Despite protests from fans that Left 4 Dead 2 is little more than a money-making scheme that should have been an add-on rather than a sequel, Valve's franchise is gearing up for a second instalment. Meanwhile, Killing Floor - which started out as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 four years ago - steps onto the scene with a new no-frills take on the squad-based zombie shooter.
While we're here let's get through the obvious L4D references at the beginning: You play online as part of a squad of armed folk trying to survive numerous zombie onslaughts. You've got various guns and in addition to the rank-and-file nasties there are a few similar ones (the 'Bloat' which spews acid on people is very similar to L4D’s Boomer). However that's where the similarities end, as in most other ways the games are chalk and cheese.
KF plays like a cross between Counterstrike and Wolfenstein with zombies thrown in. The game is set in good old London town after a apocalypse involving genetic super-soldiers gone wrong, and as a squad you have to eliminate several increasingly hairy waves of zombies. These eventually lead to a 'boss' battle with a beastie which boasts chainguns for arms, can cloak itself, spawn more zombies and heal itself. At the beginning you spawn with a pistol, knife and a few grenades and earn money for each abomination you put away. At the end of the wave a shopkeeper appears on the map and you have a minute to get to her and buy new guns, armour or ammo before the next wave kicks in. If this doesn't already smack of Counterstrike then the fact that you can run faster with your knife out will ring a few bells.
One thing to note is that although the premise is simple the game is far from easy. Each wave gets exponentially harder and the 'special' enemies turn up in much greater frequency. As this happens the best tactic is usually to seal yourself into a bottleneck and spray lead, but as the trader moves around the map you need to start running towards the shop before you kill all the zombies or you'll have only your knife and harsh language to face the next wave with. If anyone had trouble with the Survival mode in L4D this is at least as tough – ‘Normal’ will test your skills, ‘Hard’ is bloody impossible and ‘Suicidal’…? well, I think you probably get the idea.
There are only five official maps at the moment, but already a slew of user-created ones have popped up (including notably an old-school Doom map) and are automatically downloaded as you join the server, so it has the potential for a lot of variety in terms of arenas at least.
The weapons are a fairly typical selection but are great fun to use: an assortment of handguns, rifles, shotguns and power weapons (chainsaw, flamethrower and rocket launcher for the discriminating zombie killer) but Tripwire have done a good job in making them feel meatier than a 18oz Steak. The handcannon packs a punch after its hefty recoil it cleaves enemies into bloodied stumps (very satisfyingly), the bullpup peppers large areas with tiny bullets and the chainsaw carves its way through a crowd like a machete through jelly.
This brilliant gun set works well when combined with the more realistic gameplay elements. There is no aiming reticule, so when you look down the iron sights you lose peripheral vision. This lead to many pant-cacking moments when I spun around to see a previously cloaked zombie lady screaming right in my face! Also, clip size is miniscule and reload times agonisingly long, so things are much tougher and visceral than the arcade action in L4D.
However the game is constantly sending mixed messages and can't seem to make up its mind whether it’s a tongue-in-cheek team shooter or tense, dark thriller FPS. On the one hand the game can create very tense, scary moments and the maps are all dark and spooky, not to mention the heavy metal soundtrack. But on the other the characters all run around spouting innuendos with dodgy 'mockney' accents like they were in a Carry On film (like the shopkeeper's constant penis/gun jokes), and every layer of the game seems to be crammed with the admirable intent to not take itself too seriously. This is sullied by the relatively poor presentation of the game itself, now looking very dated even on the Unreal 2 engine, where the same one-liners grow increasingly more tedious. Okay, we get it lady - you like a massive 'weapon', let's just get on with it now. But what will grate even more is that whenever the game deems that you (or ANYONE in your team) pulled off a particularly impressive-looking kill then the game will go into slo-mo to show it off. However this applies to everyone, including spectators, and it retards your own movement and shooting for quite a while. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time but considering most kills are spray-and-pray it's pretty pointless.
Perhaps unsurprisingly being low budget and an ex-mod glitches abound, not least in the most important aspect - hosting and joining games. Even after spending a long time tinkering with my router and firewall settings I was still getting kicked from servers and crashes, or zombies running towards me with their backs turned.
Killing Floor tries to take on the big boys with something quite original and in some ways it works. But the simple 'kill zombies, get guns, kill more zombies, get more guns' dynamic is very basic and the levels lack direction or a 'real' objective - in L4D getting to the Safe Room was what pushed you through the levels but here you're simply killing waves of enemies for the sake of it. Although the enemies are varied themselves there's no variety in the way they come at you - chainsaw zombies amble towards you at the same speed as the Crawlers and the Bloat, meaning there's no tactical element to the game except firing and conserving ammo.
If the game were a little more varied in what you could do/had to do then it would have rated higher but even as a budget title its appeal is limited to those who play Counterstrike and wondered what it would be like if you could play as Sid James and Charles Hawtrey and fight zombies.
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
