Killing Floor

The first thing you'll notice when you fire up Iceberg Interactive’s Killing Floor is that it connects automatically to Steam online, leaving you no option but to sit back while it takes around 15 minutes updating before allowing you to proceed. In fact, throughout the test period, the game itself is hindered by frustratingly long connection times to servers, although once connected, it's mostly stable with no noticeable in-game slow down.

Having said all that, the funny thing with this title is that once you jump through all the online hoops, upgrades and seemingly pointless delays, the game springs to life and provides the player with a highly entertaining experience well worthy of the genre.

The general premise is some baloney about cloning experiments going horribly awry, resulting in London being over-run by zombies, sorry,  bio-specimens, but it really doesn't matter what they are.  It's shooting the nasty things that counts.

The comparisons between the two titles is probably inevitable, so it’s only fair to say that the main difference between Killing Floor and the more polished Left4Dead is that this time around you and the rest of your team are not traversing over a hazardous route hoping to make the next safe house before dying. Here there is basically nowhere to run, forcing you to rely more on sound knowledge of your confines andhope that your teammates are there to help you out when it all goes pear-shaped.

The game encourages team play wherever possible: for instance while healing, you won't get much benefit fromhealing yourself, while healing others helps a lot more while gaining you experience points towards your Healer class in the process.

There are different classes including the Sharp Shooter, Commando and Berserker. As you progress through the levels, you begin to improve at what you prefer to do, be it firing headshots or healing. While this is a welcome aspect to the game you honestly won’t pay too much attention to these things in the heat of a fierce battle.

If you are the type of person who likes to polish up your skills before going online, you're going to be disappointed with the single player experience: there are no bots to replace team mates - in fact, it'll just dump you into a multiplayer game albeit with no other players. You do not last long. Pointless.

The weapons and monster types are limited, but its not much of a problem as they are all well balanced; the emphasis of the game resting on co-operating with your team, rather than finding a super weapon to bail you out of trouble. The in-game music provides a decent enough vibe, though the voice acting could have been better: it's essentially one actor shouting Mockney type commands and insults, although admittedly it does provide a lot of mirth!

The worst aspect of Killing Floor is its 'bullet time' feature. That old Max Payne gimmick [Think about the slow-mo bits from The Matrix -Ed] but this time allocated in such a random way as to almost never benefit anyone: you'll invariably be reloading or not involved in a battle when it kicks in, forcing you to just wait until it's over.

If you like this type of game and can put up with the bugs, occasional crashes and lengthy loading times then Killing Floor is well worth getting. Sure it's flawed but there's no denying it's a wonderful piece of co-op gaming entertainment.