If you're stuck on the game, check out our epic Killzone 3 video walkthrough.

We've been following the development of Killzone 3 closely with a mounting level of excitement. The game's predecessor - a half-decade in the making at Guerrilla Games - was a remarkable example of a shooter built from the ground up that concentrated on the technological strengths of the PlayStation 3 hardware. At the time of the game's release in February 2009 it was the most dramatic, spectacular example of just what was possible when the RSX chip's visual power was combined with the PS3's unique Cell CPU architecture.

In a genre where technology plays such an important part in defining the gameplay experience, Killzone 2 was a world apart from its competition. The deferred rendering system employed by the developer allowed the game to operate many more light sources than any other shooter of the time, giving it a unique appearance. Cell-powered pre-processing optimised the amount of geometry RSX actually had to process, allowing for richer, more detail-heavy environments, objects and characters. Post-processing effects work such as the camera and object-based motion blur was hived out to the SPU satellite processors - another example of how the CPU was utilised as a graphics co-processor, with the visual effects work distributed between the main processor and the GPU.

But of course, Killzone 2 was not without its faults - the make-up of the single-player campaign coming in for criticism, while the slow response from the controls was singled out by players as a particular concern.

This new sequel is important in a number of respects. For all of Killzone 2's technological accomplishments, presentations from Guerrilla revealed untapped system resources in the PlayStation 3 that the developer had yet to fully utilise. Unused processing time in the PS3's SPUs, combined with optimisation efforts in the core tech could push this engine to even greater graphical accomplishments, hopefully ironing out some of the performance issues that Killzone 2 shipped with.

Secondly, the PS3 brand itself had moved on significantly in the two years since Killzone 2 was released: PlayStation Move represents the most accurate, flexible controller in the video games market and had yet to be fully utilised in a first-person shooter - a challenge Guerrilla Games took very seriously. Sony's strong advocacy of 3DTV technology also needed to be backed up with as much high-level gaming support as possible, and despite the apparent impossibility of the task, the studio came up with an ingenious solution in implementing stereoscopic support into its existing engine.

Killzone 3 really pushes back the boundaries of the PS3 architecture in 2D mode - the fact that there's a stereoscopic 3D mode at all is something of a technical marvel. Here you can see the 3D framebuffer as it leaves the PS3, left eye view on top, right on the bottom.

Finally, and most crucially, Killzone 3 gave Guerrilla Games an opportunity to address the criticisms levelled at the single-player game, while crafting a brand new, state-of-the-art multiplayer mode. Bearing in mind that the current Call of Duty offering is coming in for fierce criticism on PlayStation 3, and factoring in the technical weaknesses of the game compared to its Xbox 360 sibling, there's a strong argument that Sony will never have a better opportunity to take ownership of this genre.

First impressions of the new sequel are very favourable indeed: visually, it's still clearly a Killzone game, but somehow brighter and cleaner. Controls are massively improved: lighter, more responsive and less prone to the lag that its predecessor suffered from, meaning that Killzone's signature intense, visceral battles feel better to play than before.