As many of you know, there was a free weekend this weekend on Steam for Killing Floor, the 6-player zombie survival horror game. That concept doesn't sound familiar at all, does it? Here is my review based on what I played this weekend.
First I'll start out with the good. The game looks very nice. The guns look cool, seeing head explode is awesome. The game had some good concepts, such as the merchant system, which reminded me of Counter-Strike's buy system, but with a more Left 4 Dead spin on it. At the end of every wave of zombies, the merchant opens her store and you see an arrow telling you which way she is. When you find her, you can use the money (which is British pounds) that you've picked up and buy weapons, ammo, grenades, armor, and things of that nature. You only get a limited of time between waves, so buy wisely, and try to find the merchant before the wave ends so you'll have the maximum amount of time there.
Now we have the bad. Whoa nelly this game has a lot of problems. I feel like the studio, Tripwire Interactive didn't playtest this game with different audiences at all. Just because a concept sounds cool on paper doesn't mean it works in game. For a lot of the game, this is exactly what drags the experience down. There are occasional time when the game goes into "bullet time"-style slow motion. The problem with this is that since it is multiplayer, the slow motion happens for everyone, including those that didn't trigger it. It's really frustrating to be reloading when this happens, which happens a lot! The other problem with this is that it also slows down the speed at which your aiming "cursor" moves. Meaning that if the next thing you were planning on doing was turning around, forget it.
Speaking of your aiming cursor, there is none! You can look down the barrel of the gun just like in a game like Call of Duty, but firing from the "hip" seems pretty precise, in fact too precise. There seems to be a heavy amount of auto-aim here. It's not auto-aim in respect to moving your cursor for you, but changing the direction the bullets actually travel. There were so many times when I was clearly aiming at an enemy's torso or legs and was STILL getting headshots! I don't want headshots I didn't earn. Just because it's in general satisfying to players to get a exploding-head headshot doesn't mean they should happen all the time, even when not aiming for the head.
You also die way too easily it seems. While the common counter-argument to this point is that "It's a survival horror game, you shouldn't be invulnerable.", believe me, it's too frustrating and in no way intuitive. The older Resident Evil games had the survival-horror aspect correct. This one does not. One or 2 enemies coming up to you puts you in this state for a while where you cannot move, at all! Not even limping! This is the chance for more enemies to approach and kill you. Remember how in Left 4 Dead, when one zombie is attacking you from behind, you slow down but don't come to a complete stop? That makes a lot more sense than 2 zombies in front putting you at a complete stop.
I don't know if anyone else had these issues, but there were also techincal issues with the game. For a while, I seemed to have a lot of intermittent stutters. My framerate stayed high the rest of the time. I even tried lowering my settings and that did not solve the problem.
The menus are complicated and confusing. Trying to play a game with your friends is incredibly difficult. You can send invites out through Steam, and hit "View game info" on a friend's game through Steam, but none of that actually works. The invites say you can't connect, and the game info says "server not responding", so you can't tell if a game is full unless you go all the way to the server browser. Also, why do all the servers of 6 people have to be dedicated or nothing? Last night, Bluevoodu hosted to play this game, and after we decided to switch to Left 4 Dead, BV was sending out invites, and it said they were still to killing floor. Well apparently quitting your own hosted game is not good enough and you actually have to shut down the "dedicated" server. There seems to be no "friends-only" mode in the game, because if you use the empty public servers and you don't have a group of 6 people, anyone can just join, especially trolls that want to ruin your fun. In fact, we had a few people in one game, and then a few idiots joined and called a vote to kick Grindspine and it passed because there were enough of the trolls! At that point we went back to L4D.
I know I keep comparing this to Left 4 Dead, but believe me, it's the right comparison to make here. This is no Left 4 Dead killer, in fact, Left 4 Dead eats this for it's midnight snack. It may be 25% off this weekend, but don't let that tempt you. It's not worth it, I wouldn't even pay $3 for it because I would be playing Left 4 Dead instead. Don't bother with this unless it goes on another free weekend, play Left 4 Dead instead.
