is just another incredibly subtle call-out to how monumentally destructive the ISA really are. They're the good guys in their minds only, and they're going to wind up doing a lot of harm to the universe before this war is out. Mark my words.



I also wanted to give some quick love to these AA-guns. Massive, destructive, glorious. These are a lot of fun to use and they thankfully show up in just about all the Killzone games. Pictured above is Jan trying to bethe valiant and chivalrous hero by standing in front of Luger to take bullets in her place. What a romantic an idiot. I try to avoid shooting him in the vid but it can't be helped when the guy stands up in front of my line of fire.





I realized that in an earlier post I spoke more about Luger as a concept and less about her actual character background. I'm going to rectify that now. Like Templar, she also lost her parents when young. Both her folks were killed in the First Extrasolar War. When older, she joined the Vektan military and found herself training in the RRF alongside a young Jan Templar. The fresh-faced young man, with a boy scout-like demeanour was endearing, and they began a romantic relationship. However, Luger is an independent sort of person, more than capable of taking care of herself, and Jan's overbearing and overprotective nature began to wear on her. When the opportunity arose to take the Shadow Marshall training course, Luger took it. Partly to chase her own ambitions, as she was a natural operative, but partly to get some distance from Jan.

Again, though, it's unknown if Luger is her real name, first or last, or just a codename.




EAW25/4 Chimera Heavy Weapons Platform

Just gonna quote it from the Killzone wikia for this one:




This thing is awesome. We only get to use it as a proper AA-gun once or twice, but it's more than adequate as a weapon for eliminating troops. It's a blast to use. Seriously. It's so violent and overkill. It's so great that even when the Helghast replace it for a newer model in later games, it remains functionally identical.


VnS-10 Scylla

The Helghast version of the mounted machine gun. The large barrel is filled with a cooling-fluid to reduce overheating. These guns are wildly inaccurate, so it's to their benefit that they can fire a huge amount of bullets. It's too bad that we rarely get a chance to use them in this game. We're going to spend most of our time on the other side of these things getting shot at. There will be a few occasions specifically set up to allow us to use them against the Helghast, but they're not that exciting. In later games, you can haul around one of these as a mobile weapon.