Among devotees of the PlayStation brand, there must have been a few crestfallen faces when it became apparent that Killzone: Shadow Fall will be the most enticing exclusive game on offer at the PlayStation 4's launch. The first-person shooting franchise developed by Guerrilla Games may have inspired admiration at times, but never adulation: previous iterations have been solidly constructed but tended towards the generic. But if you pre-ordered a PS4, you can cheer up now: Shadow Fall is an order of magnitude better than any of its predecessors, and "generic" is one word you definitely would not use when describing it.

You would characterise previous iterations of Killzone as classic cover-shooters, in which you would hunker down behind cover, emerging cautiously to mow down waves of Helghast. But not Shadow Fall. From the very off, it is clear that beyond retaining the Helghast, Guerrilla has rethought every element of the franchise. For a start, the drab black-and-brown colour palette has been replaced by something positively vibrant and colourful (although you do find dank-looking areas when you enter Helghast territory). But the main difference lies in the gameplay: Shadow Fall is a proper tactical shooter, much of which is enacted in open-world environments.

After a scene-setting preamble kicks off proceedings, in which you learn that you're a Vektan (a suspiciously human-like race) called Lucas Kellan, and that following a war with the Helghast, Vekta City has been divided with a huge wall, so the Helghast are right on your doorstep. An uneasy peace soon degenerates into a civil war, and Lucas sees his father killed by the Helghast and becomes a Shadow Marshal, a sort of super-soldier, under the aegis of surrogate father Sinclair.

Into the gameplay

The first proper mission you play is a revelation. You start off on a cliff, unarmed, but in possession of a dead handy drone called an OWL. By swiping in different directions on the Dual Shock 4's touch-pad, you can tell it to attack Helghast, operate as a zip-line, send out an EMP blast or construct a small shield in front of you. You see two Helghast below, and once your OWL has taken them out (any more than two enemies, and it won't be able to cope), you can zip down and pick up some weaponry.

Now the fun really starts. Another essential part of Kellan's armoury is an echo-scanner, which picks out enemies within range, plus traps, alarms, ammo stashes and adrenalin packs: the OWL can revive you, but only if you have adrenalin, and you can only carry a maximum of two packs, so it's by no means a free pass. It's vital to use this to gain an advantage: for example, you can send the OWL off to hack alarms (as long as you have line of sight), which will stop the Helghast calling in a dropship full of reinforcements. Another technique you soon learn is to send the OWL out to attack a straggler from a bunch of Helghast, then sneak around and take out his colleagues while the OWL claims their attention. You have to think your way through the game, because the Helghast have pretty full-on artificial intelligence – no bullet-sponges here.

Later on in the game, traps such as bins full of exploding spider-robots become a real danger (again, the OWL can hack them), and you meet some formidable enemies, such as giant mechs which only take damage when stunned, either by EMP grenades or your OWL's EMP blast.

Varied gameplay

But another surprise that Killzone: Shadow Fall offers lies in the way in which its gameplay varies: it's by no means all tactical, open-world stuff. There are more conventional corridor-shooting sequences (mercifully not that many). Several missions take place in space, often with a modicum of puzzle-solving (generally involving powering up doors and objects with "petrusite capacitors"). There are free-falling sequences, in which you discover a full pitch-and-yaw engine – in one particularly thrilling such sequence, a whole city is disintegrating around your ears. After you hook up with an unlikely partner (we won't spoil the plot for you), devoid of your OWL or any weaponry, you can even paint targets for her to snipe. And there are boss-battles and some full-on, frenetic close-quarters combat, in which your OWL isn't much help, but some of the weaponry you find is, such as an electric gun, which is slow and cumbersome, but can take out tanks and Helghast with nano-shields. Shadow Fall's gameplay keeps you interested at every turn.

Glorious visuals

And the icing on top of that is a level of visual polish that will have your mates instantly comprehending why you lashed out £350 on a PlayStation 4. Shadow Fall looks stunning – as, indeed, any next-gen game should. Draw-distances appear to stretch to infinity. Metal, glass and cloth look like their real-life counterparts. And cliffs look as though they were shaped by nature, rather than a programmer virtually chipping away at rectangular blocks.

But the visual aspect that really takes the breath away is Shadow Fall's level design. It has an incredible sense of vertical space, and never passes up an opportunity to show that off – for example when you're dragged around Vekta City on a rope attached to a gunship. The Helghan half of Vekta City features a slum built from an array of containers thousands of feet high. It's a good job that the gameplay gives you occasional opportunities to slow down and take in your surroundings.

Stilted dialogue

Killzone: Shadow Fall isn't perfect. One particularly jarring aspect is the wooden dialogue that pollutes its cut-scenes – especially the portentous mutterings that emanate from Sinclair, who turns into a deeply annoying character. Kellan himself is a cipher: he hardly utters a word throughout. And sometimes plot advancements feel more like excuses to introduce a new gameplay variation, although many would argue that is no bad thing for a first-person shooter.

Fresh-feeling multiplayer

The impression that Guerrilla has massively upped its game persists when you go online with Killzone: Shadow Fall. Purists can dive into 12v12 team deathmatches, or search and destroy missions, but Shadow Fall's multiplayer is all about the Classic Warzone mode, in which your mission changes every five minutes, so you might start off retrieving beacons then taking them to designated places, before a spot of team deathmatch followed by a set charges-and-defend passage.

A minimal but clever class system – there are just three, Scout, Assault and Support, with distinctive abilities – encourages you take a rounded approach; just camping and meleeing won't pay dividends, for example. You can change class whenever you respawn, and instead of XP, there are over 1,500 challenges to meet; as you fulfil those, you unlock and upgrade weapons and abilities. Die-hard online shooter fanatics may be dubious about that system but, again, it encourages all-round players at the expense of those who specialise in just one approach. The maps are fabulous, and Shadow Fall's multiplayer is fantastically addictive.

Pick of the launch bunch

There's no doubt that Killzone: Shadow Fall is far and away the best PlayStation 4 launch title. It feels fresh and innovative throughout – after playing it, we checked out Call of Duty: Ghosts on the PS4, which felt one-dimensional and strangely old-fashioned – looks stunning and through its beautifully fettled multiplayer side, offers infinite replay value. It towers above previous versions of Killzone in terms of quality and taking a much more interesting approach. All of which makes it the one must-buy exclusive in the PS4's launch line-up.