Plastic rifle stock tucked into my shoulder, Killzone 3 suddenly feels like a much more active game, a shooter I need to play standing, face-to-face with my enemies.
The Sharp Shooter is molded-plastic housing for the Playstation 3 Move's controller and navigation controller. The Move controller snaps into the barrel of the plastic gun, its glowing ball jutting from the tip of the gun. The nav controller snaps into the front grip of the gun, letting you easily access the buttons while holding the game in place.
The housing has an array of buttons, an extending stock, and even a pump action that can be programmed to let you reload whatever weapon your character is toting at the time.
Players aim at the screen to look around and use the Nav controller's thumb button to move around.
While the game felt more real, more active than playing a shooter slouching in a couch with a controller pad in your hands, it wasn't an entirely positive experience.
Because your look is controlled by where you're pointing the gun, it starts to feel like you're pushing the screen around with the tip of you gun. That means if you're looking around a corner or around in a field, you're aim is going to be slightly off when you first spot a threat.
As I played the game I felt an increasingly level of frustration using the gun. I like the idea of arming myself with a nearly full-scale replica of a weapon to play a shooter. And the design is fantastic, it's a comfortable product. But the exercise of manually pushing around your view of the world is tiring. It slows your response to threats, a disadvantage that outweighs the benefits of aiming with a weapon you hold rather than with your thumbs.
I'm told that you can adjust the Move controls to make it more reactive and to speed up response times but without some lengthy one-on-one time with a Move tweaked to work for me, I'm going to remain doubtful at how useful this $40 add-on will be to most shooter fans.