Warzone, party of four
If you couldn't care less about horde mode--fighting off waves of aggressive enemies with a group of friends--stop reading now. With all those jokers now gone, let's talk about Killzone Shadow Fall: Intercept, the standalone expansion that'll come free to all Shadow Fall season pass owners. Put simply, Intercept is a four-player cooperative holdout against masses of AI-controlled Helghast, where teamwork is the only means to survival.
As either the Assault, Marksman, Medic, or Tactician classes--each with their own abilities, and limited at one per team--you'll have to defend multiple capture points from the Helghast hordes on relatively compact maps. Intercept uses an intriguing penalty system for death: spawning costs points from your Team Score, a pooled resource that directly correlates to how close you are to winning. The more you and your friends keep dying and spending Team Score, the farther away you'll be falling from your end goal. This can lead to some pretty intense hero moments, when one player goes on a killing spree and racks up enough Score to bring the whole squad back to life, resetting the odds in the process. It can also be pretty aggravating to be stuck watching helplessly from the sidelines, unable to lend any kind of support while dead.
Intercept certainly looks just as good as Shadow Fall, with its vibrant, neon-tinged visual flair and host of futuristic weapons. It'll be interesting to see the kind of players that take interest in Intercept, be they Killzone greenhorns that prefer co-op play with friends, or Shadow Fall veterans looking to see just how many Helghast kills they can rack up before they die in a blaze of glory. If you're a fanatic for horde modes that demand coordination, Intercept should be right up your alley.
Check out the following screenshots for additional info!
Your team, dubbed Intelligence Squad Alpha, is working to gather intel for the Vektan Security Agency. Beating a level means successfully transmitting classified Helghast military transmissions back to base
Like you and your friends, the AI Helghast bots also have their own specified roles and agendas. They can even call in souped-up Helghast support units--some of which you might recognize from Shadow Fall's single-player campaign
Each of the four arena maps are decently sized, with multiple capture points to take and defend. This prevents the action from turning into a stale turtling around one position
All the maps in Intercept are callbacks to levels from the single-player content, so don't expect any outlandish new environment type you've never seen before
You know Shadow Fall's graphical engine is good when you can barely determine whether this is concept art or an in-game screenshot (it's the latter, by the way)
The Marksman, who can snipe enemies from afar with explosive rounds, could also blend in perfectly with the soldiers from Bungie's Destiny