Killing Floor is a ‘red eye’ game. You tell yourself you are going to dip into it for a few minutes online and somehow a couple of hours, and red eyes, later you are trying to pull yourself away. The single player with its well-worn scenario of things gone pear-shaped in an experimental biolab is basically a training ground for online play hosted by Steam. Playing with up to five other team-mates, the goal is simply to survive in the face of wave upon wave of zombified mutant specimens – which are cranked up in degrees of nastiness until the boss battle with the rocket and machine-gun-toting Patriarch (“You killed my children!”) in the final wave. The game was modded from the Unreal 2004 engine, and players looking for subtlety or stunning environments should look elsewhere. Killing Floor is all about frenetic gun and weapon play with no goal other than to exterminate all the nasties before they eat you.
With six classes to choose from, you select a perk in-game and level up accordingly. The more specimens you kill as a Commando with assault rifles, the more your senses are heightened; the more you decapitate as a Berserker, the more lethal you become in close combat, and so on. The non-linear maps make no pretence at sophistication, and include a crummy West London locale of burnt-out police cars, the claustrophobic griminess of the Biolab and the creepy open expanse of the Farm. Before the end of each wave, the trick is to get within running distance of the next trader point to purchase more ammo and better weapons. But linger too long in the brief Trader time window and you’ll find yourself alone and in a world of pain.
Gunplay is simple but has an awesome chunky impact in sound and feel, from the rapid fire of the 9mm pistol and the devastating up-close carnage of the shotgun to the panic stations of the dual handcannons. The weight limit makes choices harder as waves progress (indispensible combat armour included) and because the viciousness of the enemies increases with each wave, the game is genuinely co-operative. Welding doors to corral specimens while dealing with an oncoming wave from elsewhere is a necessity, while without a flame-throwing Firebug and a katana- or chainsaw-wielding Berserker or two among you, the chances of surviving the final waves are slim. Die within a wave and you must wait to respawn in the next one, begging other players for money to buy weapons.
Neither the generic Metal riffing soundtrack nor the repetitive Cockney wideboy dialogue (“I’m trying to heal you, not shag you!”) have time to irritate, as you are too busy romping through viscera. Because there is blood. Lots of it – some spectacular splashes of the stuff when the game momentarily kicks into the slow motion which gives you the edge over oncoming clots, crawlers, sirens, stalkers, gorefasts, bloats, scrakes and fleshpounds. At an almost bargain retail price, Killing Floor does some very simple things, very, very well. Just leave your own brain in the real world and proceed to splatter those of the virtual mutant nasties.
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