A Weekend on the Killing Floor

I must confess, I tend to avoid multiplayer shooters like the plague, especially the kind of high difficulty, low player count game wherein one weak link (like say someone who can't snap off headshots as well as a 14 year old full of Mountain Dew and racism) will spoil it for everyone. Still, a few days ago when Killing Floor had a free weekend on Steam, I had to give it a go. After all, the price was right.

My God, I was impressed.

I played the majority of the matches over LAN with my brother, which admittedly gave us a significant reduction in firepower compared to the 6 players that the game seems to expect, and on anything other than the easiest difficulty, require. On the flip side though, at least I could concentrate on enjoying the game rather than on how much I suck at FPS compared to everyone else on the internet. It was because of that, that I was able to appreciate just how good this game is.

Yes, that is who you think it is.

The basic set-up isn't all that uncommon these days. It's essentially a horde game: enemies come in  waves of ever increasing size and difficulty, killing enemies yields cash which can be then spent on weapons and upgrades at a store in between rounds. A simple weight system keeps you from tooling up with more weapons than an African Warlord. After the final conventional round, you have to face "The Patriarch" a huge undead monster with a minigun come rocket launcher, a massive amount of health and the ability to cloak and regenerate. Kill him and victory is yours. Simple. Well, in theory at least.

In practice, I only ever saw the Patriarch on the easiest difficulty, wherein he was less a creature of unstoppable horror and more the only thing that even had the slightest chance of killing me.

This is a very British game, and I love it for that.

Personally, I didn't enjoy playing it on easy. Yes, it was the only way to win with just two of us, and it was fun to actually see the upper tier weapons, but I just didn't find it as fun as really having to fight to stay alive (then fail woefully) on the harder difficulties. The combat is so engaging, that it wasn't all that fulfilling or fun when it was a cakewalk.

Speaking of combat, Killing Floor has some of the best shooting of any game I've played for a very long time. Even better than E.Y.E. I'd like to think that the old-school sensibilities come from the fact that Killing Floor started life as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The guns definitely have a chunkiness to them that has more in common with that era of shooter than this one. Still, having never actually played the mod this is just speculation.

What I loved most about the combat, even more than the chunky, authentic (if not realistic) feeling guns, was just how frantic it felt. Like somebody had strapped a Nitrous bottle to an old Rainbow Six game. As I said, the guns have an authenticity to them and this expresses itself in a few different ways. For one thing, there are no crosshairs in the game, it's ironsights or firing blind. What really has the biggest impact however, is the fact that reloads take a believably long amount of time (compared to more arcade-y shooters) this contributes to a huge feeling of tension, especially when you've got a mutant eight-legged reindeer (more on that in minute) baring down on you.

Reload times were such a consideration that I started basing my tactics around them, eschewing fully automatic weapons and shotguns in favour of high powered pistols and semi automatic rifles. Automatic weapons were far to easy to empty in the heat of the moment, making reloads all too frequent, and shotguns, once emptied, needed to have each cartridge reloaded individually. A far too time consuming process, especially on the perpetually empty double-barreled shotgun.  This wasn't really that much of a problem since I've come to prefer rifles and powerful pistols in most games: it always feels badass to be methodically popping heads left and right with nerves of steel as the horde descends upon you.

Yeah, these aren't action shots, too hard to play and screenshot.

The game sells itself as a survival-horror co-op, which isn't really right. Yes the maps often have a lot of great creepy atmosphere, and the creatures are grotesque, but the very nature of co-op undermines the feeling of solitary helplessness that is really key to videogame horror. I do have to give credit where it's due though. The tension generated by the combat, the huge volume of enemies, and the well designed maps which never give you a too easily defensible position, mean that (unless you're playing it on too low a difficulty) you only ever feel like you're surviving as opposed to thriving. You may be in control of the situation, but that could change at any moment.  That's something I love, and since advances in standard of control and graphical fidelity have killed the survival horror genre as it was back in the halcyon days of Resident Evil 1-3 and Silent Hill. I feel that emphasising the survival aspect as a mode of creating tension, rather than trying (and failing) to be scary, may be the way that the genre has to go.

For the sake of full disclosure, I have to add that there is the possibility that the reason that I didn't find the game in any way horrifying, may have something to do with the fact that I was playing a Christmas themed version replete with grappling elves, bloated vomiting Santas (the fuckers), the aforementioned scuttling mutant spider reindeer, homicidal ginger bread men, and a very jolly Santa derived Patriarch. If anything, this just made things surreal, especially on the festive maps, wherein the soundtrack to your slaughter was made up of Christmas songs. Though since a lot of Christmas songs do inspire a blood rage in me, this was still somewhat fitting.

My kind of Christmas

This being me, I can't leave this without mentioning some of my less great experiences with the game over the weekend. My main gripe with the mechanics is that I wish that there was some sort scaling within a difficulty level based on the number of players in the game. Fun as it was to be playing LAN co-op rather than online with whoever, we were stuck in a weird position of either winning easily or getting totally destroyed. I feel that if there was some modification based upon player count as well as difficulty level, the game would be able to provide much more appropriate levels of challenge.

My other main concern relates to just one enemy: the Clot (or elf in this version). Why on earth does it grapple you!? When the Clot attacks, you become stuck in place until you kill it. Sounds reasonable enough doesn't it? Well let me tell you something, when you're in a high wave, surrounded by enemies and running low on ammunition, it doesn't seem so reasonable when you die because one of the creeps in the mass surrounding you happened to be a Clot and the little shit stopped you from running. Especially when the damn thing is attacking you but is obscured behind a larger, tougher, monster so you can't see it to kill it... WTF Blizz!? Clot is OP! etc.

So, my Killing Floor weekend was good one, plenty of bullets and plenty of blood. I was mightily impressed with the game, and whilst it isn't going to get me totally into online multiplayer shooters, it did remind me how good LAN can be. Now I just wish that someone would make a campaign driven FPS with the combat mechanics of this. It would be a hell of a lot better than the other thing I went back and played that weekend; the buggy, bloated, over-hyped, darling of the e-peen waving, hardware forum arsehole: Crysis. That's another story though.