Famous firsts usually aren't. They're often just more competent seconds, the design that had the publicity, the much-needed tweak to make something really work... Pong probably wasn't the first tennis game, but it's the first one you'll recall.
Gears of War wasn't the first cover-shooter, but (spoilers) it does the new genre better than Kill Switch does, which probably also wasn't the first cover-shooter, but it really is all this game has going for it (damn, more spoilers).
You are the all-American, one-man killing machine Nick Bishop, the video game action hero who finally learned how to hug walls and chest-high cover such that he doesn't get shot in the face. It is a monumental leap in military tactics, but what's actually going on here?
Frustrations
Kill Switch is as grey and brown as shooters come, and it is immediately apparent that absolutely no budget was left over for any kind of cutscene. Nick stands, stands some more, the camera slowly moves in to show him continuing to stand, all while he has a conversation with someone over the comms. His lips don't move. He doesn't emote. I'm not always sure which voice is even his.
The tutorial goes through the motions, moving, shooting, throwing grenades... we've seen it all before. And then, only when you think you've seen it all, does it drop the bombshell that is the cover mechanics.
Run into a wall, hold L1, and you're good to go. Peek, aim, even blind fire if you want to spread the lead. Boom. Video games have just been changed forever. It is finally possible to do what we'd do in real life, were we in desperate need of some sense of safety.
Most people in video games back then thought the shooter was a dangerous genre. Now, if I were to stand up, I might get killed. But behind this wall, it's pretty safe. So to us, the shooter is a safe genre. Right here, I feel pretty safe. Do you feel safe?
It's all relative, and we're ready to head out to the Middle East and enact some cover shooting.
There is something else going on in Kill Switch. You're lead to believe that there is some kind of remote control aspect going on and that you're not actually one-man killing machine Nick Bishop, but are perhaps a one-man killing machine behind the safety of a computer manipulating an avatar of Nick Bishop.
It's not something that's hinted at, it's practically said out loud by various characters - and I don't even know their significance to each other at this point, such a bad job has been done. I read that this plot sets itself up to be deep and thought-provoking and utterly fails to land with any significance, so you can imagine the story to be a ridiculous B-Movie, or maybe even worse.
I'm emulating the PlayStation 2 release of Kill Switch, and it mostly runs alright. It often drops and slows down whenever any action takes place, but it's playable, and we can enjoy all the colours of brown the developers had available to them.
You'd have thought that the first piece of chest-high cover would signal the first enemy of the game, but this makeshift cover is just a big piece of debris, and the first interaction with the opposition actually takes place through a window.
If this game isn't revolutionary, I don't know what is.
Alright, I joke, but this is a game where they have a great cover mechanic (in need of some slight tweaking perhaps, but let's face it, this is a great move), but haven't got a clue where to put it. A shooter, obviously, and there is a lot of conflict in the Middle East in this period of our history, but it can't just be a generic shooter, can it? It's got to be something more, right?
Well, no, it isn't. Not yet, at least. It's really trying, with lots of uplinks and technobabble and a woman repeating the line 'Say my name', as though it's the most important thing there is to know, but it really has done a poor job of explaining anything. I had to look up Nick's name, for goodness sake, he's that generic.
So, we work our way through the complex, hugging walls, poking our heads through doors, shooting anything that looks human - there are no innocents here, though I have literally no idea who these people are - and then something comes up in the plot.
So we work our way through more corridors and poke our heads around more corners and wait for more enemies to get bored, stand up, get shot so we can move on...
Make no mistake, this is all run of the mill stuff. All you need to do is find cover and pick off your targets in an order that makes sense. Armed with some flashbang grenades, you can make your life easier by lobbing one downrange and watching the enemy go blind and stagger around, inexplicably shooting their machine guns without a care in the world. It's the funniest part of the game to watch so far.
I stumble into a room where a General cowers in fear, says something I immediately forget, I shoot him, and the cutscene triggers.
I say cutscene, it's more of a pan the camera back and around while nothing in the scene moves and people talk to fill the dead air. But after that, we're told so get out of here in one piece.
Death is accompanied by a digital signal failure, which really hammers home the notion of you aren't/this entire thing isn't real, it's a simulation, woo woo woo, there's something more to this, pay attention now. Even the pause screen mentions it, but not in an Assassin's Creed 'whoops, you weren't meant to see that' kind of way. That'd be far too subtle.
The action looked like it was hotting up, with a helicopter sweeping in to shoot at us, but it was swift to disappear and never come back. The enemy troops were nowhere to be seen until you ran past the spawn trigger, where four of them would run out of a door, fail to find cover and get shot. They can have long death animations where you're not quite sure if you've killed them, which is nice attention to detail, I suppose.
It just felt so bland. Run, find cover, shoot. Repeat until the next part of the level needs to be loaded in.
I manage to make it out alive and decide to call it a day. It's not a terrible game, it's just terribly generic.
But then a CGI scene of a woman on a balcony started playing, again making no sense but seriously, definitely, not making this up, suggesting something important is happening in the background of this game, before the next level loaded, and Nick quipped something about going on a stealth mission. I wonder what that was a nod to...
Final Word
I'm aware that I've not used the 'Fun Times' header in this post, but you could probably use that and 'Frustrations' interchangeably here. I didn't have fun, but I wasn't frustrated, but I was more 'bleh' than 'yeah'.
Kill Switch tries. It really does. I have no idea what they're trying to do with the plot, but as I say, I read that it doesn't really go anywhere worth worrying about, so I won't. But at the same time, I do want to see what it was trying to do. I don't care for Nick, but are we really Nick? I kinda want to know...
In terms of straight-up gameplay, Kill Switch is a little clunky, a little generic, but to be fair to it, I was let down by the emulation slowing down more often than not. Maybe at a stable framerate, I could get more into this game, samey though it feels.
It's on this 1001 Must Play list because of those cover mechanics. It's certainly not here for its presentation or its plot, and I've only seen one level so far. Is it worth playing then? Well, it's a claim to fame that changed the game, so yeah, give it a bash.
It's not going to wow you, but it introduced games to a mechanic that can now be found eeeeeverywhere. Or, you know, it was probably the game to introduce the mechanic. Maybe.
First, second, whatever, it's a playable, if forgettable game. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.
Fun Facts
Gears of War often gets the credit for the cover-shooter mechanic, but the developers will tell you that it was Kill Switch that influenced them. Hell, one of the team even lead the design for Kill Switch...
Kill Switch, developed by Namco USA, first released in 2003.
Version played: PlayStation 2, 2003, via emulation.