Killzone 3 Looks Pretty Standard – Except for 3D

Sony’s Killzone 3 display at Comic Con 2010 included goofy glasses and a display that looked like it had had one drink too many.

Once I put the glasses on, however, I got to see the apparent “splendor” of Sony’s 3-D TV vision of the future. It wasn’t that impressive. And it used an old Six-Axis controller, not Move.

The single-player level – which started with series mainstays Rico and Sev blasting away from a troop carrier with a pair of miniguns, followed by a crash and on-foot assault of a snowy Helghan base – was a lot like the Killzone games we’ve seen up to now.

Yes, the graphics were impressive (as they were with Killzone 2), but the 3-D effect actually detracted quite a bit from the game‘s beautiful, murderous onslaught. Objects’ edges were blurry and double-vision seemed to happen a bit: the result of doubling objects on the screen so that the polarized lenses of the 3-D glasses will pick them up differently for each eye.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been made to play from two feet away.

Regardless, the playable stage wasn’t exactly a run through anything new or innovative. Turrets on the troop carrier operated like turrets have since Halo, and the on-foot portion had me scrambling to figure out an accurate way to take down Helghan troops. They have thick heads and sometimes repel bullets with their skulls.

There were a few cool additions in the demo – Rico executed an up-close knife-in-the-eye kill on a defenseless trooper after I commanded him to melee the guy – but that animation didn’t include any player input.

Hopefully the finished game will have something more to offer than a rehash of past games. That’s all the Comic Con playable level