…continued
You’ll get money for your kills that you can spend on simple handguns and melee weapons, right up to the LAW rocket launcher – essential kit for taking down the Patriarch, who soaks up as much punishment as he can dish out. Your choice of weapon will be dictated by a weight limit and the amount of cash you have handy, but also your perks. These are incremental weapons and performance bonuses, boosters such as the Sharpshooter perk that increases damage done with handguns, crossbow and the bolt-action rifle, or the Firebug, which has a similar bonus applied to the flame-thrower. They can be levelled to improve the effects and are persistent for your character, giving achievement whores something to strive for other than the thrill of going toe-to-toe with a room full of slavering undead.

But chasing the perk level cap and the PC equivalent of Xbox Live Achievements is not the last word in Killing Floor’s entertainment value. As a six-player co-operative game it’s genuinely thrilling to play, even though with the current batch of six official maps and a tenuous DLC pack that gives you four different suits to wear, it is a little shallow.

In solo mode you’ll have your work cut out, even though the ‘killing floor’ itself scales the number of enemies to the appropriate difficulty setting for one player. With two or more players, you can afford to think more tactically beyond a shotgun and dual hand cannons. With an organised team of six the roles can be tailored very specifically to perks: a medic for patching the team up, a commando for welding doors shut and close-range shotgun duties, a firebug for annihilating hordes of Clots and softening up deadly Scrakes and Fleshpounds and so on. Killing Floor doesn’t do anything distinctive with the team dynamic that hasn’t been done by dozens of co-operative games in the past, but being the knackered sole survivor of a six-man team, with limited ammo facing the final half-dozen zombies while being spectated by the other five members, never gets old.

In fact, the Patriarch himself is a bit of a letdown, it’s the crescendo leading up to his entrance that makes it worth repeating all over again, and the knowledge that the penultimate wave of zombies will bring with it several dozen of Killing Floor’s most nightmarish denizens. And there’s something tantalising about the anxious wait you and your team endure, before the first few Clots of the next zombie onslaught shamble through the nearest entrance…