Killing Floor

[Smiley]

Just to sum up Killing Floor... It's a co-op round-based survival FPS, built on the Unreal 3 engine. The game is independant though, so you purchase it by itself without anything else required.

Basicly there are 4, 7 or 10 rounds per game plus another against the Patriarch(boss) which is difficult to kill.
Between rounds you need to run to the trader who spawns randomly between keypoints on the map. There you buy better weapons to handle the larger masses of zombies pushing in on your group.

If you die, you lose all equipment and respawn on the next round, if the others make it that is...

You earn cash by surviving and killing zombies, and it's expected to dish out cash to eachother in order to help advance.


Strong Points:

1. Cheap. It costs 18€(With taxes - so roughly 20$ or something for you yanks).
It's easy to convince friends to give it a shot.

2. It has 7 perks (classes) which you level up by doing the things that fit their style (Sharpshooter requires headshots, medic needs to heal etc).
You level up perks independantly from what you play, so if you start off every first round headshotting zombies, you gain advancement in that.
Or no matter what you play, if you heal others, you advance in the medic class.


3. What you've earned, you keep.
The info on the perks you level up are server stored, so when you join a new game, you retain your advancement and levels, basicly being able to start off with a weapon and be more effective than beginners.
You can play solo, and your advancements even on solo maps will still be recorded.

4. Large array of weapons and playstyles.
Melee has low tier and high tier weapons. Low being a machete and axe, high being a chainsaw and katana, which are equally powerful in each of their ways.
Weapons range between pistols, 3 assault rifles, 3 sorts of shotguns, two rifles, a crossbow to grenade launchers, sub-machine gun with healing darts and a flamethrower. Oh and a LAW rocket launcher(which honestly sucks).

To sum up classes briefly:
Medic: Better healing, takes less damage and moves fast.
Support Specialist: Increased carryweight, massive shotgun firepower and effective welder.
Commando: Assault rifle specialist, can see invisible zombies at range as well as health of all zombies. Can prolongue bullet time(which happens randomly) by killing more zombies during that time.
Sharpshooter: Powerful headshotting class. Very effective, but takes skill.
Beserker: Moves fast, takes less damage, deals maybe the most damage of all classes.
Firebug: Least interesting, basicly sets everything on fire, with greater range and damage. Only one weapon though.
Demolitionist: New Perk, specializes in the two sorts of grenade launchers and all explosives, such as proximity pipebombs.

5. The Maps are well made.
Clearly a lot of effort have been put into the maps, and only very few of them have any sort of go-to place that's best to be at.
More often than not you end up barricading yourself and making sure the zombies only come from one direction, although they're doing their best to prevent just that. The random spawning trader keeps you on the move and forces you to hole up somewhere near her.

6. Is updated regularly and for free.
The last patch contained a new level for all perks, as well as a new one, two maps and 8 new weapons I think. After the patch came out there have been two or three updates fixing errors and tweaking exploits. More content is expected to come some day.

7. All weapons are crosshair-"realistic".
If you're not using iron sights, you don't know where you're aiming.
I've put a lot of hours into the game, so I know where the middle of the screen is, roughly anyway.. But there's no crosshair, so either you use iron sights or guess where you're shooting.
It might be a turnoff for some, but I think it makes the game way better.

8. Achievements.
Depends on how you view them.. Most of them are redundant, such as killing x amount of zombies, but others are challenging and fun.
The more you progress in your perks, the more fun it gets by taking on challenges such as playing on the hardest difficulty and beating the end boss, which is very hard unless people work together and know what they're doing.

9. Custom Maps.
People have made and are still making custom maps for the game, some of which are really well made, but most are crap.

Weak Points:

Gets repetative quickly, more so than Left 4 Dead.
There is ONLY the one play mode, although there are mutators which presets which zombies spawn.

Special Zombies aren't that special.
You have your bloated fucker which spews blinding acid on you, invisible zombies, spider zombies, chainsaw zombies and big ass Flesh Pounders, which churns your flesh in a matter of seconds, as well as a few others.
They're inventive and pose a challenge, but mostly in large groups. The game becomes challenging when you're being swarmed.

There's nothing you can't fix by just shooting more, unlike the new zombies in L4D2, where you need to cooperate in order to take down some zombies. Such as policemen which are armored in the front, so someone needs to kill it from behind, or the jockey which rides you, forcing others to be careful while taking it down.

Too far between levels.
This is one of the best and worst parts...
Doing 8500 headshots in order to advance to the highest level sharpshooter gets tedious very quickly.
It makes each level feel earned, but there's so far between levels that it might feel a bit exhausting and frustrating. If they had doubled the amount of levels, halved the bonuses and requirements up to each level, it would've felt better.

Micropayments...
This is only for models/skins though, no game content as of yet. So unless you care about how you look in the game, it makes no difference. Although the skin-packs are very cheap.



All in all worth it. You can spend ten minutes shooting zombies and actually have something to show for it when you're done.
Blasting away zombies in co-op is always good fun.

[Stainless]

My friends and I played this to death in the first month of its release. We gave it a bit of a go again after the recent update with those awesome new ranged fuckers, which were sorely needed, but we've all just got too much shit to just burn through this again atm.

[SenisterDenister]

I've got it, and I know Mad_Max_RW does too, 'cause I've played a round or two with him. If you guys are in the #fallout steam group we should do something.

[Mad Max RW]

Uh, there are friendly fire servers.

[ekkaman]

could have been so much better but thats the way games are now i guess

[SenisterDenister]

Its funny because you think you're right.

[Smiley]

Uh, there are friendly fire servers.

Awesome, I'm blind. I think I'll go FF servers only then, since the added challenge is very much worth it. And definately something I loved in L4D.

Also, it'll give an appropriate excuse to teamkill idiots who don't know how to stay put.

[PiP]

I would have loved this kinda game 10 years ago when I played Blood 2

[MadBill]

Akimbo AR15s ftw.