Mental Health Break

EA's Bulletstorm and Sony's Killzone3 take Bungie's Halo version of the first person shooter game to the next level.

That’s where Killzone 3 and Bulletstorm come in. Released in head-to-head competition last week, each offers a well-polished addition to today’s first-person shooter game. It is a world defined by amusing, if routinely predictable and ultimately superfluous stories and characters. It is a world of eye-watering animation and digital effects. It is a world in which subtlety is reviled. The Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises, all by id Software, originated the shooter in the 1990s on PCs. A decade ago Bungie’s Halo was an essential ingredient in the emergence of Microsoft’s Xbox, and it demonstrated that shooters really could work on consoles. The current champion is Activision’s Call of Duty series.Neither Killzone 3, published by Sony for the PlayStation 3, nor Bulletstorm, published by Electronic Arts for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, tries to outdo Call of Duty in its own niche, the evocation of modern warfare. (Electronic Arts tried and failed at that last year with its mediocre reboot of the Medal of Honor franchise and will try again later this year with a new game in the Battlefield series.)