Killing Floor 2009 Eurogamer Review - 7/10 Verdict Explained

In May 2009, shortly after Killing Floor arrived on Steam, Eurogamer published a review by Will Porter under the tagline "Cockneys vs. Zombies". It landed on a 7/10. This page retells that review in our own words: what a critic thought of the game at launch, what stood out, and which complaints were later addressed by Tripwire's long run of updates. For a wider picture of how the game was received, see Killing Floor reviews and ratings.

The Left 4 Dead question

The review opens with the comparison everyone was making in 2009. Left 4 Dead had come out a few months earlier, and Killing Floor was cheaper, shared some ingredients (including a fat enemy that throws up on you) and was clearly less polished. Porter's answer: yes, it is the budget option in some ways, but it takes a different approach, comes from a respected Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, and has enough good ideas of its own that it deserves to be judged on its own terms. Even the vomiting enemies, he noted, spew with a different consistency and purpose.

How a match plays out

• You and up to five other players hold off ten waves of increasingly numerous and dangerous specimens on maps set around the UK.
• Between waves a Trader opens her shop and sells better weapons. She has a knack for appearing in a different part of the map each time.
• Because the shop moves, the team spends the wave fighting its way toward the next location, so you rarely defend the same corridor from the same angle twice.

The review compares the Trader to the merchant in Resident Evil 4, who also seems immune to the horde around him.

A specimen dies mid-air during zed time, with the screen tinted red. Screenshot from the 2009 review.

The specimens and the slow motion

The enemy list at launch was short but balanced: staggering Clots, crawling creatures, invisible Stalkers, the screaming Siren whose shriek turns the air red, and the Fleshpound, "a chap with a giant LED stuck in his chest" who becomes very dangerous once enraged. Dismemberment made all of them satisfying to shoot.

Two things were flagged as acquired tastes:

• The soundtrack. Constant heavy rock riffs in the style of Painkiller.
• Zed time. A well-placed shot can slow the game down for everyone. The reviewer found it great for lining up extra headshots, but admitted you also spend some of it staring at wall textures. Overall, the payoff outweighed the annoyance.

Weapons: the strongest part

Weapons are bought in a Counter-Strike-like way, and holding your knife makes you run faster, a detail the reviewer clearly enjoyed. Since Tripwire had made Red Orchestra, it was no surprise that every gun felt meaty. The review calls the arsenal the area where the game "really shines", with headshot hunting using hand-cannons and rifles described as a constant brutal pleasure.

Perks and team healing

The game tracks your damage, headshots and healing, and these stats raise six perks through five levels (as it was at launch):

Perk	Focus
Field Medic	healing teammates
Support Specialist	shotguns and welding
Sharpshooter	headshots with precision weapons
Commando	assault rifles and spotting Stalkers
Berserker	melee
Firebug	flamethrower

Porter pointed out that perks were not new (Battlefield 2 had them), but in Killing Floor's tight maps the progression really works, and the top difficulties were "genuinely nightmarish". He also liked the healing design: you can give yourself a small recharging dose, but a teammate heals you for much more, which nudges players to cooperate. For how these perks work today, see the Field Medic guide and the perk overview.

A Clot grabs a teammate in a cramped lab office, the kind of dark corridor map the review compared to Doom 3.

Maps at launch

The game shipped with five Tripwire maps, and the SDK was already in players' hands, so custom maps were starting to appear. The reviewer split them into two kinds:

• Tight, dark corridor maps such as an underground lab and an office block, compared to Doom 3.
• More open maps such as darkened farmland and a walk through West London with overturned red buses, where long-range weapons matter more.

A barn with hanging carcasses on the farm map, with the Trader portrait on the left.

He also joked that there were no zombie cows and that the modding community would need to supply them. For the full map list today, see Killing Floor 1 maps.

Very British

The setting is unmistakably the UK, between the 28 Days Later-style London scenes and the Cockney voice barks. Some lines were genuinely funny ("I'm trying to heal ya! Not shag ya!", "Christ! It's like Croydon on a Friday night!"), but others grated quickly, especially reload barks and the Trader's constant remarks about "big weapons".

Rough edges

The review was clear that Killing Floor still felt like a mod, even a very good one:

• no fancy physics or advanced lighting
• some user-unfriendly menus
• connection problems at the time of writing
• exploits such as players blocking the shop doorway to annoy others

The reviewer expected a constantly updated game to fix such issues, which is largely what happened over the following years of patches, new maps and new perk levels.

Verdict: 7/10

The conclusion: not a game future generations will sing about, but clever, loud, a bit silly and fairly cheap (it launched at GBP 14.99 on Steam). Returning to the opening joke, Porter decided its relationship to Left 4 Dead was more nuanced than "budget versus premium" and put it roughly on par with a respectable brand rather than a value range.