Image source originally found here.

I easily passed on Killing Floor when it first came out. Little did I know it would be a game I play with friends so often as of this post. It is true, so few games now-a-days offer a coop mode in games. That’s what this game is. It is initially easily comparable to Left 4 Dead, but after playing for a bit, you quickly get a sense that it is very far from it. It’s grittier, less forgiving, and darker.

Each game by default has up to 6 slots for players to occupy. It’s round based instead of guiding you through a tunnel. This lets players decide how they want to survive. Often I’ll find that some areas are really good for defending, as opposed to others. Those who like to hunker down and weld doors shut so that they can funnel the mobs, can do so. They can even use it to their advantage where the weld a gate shut so gunfire can still pass through. You can’t always hunker down completely as the trader changes location each round so if you get stuck defending one location, you might not have enough time to make it to the trader.

The trader gives you access to bigger and badder weapons, should you be able to afford them. If not, then gain cash by killing mobs and surviving. If all else fails, ask for money and someone might be able to lend a few bucks. Giving cash to other players is critical to the game in harder difficulties as deaths are likely. The game is pretty unforgiving in that your weapons and armor are gone after death, unless someone was able to pick it up for you. You also lose some cash too. Being able to get right back to where you were last round with the help of friendly donations is key, otherwise you’ll once again be the weak link in the group.

The game also scales depending on how many players are in the game, along with the global difficulty setting. This can work against the group if people quit or are afk after a round starts, or someone doesn’t know how to play.

Overall, the game is fairly polished despite a few quirks such as:

• Very rare, but I’ve been stuck in third person view a few times. No way of getting out of it except for hoping it resets on the next round (usually after a death)… otherwise it’s quit the game and start it back up.
• Headless mobs still have a sense of where you are. Would have been nice if they just wandered around aimlessly or continued in the same direction before bleeding out.
• There’s a few maps where the mobs get stuck, and sometimes can only be heard and not seen (making it difficult to kill them).

I had high hopes for this game. Even when I purchased the game a while ago, I found it entertaining. I am much less critical of games than others can be. At the time, I wasn’t playing much multiplayer, or at least I was playing multiplayer in different games. For this game, I kept it for the singleplayer experience.

The graphics for it’s time were “unreal.” It did live up to it’s name. It was definitely a step up from the previous game which was UT2004. But something was lacking.

I couldn’t set the bot skill to a level that I liked. Either they were worse than cannon fodder, or made me feel like it. There was no grades of middle ground, let alone one middle ground. I’m also no longer the hardcore gamer I used to be. Trying to beat the game on it’s hardest level is not what I go for anymore. Again, not that I was good enough to in the first place, far from it. As time goes on, I look for a release instead of topping a chart.

The bots lack of scalability would have been overlook-able but coupled with it being next to impossible to run a small networked game with friends made my distaste for this game grow strong. I have followed nearly every guide I could find for opening ports, DMZ, etc but I could still not get the campaign mode playable with friends. Looking up solutions online found only others following guides that also didn’t seem to work. Looks like Campaign mode is LAN only for me. Even running a VPN didn’t work. Such a shame.

Likely, the biggest reason for all of this is Epic has decided to abandon the PC due to piracy. A sad end to the Epic Games’ games, Valve has it right, but they are such a small company, who’s going to buy from them? It is this last point that has me mostly conflicted. Piracy is definitely out of control so their business choice is understandable. But being a PC gamer myself, I only know that it would mean I’d miss out on a lot more because of it. It’s still a shame they left UT3 to rot before they fixed the issues. Unless that’s their way of giving all PC gamers the finger, even if it is directed only to the pirates.

Not all is poo poo with this game. The Unreal Development Kit is a nice gem for wannabe developers. Even their pricing model is very competitive to lower quality gaming engines out there. At an initial $99, you get the engine and can keep the first $5000 you make royalty free. After that, it’s 25% for the rest. While there’s no cap, It definitely beats some of the others that have higher initial costs. The quality is also superior to the free ones that I found at the time. If you wanted a game that looked good, you had to either make it a mod and give it away, or bank on it making enough money to cover your costs… or be a big enough company to start with and not even worry about the first two. Hopefully, the UDK doesn’t have you inherit the previously stated troublesome network code.

And from what I have seen up until this post (2011), there are a heck of a lot of games running on modded versions of the Unreal 3 engine. So we do have something to thank Epic for, even if UT3 itself isn’t that great. The move to making the UDK very affordable for even the smallest of developers, gives me the indication that they might be telling the PC world they are done with it, but they are willing to make the tools for others who are not. I’d even consider it myself, should I gather the resources.