Since the swineflu is 'rampaging' around and video game zombie renaissance has kicked in by L4D, games based on such events are good practice on how to survive if things get truly rough. Too bad there's just no HUD in real life to check your ammo.

Killing Floor started out as an UT2k4 mod, and then one of the original developers attempted to port it to Red Orchestra (which is one hell of an excellent game made by TWI) and since Tripwire Interactive got curious and they liked the idea, it eventually became a retail game which is available on Steam for 17 euros.

Since Left 4 Dead came first to the retail market, people have easily dismissed it as god-awful indie version of a L4D wannabee and rips it off. I find that statement as accurate as saying Half-Life ripped off the original Doom by being an first person shooter and god-awful doom-clone. Or that Willy Messerschmit ripped off Hawker-Siddely's Hurricane with his Bf-109 design.

I do have to warn you about screenshots. I initially planned to make this review ages ago but due lack of 'reasonable' screenshots it got delayed and as my main PC's motherboard fried up, I am stuck with 9" netbook with Intel GMA945. But at least it tells the game doesn't require that much, so even your old fart or some non-gaming laptop might do a reasonable job with it, but don't expect any too high quality of visual orgy. You don't play 10 year old game because it has good visuals, you play because it's functional or even probably good.

Umbrella Corporation's bastard child

The game's 'plot' is basically that Horzine technologies (or something like that) conducted top secret genetic experiments for military purposes, things went awry and now they're spreading aids around England, which is proudly follows the tradition of Umbrella Corporation's business model of using shit loads of money to conduct more and more and more experiments without realizing that nukes would be far more efficient. Basically it's just a rough back story to the bloodbath that follows when you start shooting some nasty lurkers

The basic gameplay is based on waves and depending on server settings the amount of waves do vary, and each one gets more and more stronger and numerous, so rather than being a blitzkrieg fest from point A to point B, it's more about a stroll in a map until you kill all the bad guys and between each wave you go to buy stuff from the local arms-dealer called the trader. When you reach the final wave you're off to face a boss called the Patriarch which has hentaitentacle in his chest and armed with a rocket launcher and a chaingun and the guy reminds me of Jesus in early arts.

As obnoxious as it might sound, it's fairly functional and the gameplay is quite dynamic to that degree, albeit bit more traditional also. If you die in middle of a wave, you'll respawn in the beginning of the next wave and if everyone meets the reaper, it's game over and time to vote for another map or wait for server to change.

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Money money moneyyy

The players can choose one of the six perks to give them some extra abilities and they are Field Medic, Support Specialist, Commando, Sharpshooter, Firebug and Berserk. As an example, field medic perk gives you more effective first aid syringe, discount on armour and better armour as a whole and Commando gains more efficiency for Bullpup and AK47 and some other bonuses. All of the perks starts from level 0 and have different requirements to level up to some degree, with the highest level being 5. Your perk has to reach level 3 before you gain all of the extra bonuses to some degree though.

When a map starts, players are armed only with pistol, knife, medical syringes and welding tools, but you may find ammunition or weapons scattered around the map. You get money for every kill you make and for each wave you survive and it can be shared with team-mates if they are short of dosh to buy some gear. You have limited time to buy your gear and the trader switches her spot usually per each wave so you might have to plan when to start moving if you have holed up in a castle of some sort. Welding tools are useful for blocking some routes temporarily or if you have holed up in some place, but they don't last forever unless you reinforce them constantly which can easily mean a noticeable loss of firepower in the team.

You can buy all sorts of things from trader, machetes, axes, chainsaws, AK47s, bullpups, shotguns, flamethrowers and other items to cause some mayhem, so it does have some weapon variety and you can be slightly creative with your 'lineup' in terms of weapons. However, you do have limited carrying capacity so you have to also plan a bit what you want to buy in general and it does affect your movement speed; a player with only one single weapon will move faster than a player with enough gear to supply an entire insurgent rebel group. Oh and by the way, there are no crosshairs in the game so if you want to aim accurately in general, you have to use ironsights. There is no melee option for weapons, even though it would be useful occasionally but interestingly it's one of those 50-50 good-bad things that fits with the gameplay.

There's total of four difficulties in the game: beginner, normal, hard and suicidal. Beginner is what it is, normal is what it is, hard is actually pretty hard and suicidal is comparable to similar hardcore style found in Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry games, which means it might be a merry journey of bumrapes.

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Left 2 Die in before Fanboys

The enemies in Killing Floor are bit stock, there's clot that can grab and hold you cooking your meat with BBQ sauce, there's gorefast with a nasty blade on his arm, crawlers which come out of nowhere, stalkers which resembles some prostitutes, bloats which use either their kitchen knives to chop you or puke acid to burn you, sirens which are probably what Homer saw back in his days, then there's the scrake with his chainsaw and maniac laugh and flesh pound which doesn't really fuck around. They all have their own threat-weakness line, such as clots might be weak and look harmless, but if one grabs you you can't move until someone kills it and add few other clots and you're pretty much stuck and if you have some extra company of gorefasts or sirens, you're pretty much screwed within a few seconds. Visually they're not really that special besides flesh pound which looks both hilarious and pretty nasty at the same time.

However, since the famous "zomg KF rips L4D off" still rampages around in some religious L4D players, I could make some brief comparisons: L4D is more about blitzkrieg fest with shotguns from point A to point B, while KF is more about kill everything that is hostile in waves. L4D is bit more cooperative by basic design as it's forced, while KF does not force it but that doesn't mean it would be useless. So yes, while KF might lack some neat cooperative features found in L4D, it does have an entirely different gameplay nature and is far more difficult actually.

Killing Floor does also suffer bit more from simple repetition, but it also has a noticeably greater amount of gore as you can decapitate heads and hands with melee weapons or with firearms. The voice acting is also rather interesting case, as either you find it mildly amusing or you want to shoot your brains off but the music is pretty damn neat. While I usually don't have any kind of music on in any kind of multiplayer games, KF is one of the few exceptions where I might occasionally put them on as it has more or less heavy metal\rock oriented soundtrack to play on the background while shooting the specimen back to the moon. One thing I do hate with passion is the lack of FF as default setting.

It's by no means perfect, it has only five stock maps (but unlike some other game, the SDK was released on the actual release date rather than delayed D-Day + five months, it has excellent custom maps run on many servers), it has odd voice acting, the game suffers from somewhat simple repetition and you can see it's a budget game more or less. However, I doubt how you could go wrong with 17€ price unless you are religious L4D lobbyist who considers AI director as a God or simply dislike games with KF-like nature. But there's one thing that says the difference if we're to be mean: it took me roughly 10 hours to finish all of L4D's campaigns on expert the first time. It took me 20+ hours of gameplay before I started to survive entire maps on normal difficulty in KF, so it does offer more challenge to some degree with rather unforgiving nature.

But honestly, you can pretty much tell from this review that I prefer KF over L4D these days and I have been whining like a broken fan about some subjectively noted flaws in L4D. KF is still worth giving a go and those two games can co-exist peacefully, but if you prefer one over another... then you do.

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