While I was waiting for Ox to get his butt ready for a C&C skirmish, I decided to have a super-quick spin on Killing Floor. I got it uber-cheap during the Xmas sales because it's a coop game where you kill zombies. Here are my first impressions.

Loaded up the game and the general feel of the menus is like the Unreal kind, for example, Red Orchestra. This means it's the same engine which is a good thing because not only is it a very capable engine, it's also old but in a good way. This means that if you don't have a high end machine, it will run perfectly fine on full detail.

Having said that, even if you have a high end machine, it doesn't look sloppy at all. Having loaded up a solo game after quickly resetting a few keys and maxing the graphics, I was soon wearing a pleasant smile. The detail, grittiness and darkness was greater than what we're used to in L4D. What's more, you can right-click to aim you weapon COD style! Just a little touch that shows promise of adding that extra bit of realism to a zombie fragging experience.

So there I was with a knife, some medical equipment and what looked like a 92F. Adjusting to the darkness, and instinctively pressed F to activate the flashlight. Awesome. Nice detail and as I stopped to scan the room and absorb the sounds I imagined to myself how gripping the game could be with a few friends on coop.

I then set off, clueless of what to do because I only had around 5 mins, but soon enough some zombies appeared. Slow zombies compared to L4D, but no less scary or resilient. I raised my sights and started plugging, sometimes getting extra satisfaction with blowing off heads.

I moved along and soon noticed the HUD / indicator elements to tell me what to do and where to go, such as compass arrow, and route markers. They were very bright and obvious too, so I hit Esc and switched them off as best I could. On I continued. A few more waves of Z's dispatched and I was starting to think of how much ammo I actually had. Seemingly no ammo problems, I believe something like 6 magazines to start with but there were also alot of scattered ammo boxes lying around the place. I soon got to the end of the level, having understood that perhaps the game is a "get from A to B" or atleast the game I started.

2nd level started and apparently there was a Trader that I could go to. It occurred to me that at this point Killing Floor could be a fairly achievement based game. The trader reminded me of STALKER. I purchased a carbine SA80 (strangely with an Eotech red dot sight as opposed to a standard carry handle or SUSAT) but I also came to question myself as to how I have hundreds of dollars with me. Anyway, onwards!

Unfortunately I soon died. The first room was some kind of swimming pool, still in creepy darkness I approached it, but then things got crazy pretty quickly. Some zombies came at me from another door up ahead but some kind of superfast flamethrower amphibious creatures leaped out of the water and burned me to death. It all happened in about 20 seconds as I tried to retreat and unload as many rounds as possible, but that was the end of my 5 minute review.

The game seems fairly centered on customising classes and weapons, but i'm not sure if this goes well with the essentially fundamental nature of survival. I'm not sure if you can turn off all the nooby directional pointers too, which worries me because what could be a cool "where-do-we-go?" game is potentially just a "all-get-to-the-end!" game. The ubermonsters I came across weren't pleasant to say the least but i'm willing to play another 5 minutes some time soon to write up a little more.

*is kind of disappointed that 5 minute reviews don't come with 5-minute ratings*

Thanks for the (loosely based on consistent fact) review Derfmeister. We'll have to validate that guest pass of mine some time, together with Peltz (he's got the game). Might be fun...but I'm pretty sure it won't be L4D fun.

Its not. Basically the game goes like this. The map fires up, people enter the game. You choose your kit (it gives bonuses to certain weapon) and the first wave begins. There are usually about 5-7 waves where the final one is boss that can turn invisible and has chaingun attached to his arm. He looks like georg michels compared to the tank in L4D. And thats pretty much it. In between the waves theres a time to visit the shop to grab some gear. On the easy setting there are guns and ammo lying about but at higher difficulty theres very little ammo only and even that is quite rare.

So basically the game comes down to clearing wave after wave and then the boss. Its absolutely nothing like L4d.