I love this game. It's an unusually deep wave shooter with a lofi presentation. They probably weren't going for the lofi thing, but it was 2008 and that's how it panned out. I have a bunch of thoughts about this game and I'm going to just start listing them here in no particular order, but to be clear, I think it's a classic and you should play it.

So first of all, the game is arcadey in a positive way. The enemies (hereafter referred to as "zeds") are really just walking health bars that you need to reduce to zero with your chosen damage machine before you get smacked around. There are nine discrete types of zed that you’ll encounter wave-to-wave, and any given quantity and combination of those nine warrants a unique response, so there's an okay amount of variety game to game. There are a ton of maps and most of them are genuinely excellent-- possibly the best I have ever seen in a game like this.

You can close off the entrances to some areas with your welder, but that’s almost always a strategic move rather than a move that creates actual safety. If you are able to shoot the zeds, that usually means they are able to charge full-speed at you, and if you truly close off every entrance the game will keep spawning baddies until they blow open all the doors and swarm you en masse. So hiding isn't really an option. This is a positive thing. It either leads to a very intense, dangerous camping strategy with a constant stream of enemies, or a very intense, active kiting strategy with a mob at your back. Both, you may have noticed, are intense. The game is intense.

There are a number of classes (called Perks) to choose from-- everything from Headshot Friend to Assault Rifle Friend to Sword Friend and more. Most of them house a category of weapons, but they each get different resistances and other goodies as well. Their inclusion in the game encourages legit team-play. Despite vastly different strengths and weaknesses, they are balanced such that all of them are also viable in solo play, even the medic who is specifically designed to heal teammates. I have no idea how this was achieved. The game still shines brightest in co-op scenarios where it really feels like everyone has a role. Scrake coming up? Berserker can stun-lock it, but we gotta keep everything else off of him. Tons of trash, low-tier zeds? That's for the Commando or the Firebug. What's that? Our Sharpshooter went online and learned that by perfectly placing 10 M14EBR headshots in 5 seconds he can solo a fleshpound on 6-man Hell on Earth difficulty before it gets through its rage animation? And then he spent 4 real-life hours grinding that maneuver and now it's in his muscle memory and he can hit it every time? I guess we can leave the fleshpounds to him.

These perks level up over time and you get some pretty significant bonuses to damage and overall effectiveness once you hit the higher levels. The systems in place for leveling them are some of the most ridiculous that I have ever seen, and that's a good and a bad thing. For example, let's look at the leveling curve for the Commando, which is the assault rifle class. To become level one in this class (you start at zero), you have to deal 25,000 damage with assault rifles. That takes a couple games. To get to level six, which is the highest level, you have to deal 5.5 million damage with assault rifles. It takes quite a long time to do that! I have a buddy who only plays Commando because they're stubborn. 20-odd hours into playing the game, they were only level four. They've since reached level six, but they've played like 130 hours now. I’ve really enjoyed slowly leveling up over my several-hundred hours, but I want to publicly acknowledge that anyone who thinks this is stupid is correct.

The game is also unyieldingly difficult. There are five difficulties, and my buddies and I still can't guarantee a win on the highest of them after over a thousand combined hours of play (god help us). Keeping with the arcadey shooter theme, the main differences between the difficulties are numbers. Enemies are faster, stronger, and more resilient on higher difficulties because all of their numbers tick up. Upgrading your equipment costs more, and you are less effective as a result. Most of these changes just mean you have to play better and land more of your shots or get bonked. I’m not going to say that there’s anything revolutionary here, but I appreciate how tough the game is. When you go from getting your ♥♥♥♥ rocked on a difficulty, to being able to beat it most of the time, to moving up to the next difficulty and repeating the process, that feels like real progress. It's nice that the game has a variety of more accessible difficulties while also providing a truly unhinged level of difficulty at the top for people who play for hundreds and hundreds of hours.

The wide range of difficulties and extremely challenging maximum difficulty in this game only work because the skill ceiling is ridiculously high. As an example, every enemy has two health values. There's health, which is a numeric value that triggers death when it hits zero, and there's HEAD health... which is a much smaller numeric value that (basically) triggers death when it hits zero. So like, if you get really good and are hitting exclusively headshots, clots (the basic zed) functionally have 44 health instead of 228 at the highest difficulty. Add in the damage bonus that you get for landing a headshot and suddenly you're killing clots in 1 shot instead of 15. Another example-- there's no crosshair when you fire from the hip in this game. If you want to see where the middle of your screen is, you have to ADS. But... the accuracy of weapons is functionally the same regardless of whether you're ADS'd or not, so if you're really good at knowing where the middle of your screen is, you almost never need to waste time aiming down sights. As a result of all of this, you may feel like you don't understand how you're supposed to aim and it takes forever to kill anything during your first several matches. But you can quickly learn how to play the game normally and over a longer period of time you can ascend to godhood. It's kinda like Counter Strike. You know Counter Strike? It's like Counter Strike but zombies instead of terrorists and invisible crosshair instead of spray patterns. And no cool movement tech.

Altogether, it works so well because the game is non-fudgy. It doesn't correct ANYTHING for you. It doesn't arbitrarily nudge the difficulty of the situation you're in or round damage numbers or fix your aim. It is just systems that you can get really good at interacting with. In a way, the game is indifferent to you. This is probably my favorite thing about it.

Now, it hasn't aged perfectly-- the player character animations are really bad, the footstep sounds are the same four or five clips played over and over, aaaaaand actually those are pretty much my only complaints. The automatic player call-outs are a nice touch and really fun-- they all sound like they were recorded by someone who is not a voice actor but they have a really endearing energy to them and they happen all over the place. Welding a door? “I am WELDING this DOOR!” Throwing money for other players? “Cash here, grab it all.” Reloading? “RELOADING!! CAN’T YOU SEE I’M RELOADING?!! NEW MAG, GIMME A SEC!!” They’re great.

Finally, you can mod this game a lot. I have especially enjoyed removing the 6-player co-op limit. Sometimes we get like 20 or so people in a single game and it's a blast.

So basically, it's the best co-op wave shooter. And the tone is perfect for our ongoing global pandemic societal collapse hellscape. Give 'er a go.

I love this game. It's an unusually deep wave shooter with a lofi presentation. They probably weren't going for the lofi thing, but it was 2008 and that's how it panned out. I have a bunch of thoughts about this game and I'm going to just start listing them here in no particular order, but to be clear, I think it's a classic and you should play it. So first of all, the game is arcadey in a positive way. The enemies (hereafter referred to as "zeds") are really just walking health bars that you need to reduce to zero with your chosen damage machine before you get smacked around. There are nine discrete types of zed that you’ll encounter wave-to-wave, and any given quantity and combination of those nine warrants a unique response, so there's an okay amount of variety game to game. There are a ton of maps and most of them are genuinely excellent-- possibly the best I have ever seen in a game like this. You can close off the entrances to some areas with your welder, but that’s almost always a strategic move rather than a move that creates actual safety. If you are able to shoot the zeds, that usually means they are able to charge full-speed at you, and if you truly close off every entrance the game will keep spawning baddies until they blow open all the doors and swarm you en masse. So hiding isn't really an option. This is a positive thing. It either leads to a very intense, dangerous camping strategy with a constant stream of enemies, or a very intense, active kiting strategy with a mob at your back. Both, you may have noticed, are intense. The game is intense. There are a number of classes (called Perks) to choose from-- everything from [i]Headshot Friend[/i] to [i]Assault Rifle Friend[/i] to [i]Sword Friend[/i] and more. Most of them house a category of weapons, but they each get different resistances and other goodies as well. Their inclusion in the game encourages legit team-play. Despite vastly different strengths and weaknesses, they are balanced such that all of them are also viable in solo play, even the medic who is specifically designed to heal teammates. I have no idea how this was achieved. The game still shines brightest in co-op scenarios where it really feels like everyone has a role. Scrake coming up? Berserker can stun-lock it, but we gotta keep everything else off of him. Tons of trash, low-tier zeds? That's for the Commando or the Firebug. What's that? Our Sharpshooter went online and learned that by perfectly placing 10 M14EBR headshots in 5 seconds he can solo a fleshpound on 6-man Hell on Earth difficulty before it gets through its rage animation? And then he spent 4 real-life hours grinding that maneuver and now it's in his muscle memory and he can hit it every time? I guess we can leave the fleshpounds to him. These perks level up over time and you get some pretty significant bonuses to damage and overall effectiveness once you hit the higher levels. The systems in place for leveling them are some of the most ridiculous that I have ever seen, and that's a good and a bad thing. For example, let's look at the leveling curve for the Commando, which is the assault rifle class. To become level one in this class (you start at zero), you have to deal 25,000 damage with assault rifles. That takes a couple games. To get to level six, which is the highest level, you have to deal 5.5 [b]million[/b] damage with assault rifles. It takes quite a long time to do that! I have a buddy who only plays Commando because they're stubborn. 20-odd hours into playing the game, they were only level four. They've since reached level six, but they've played like 130 hours now. I’ve really enjoyed slowly leveling up over my several-hundred hours, but I want to publicly acknowledge that anyone who thinks this is stupid is correct. The game is also unyieldingly difficult. There are five difficulties, and my buddies and I still can't guarantee a win on the highest of them after over a thousand combined hours of play (god help us). Keeping with the arcadey shooter theme, the main differences between the difficulties are numbers. Enemies are faster, stronger, and more resilient on higher difficulties because all of their numbers tick up. Upgrading your equipment costs more, and you are less effective as a result. Most of these changes just mean you have to play better and land more of your shots or get bonked. I’m not going to say that there’s anything revolutionary here, but I appreciate how tough the game is. When you go from getting your shit rocked on a difficulty, to being able to beat it most of the time, to moving up to the next difficulty and repeating the process, that feels like real progress. It's nice that the game has a variety of more accessible difficulties while also providing a truly unhinged level of difficulty at the top for people who play for hundreds and hundreds of hours. The wide range of difficulties and extremely challenging maximum difficulty in this game only work because the skill ceiling is ridiculously high. As an example, every enemy has two health values. There's health, which is a numeric value that triggers death when it hits zero, and there's HEAD health... which is a [i]much smaller[/i] numeric value that (basically) triggers death when it hits zero. So like, if you get really good and are hitting exclusively headshots, clots (the basic zed) functionally have 44 health instead of 228 at the highest difficulty. Add in the damage bonus that you get for landing a headshot and suddenly you're killing clots in 1 shot instead of 15. Another example-- there's no crosshair when you fire from the hip in this game. If you want to see where the middle of your screen is, you have to ADS. But... the accuracy of weapons is functionally the same regardless of whether you're ADS'd or not, so if you're really good at knowing where the middle of your screen is, you almost never need to waste time aiming down sights. As a result of all of this, you may feel like you don't understand how you're supposed to aim and it takes forever to kill anything during your first several matches. But you can quickly learn how to play the game normally and over a longer period of time you can ascend to godhood. It's kinda like Counter Strike. You know Counter Strike? It's like Counter Strike but zombies instead of terrorists and invisible crosshair instead of spray patterns. And no cool movement tech. Altogether, it works so well because the game is non-fudgy. It doesn't correct ANYTHING for you. It doesn't arbitrarily nudge the difficulty of the situation you're in or round damage numbers or fix your aim. It is just systems that you can get really good at interacting with. In a way, the game is indifferent to you. This is probably my favorite thing about it. Now, it hasn't aged perfectly-- the player character animations are really bad, the footstep sounds are the same four or five clips played over and over, aaaaaand actually those are pretty much my only complaints. The automatic player call-outs are a nice touch and really fun-- they all sound like they were recorded by someone who is not a voice actor but they have a really endearing energy to them and they happen all over the place. Welding a door? “I am WELDING this DOOR!” Throwing money for other players? “Cash here, grab it all.” Reloading? “RELOADING!! CAN’T YOU SEE I’M RELOADING?!! NEW MAG, GIMME A SEC!!” They’re great. Finally, you can mod this game a lot. I have especially enjoyed removing the 6-player co-op limit. Sometimes we get like 20 or so people in a single game and it's a blast. So basically, it's the best co-op wave shooter. And the tone is perfect for our ongoing global pandemic societal collapse hellscape. Give 'er a go.