E3 2014: Shadow Fall's Intercept DLC Feels Too Generic

Today at Sony's booth at E3 2014, my colleague Peter Brown and I played a round of the cooperative Intercept downloadable content for Killzone: Shadow Fall. Since we were playing with a full team of four, all four of the DLC's class types were represented. (You can't double up on classes—there must be one assault, one medic, one marksman, and one tactician.) The assault and medic roles are pretty self-explanatory; the marksman can snipe enemies and call out enemy positions to teammates (there is no minimap), and the tactician can set up defensive turrets. Defense is important in Intercept, since your goal is to maintain control of three points on the map as waves of AI enemies invade and try to wrest those points from you.

Of course, it might have something to do with the fact that I was playing the game for the first time in a noisy hall with an uncoordinated team on a map that I was unfamiliar with, but it all felt pretty generic and sloppy to me. Playing as the assault class, I ran around to the command points as they were challenged and did my best to gun down enemies. When I fell, the medic's drone would come to revive me. I had a drone of my own that hovered nearby and automatically attacked nearby enemies.

By doing things like carrying capacitors back to the team's base, you can purchase temporary benefits like miniguns, damage boosts, and jetpacks. There's some novelty in leaping into the air and raining death from above on your enemies, but my time with Intercept didn't leave me with the impression that this DLC is doing anything that will make it stand out from the many other cooperative shooter options on the market. But we don't have to wait long to get the full picture of what Intercept has to offer; it's being released as Shadow Fall DLC on June 24, with a standalone release to follow on August 5.

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