Keepalive: Plants Vs Zombies, Killing Floor

written on Sunday, May 17, 2009

This entry was an hour late.

Whoops. I was messing around with the garden in Plants Vs Zombies and lost track of time. That's probably a good sign, huh?

I've finished the puzzle mode and am starting the survival mode. That seems to be the best place to make money. By controlling the flow of zombies into kill zones and using upgraded sunflowers to generate lots of power in a little space, I can afford the space it takes to put down marigold plants which do nothing but generate money used to unlock stuff. They always seemed pretty useless during the normal campaign, but Survival Mode lets the player change the plants they use between waves, which allows for upgrading up the wazoo.

Speaking of upgrades, I've gotten most of my classes in Killing Floor up to level one. The game has a number of jobs you can do (Medic, Support, Sharpshooter, etc.) and as you perform them, you upgrade your abilities. It's mostly just stuff like X% more damage with the class' preferred weapon. But it adds up. Personally, I would stick to easy mode until unlocking the higher level abilities, as many of the enemies in normal mode can kill you in a few hits. Plus every time you get hit your vision goes all wonky, making it hard to hit anything.

The only real problem is that Killing Floor is super stingy with the upgrades. It takes forever to unlock them. And it's not fun enough to encourage that much play time. Much like Left 4 Dead, it's the same game over and over. But unlike Left 4 Dead, the pacing of the game is very uneven. To an extent, I like that. Left 4 Dead was paced a little too consistently and felt like the same fight over and over. But Killing Floor literally is the same fight over and over. There's even a configuration menu where you can tweak exactly what combination of baddies appear in each wave of the game. So once you've played the game a few times, you know exactly what's coming, which is a shame as the game has a lot more zombie types than Left 4 Dead and could keep things a lot more interesting by mixing things up. One wave could be a huge swarm of basic types, or just a few big bruisers. I'm not sure that would be enough to keep me playing long enough to max out my levels, but it would certainly help. Oh, and you can't max out medic in solo. You only level up by healing other players.

When you play on public servers with people you don't know and will probably never see again it's called pubbing. It a special case of the Jean-Paul Sartre quote, "Hell is other people." I don't recommend it.