It’s probably not fair to either game to invoke No Man’s Sky when talking about upcoming sci-fi survival offering The Solus Project [official site], but both the reddish-pink colour palette and the heavy use of tricorders (let’s not kid ourselves, eh?) does put me in mind of Hello Games’ newbie. The Solus Project is billed as a survival game, but more in the classical sense than the newer DayZ, Rust etc one. Devs Teotl Studios – who you may know from The Ball – and Grip – of Unmechanical fame – are at pains to point out it’s not a sandbox jobbie. It’s a singleplayer, linear game in which you will be attacked not by creatures, but by a hostile environment, as well has having to deal with hunger and thirst. Man, that’s easy: eat fingers, drink wee. Survivalists these days, honestly – no backbone, that’s their problem.

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August was a busy month for the RPS community, with action seen in Dirt Rally [official site], Rocket League [official site], Terraria [official site] and others – including Awesomenauts [official site], Natural Selection 2 [official site] and Killing Floor [official site].

Click on for information about each, along with how you can get involved.

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It has been a decade since the original Killing Floor mod for Unreal Tournament, which was released in much-improved standalone form in 2009. It’s one of those games that quickly turns some people off: the visuals were a bit shonky, it was essentially built on repetition, and the less said about the Dick van Dyke voice-acting the better. But for devotees, Killing Floor is one of those games that stealthily racks up several hundred hours on Steam and swiftly becomes a fixture among like-minded mates, a precision blastathon where the repetition is the whole point.

You got better; the game got deadlier. And Killing Floor 2 [official site] is as straightforward a reload as you’re ever likely to see.>

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As luck would have it, I’ll be in Paris right when monstrous hordes are due to overrun the city. Tripwire Interactive have announced plans to release Killing Floor 2 [official site] onto Steam Early Access on April 21st, and I’ll be on the look out for – wait is that a lady with blue cyberhair in that screenshot – for myself?

The original was a barrel of murderfun, and I’m quite keen to return for more first-person face-shooting. Especially as one of the sequel’s big selling points is that faces (and other bodyparts) will explode in a squillion different gory ways.

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Look, it’s the last day of term and we’re allowed to bring in whatever we want. Pip’s batting an avocado about, John’s cradling what appears to be a small hairless cat with opposable thumbs, Graham and Adam are kicking some kind of spherical egg between themselves, and me, I’ve brought in a video to watch. It’s about zombies and monsters and big guns and cool swords totally murdering zombies like schhhhing!> in Killing Floor 2 and before you ask, yes, my mum did say it’s fine if I watch it okay.

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I do enjoy how Killing Floor’s monsters look like people in Halloween costumes, the sort of thing one could make with a few hours and some household supplies. Given me a black bodysuit, some tights, cotton wool, pipe cleaners, socks, and wire coat hangers, and I’ll make you a Crawler that’ll win you pity in your office costume contest. Unsurprisingly, Killing Floor gets into Halloween in a big way.

The co-op survival FPS’s annual spooky event launched yesterday, and KF is also part of Steam’s ten-game Free Weekend Weekend, so all and sundry can come fight the horrible, horrible dolls that are murderous and horrible.

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Summer has arrived in London, and it’s pretty glorious all right. But I say that as someone on the third floor with a nice south-facing window and a cat dozing in the sunlight. Parts of London are today, I say exaggerating only an awful lot, Hellish. You hop on the Central Line during rush hour tonight and you’ll see. So where better to set a level in a co-op horror shooter?

Killing Floor‘s annual summer update has arrived, with goodies including a new Underground map and a new playable mutant-murdering lady. And, as they cannily do with big updates, developers Tripwire have also launched a few new paid DLC packs and put the game on sale.

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Dear readers, until today I had thought that the screaming and chattering noises spiders make in movies and video games were entirely fictional. I had intended to post a Killing Floor 2 trailer which introduces a few of its mutants, including the arachnoid Crawler, and say something clever about the “shared unnatural sonic vocabulary” of popular media. But, curious about the origins of this, I read around a little (looked on Yahoo! Answers) and discovered the world is a terrible place.

Now I know that some spiders do actually hiss and rattle (‘stridulate,’ we say–know your enemy), I find this trailer for the co-op FPS abhorrent and oh god why have the hairs on my neck pricked up what’s that feeling is there a spider on me you have to tell me I mean it.

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Killing Floor is a pleasantly solid co-op survival FPS, blessed with chunky-feeling guns and ridiculous English accents shouting daft Britishisms. It also cemented Tripwire Interactive as one of my favourite developers for banging it full of new monsters, levels, and special events for years after launch in a way that only Valve match nowadays. Now, delightfully, a sequel’s coming. Imaginatively titled Killing Floor 2, it seems to have as its core new feature, er, buckets of gore.

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Red Orchestra 2 occupies some space on my hard-drive. I keep it there, along with Sniper Elite V2 and Build & Shoot, to satisfy a basic need I have to shoot at a tiny cluster of pixels in the distance and hope that their widows are weeping come the end of the round. I’m not a super expert at it, but it’s satisfying enough for me to keep my sights trained on the upcoming Pacific-based Rising Storm, Tripwire’s mod-gone-pro expansion thing. (more…)