Time To Kill Some Zeds
Tripwire Interactive’s 2009 release Killing Floor was a squad-based shooter that dropped you and up to five friends into London following an outbreak of horrific zombie-like creatures from a biotech lab running experiments for the military. (Who would have guessed science could go so horribly awry?)
The follow-up, Killing Floor 2, is available now on Steam Early Access, and it takes the concept of the original game and turns everything about it up to 11.
For starters, this isn’t a traditional shooter that makes you go strolling through a massive map full of corridors and rooms looking for stuff to shoot at. It’s cut from the same cloth as Gears of War’s Horde Mode, where the zombie hordes (or “Zeds,” as they are called in this game) come looking for you. You have to survive wave after wave of horrific, mutated nasties who want nothing more in life than to chew on you, and the odds against you are stacked a little higher with each successive wave. New monster types and the overall enemy count increase gradually, until you finally face off against a level’s boss, but no matter where you go, the fight comes to you.
That’s not to say that you can just stand with your back in a corner and gun them all down; such a strategy will kill you faster than just about anything else you can do. You (and/or your squad of up to six players) have to strike just the right balance between staying on the move and using the environment to your advantage. Some areas in a level will provide no cover, but others include bulkhead doors that you can weld shut and so on, giving you a moment to regroup and reload. Between each wave, you have a limited amount of time to get to your level’s gun vending machine to trade the cash you rack up from putting down Zeds for better weapons and more ammo.
You also gain experience along the way and can use those points to improve your character’s damage with certain weapon types or to improve support and healing skills, etc. This element of the game adds a surprising amount of depth to what is essentially a run-and-gun meat grinder. There is a story — Killing Floor 2 takes place a short time after the events of the first game, and the Zed infestation has spread from London to continental Europe — but the real star of this show is fast-twitch action and buckets of gore.
Killing Floor 2 puts a dizzying array of weapons at your disposal, including guns, a plethora of melee weapons, explosives, and more, and you must use them to blast, slash, and blow your way through the Zeds until your squad is all that’s left standing.
The game runs on the Unreal Engine 3, which is a little long in the tooth at this point, but Tripwire uses some clever tricks to keep things moving quickly and looking good. For instance, instead of rendering a blood splatter as a new, separate object on top of a floor or wall, they actually update the floor or wall’s texture map in real time so that the blood effect becomes part of it. Not only is this easier on system resources, but it also means that when you kill a Zed in KF2, its blood becomes a permanent fixture in the level until the end of the match.
Although its premise is simple, there’s no denying this game’s appeal. If you and a handful of friends are looking for a little zombie-eviscerating catharsis, Killing Floor 2 delivers. And delivers. And delivers...